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An irony of minimalism in defending the resurrection

For some time I've been writing and speaking about the problems with a certain minimalistic approach to arguing for Christianity that has become popular in evangelical circles in the last several decades. (See, e.g., here, here, and here.) Sometimes it goes by the name of the "minimal facts" approach. But not always. The apologetics giant William Lane Craig refers to the facts in question as "core facts" rather than "minimal facts" and includes the empty tomb among them, whereas the father of the minimal facts approach, Gary Habermas, does not include the empty tomb among his set of minimal facts. But as I have pointed out, the difference there is far more terminological than substantive, since in both cases the core fact or minimal fact that the disciples had appearance experiences is kept vague in order to be able to rope in a lot of scholars and say that they accept it. This causes a lot of epistemic trouble when one tries to argue for the physical resurrection of Jesus, since it's precisely the physical details that give us reason to think that Jesus was physically raised. It shouldn't need saying, but the reason Christians think he was physically raised is because we think he appeared physically to his disciples. (Obviously.) The mainstream scholar Wolfhart Pannenberg, who thought the resurrection accounts in the Gospels were heavily embellished, apparently thought that Jesus' body really disappeared and that in that sense he was "physically raised," but that he went immediately to heaven and that the appearances to the disciples were visions sent by God to the disciples and bore little resemblance to the appearances recounted in the Gospels. I'd say that at that point the meaning of "physically raised" has been changed almost beyond recognition and also that the epistemic support for believing in anything objective at all is gravely undermined.

This point was brought home to me recently by watching a series of video discussions between Michael Licona and Dale Allison. (Videos here, here, here, and here.) Allison is a little hard to characterize. He speaks of himself as a Christian (PCUSA), and Licona calls him a "fellow believer." He talks in the interviews about his prayer practices, which involve a yoga mat and icons. He's obviously a theist of some sort. That much I think can be said definitely. But Allison is and always has been profoundly ambivalent about the physical resurrection of Jesus and treats it very much as up in the air, and he obviously thinks it quite plausible that the resurrection narratives in the Gospels are highly embellished and that the details of those narratives, such as Jesus' eating with his disciples, were added for apologetic purposes. Licona is a strong advocate of the minimal approach and tries to do everything "through Paul," and in the interaction with Allison, it cuts no ice. Mind you, Allison is a naturally somewhat skeptical fellow. As he rather charmingly explains, there are four of him inwardly. They all get along with one another, though they disagree. What is interesting to notice is that none of these four "Dale Allisons" believes that robust, orthodox Christianity, including fully physical appearances, is historically justified by the objective evidence. So it is entirely plausible as a sociological and psychological matter that a discussion with someone who takes a more maximal approach to the resurrection would also cut no ice with Allison. But I consider Licona's attempts to counter him, most of them going "through Paul" (e.g., trying to treat Paul as our main or or even only eyewitness of the resurrection whose account has come down to us) to be objectively far weaker than the available arguments really are and hence consider it somewhat understandable that Allison bats them aside.

In reflecting on their interaction, I thought of an irony concerning the minimalist approach and the way that it bills itself, and I posted this on Facebook.

It is especially ironic that advocates of the minimal facts approach to defending Jesus' resurrection argue that they are appealing only to premises granted by a skeptical audience. Often this is portrayed as especially successful, because it appeals to common ground. I have argued in my "Minimal Facts vs. Maximal Data" webinar that this gravely weakens the case by watering down the notion of Jesus' "appearances" to something that a wide variety of scholars will accept.

But there is a more specific irony, which must be followed carefully to understand it: Due to the watering down of the "appearances," the physicality of Jesus' resurrection is cast into doubt, because the minimalist is not willing to argue that the highly physical details in the Gospel narratives (such as Jesus' eating) are really what the witnesses claimed. After all, the minimalist knows that that is not granted by a majority of scholars. How, then, to argue for the physical resurrection?

Generally the minimalist will at that point spend a fair bit of time arguing indirectly that the disciples believed the resurrection was physical. Per the minimalist's preference, this often goes "through" Paul. (There is a huge preference for doing everything "with" or "through" Paul.) E.g. Paul probably believed the resurrection was physical. Paul said that his gospel that he was preaching was approved by the other apostles. Therefore, the other apostles probably believed that the resurrection was physical. Or: The Gospel of Luke portrays the resurrection as physical. Luke was a companion of Paul and spoke to other apostles. Therefore, the apostles probably believed that the resurrection was physical. Note: This means that even if Luke invented the physical details in his narrative, this somehow doesn't matter because he invented them in order to convey what the apostles believed!

The minimalist will then try to insist that the apostles wouldn't have believed the resurrection was physical if they didn't have good evidence thereof. So, therefore, they probably had good evidence thereof. Again, this argument is supposed to circumvent concerns about the Gospels' embellishment. The idea, then, is to argue that even if those particular details were invented, something else was probably what they experienced that made them rational in believing in a physical resurrection!

So this round-the-barn approach eschews an attempt to defend the proposition that the only actual accounts we have tell us what the original witnesses claimed! It then attempts to bolster the now-weak argument for the physical resurrection by pouring energy into arguing that they probably believed it and that something-or-other convincing had to be what they experienced or they wouldn't have believed it.

Would that proposition be granted by the skeptic? Obviously not! Any skeptic or even ambivalent scholar (such as Dale Allison) is going to reject the proposition, "If the disciples believed that Jesus was physically raised, they were rational in doing so." Of course not! Such a person will point to various apparitions and visionary experiences as an analogy to the resurrection experiences (both Allison and Bart Ehrman expressly do this) and will then say that people believe a lot of things and that the apostles appear to have believed in a physical resurrection of Jesus for some other reason--e.g., because they were conditioned to so by their Jewish background, etc.

The point I am making is that at this incredibly crucial juncture the minimalist is forced to abandon his much-touted method of relying only on premises "granted by a majority of scholars" or even granted by a specific skeptical interlocutor. So even the supposed rhetorical and strategic advantage is suddenly lost.

But in that case, why not take a forward position sooner, make an actually stronger argument, and argue that the Gospels are reliable and that we have good reason to believe that the Gospel resurrection accounts tell us what the original witnesses actually claimed?

Here comes an interesting question: How many minimalists think you can do that? To what extent has the decades-long reliance on this supposed "mere strategy" given rise to a genuine loss of nerve, to an apologetics community full of people who don't think that they can argue that way, who don't think that the evidence actually supports that premise? Unfortunately, I fear that this is too true, and that this isn't really *just* a "strategy." (Indeed, I have provided quotations in the webinar that indicate as much.) That would mean that we are forced to argue in this roundabout fashion and only take a stand at the point of insisting that the disciples' belief must have been rational. But in that case, you might as well admit that that is what you're doing very openly. Just say it: "No, this isn't really a strategy that relies only on premises that the skeptic will grant. But I don't think the robust reliability of the Gospels and the unembellished nature of the Gospel accounts of the resurrection is defensible, so, I'm sorry, but this is the best we can do."

Isn't it a great thing that we have a better way?

In a comment to the Facebook post I was asked if a minimalist approach to arguing for the resurrection is/was just an excuse to bring higher criticism into evangelicalism. As I point out in my response, giving a bit of sociological history, the reality is more complicated than that. Here is what I said (very lightly edited):

I don't think it was intended to be that initially. I truly think that initially, e.g., as formulated by Dr. Gary Habermas, the minimal facts approach was meant to be a strategy for jumping off from what Habermas found to be an encouraging softening of the liberal scholarly stance, in order to to press for more. The idea was that perhaps after, say, the 1970s, the liberal scholars were admitting enough that we could grab that and use it as a set of premises and actually argue for the resurrection as an explanatory inference just from those premises. This was seen as a big advantage, a convenience, and also excellent for the popular use of debates to answer skeptics, because saying, "This is granted by so many liberal scholars" was seen as a knock-down debate tactic.

Unfortunately, a lot of things then happened. For one thing, Habermas did not consult enough epistemologists about the way he was writing and the rationale for his approach, and he confused epistemology with sociology. One finds this in several of his statements of the minimal facts case--he will speak as though a high percentage of scholars' agreeing is in and of itself helpful to strong epistemic status, which of course is not the case.

Second, the strategy took on, as it were, a life of its own so that the "muscles" that would otherwise be used for defending the more robust case tended to atrophy because Christians arguing for the resurrection were not using those muscles.

Third, Michael Licona wrote a book that was a lengthy historiographical expansion of the minimalist account, with Habermas's approval (though I don't really think Habermas fully realized what was going on) in which Licona used the phrase "historical bedrock" for a very limited set of sources. In that book he put big question marks over the resurrection accounts in the Gospels. At this point the embrace of something like "higher criticism" really did enter the "minimalist" approach, as Licona made, as it were, a virtue out of necessity (or a necessity out of an alleged virtue?): Such-and-such isn't "historical bedrock," such-and-such is unsure because we don't know how much of it goes back to the original disciples and we don't know how much liberty the evangelists felt free to take. Therefore we should try to use other methods. This approach was embraced to a disturbing extent around the same time by William Lane Craig, who in the 2008 edition of his book Reasonable Faith actually states that the more forward approach of William Paley and company has been rendered "forever obsolete" by the work of higher critics. Note that this involves, once again, confusing sociology with epistemology.

Since then, Licona's 2017 book and his many presentations have further pressed the idea that the evangelists felt free to "take liberties," and his views have been endorsed by high-level people in the apologetics world, cementing still further the unhappy union between minimalist apologetics and these higher-critical approaches, even though that wasn't the original reason for the introduction of the approach or even for its earlier popularity.

Meanwhile, lay apologetics took off as a cottage industry, and many lay apologists are simply confused about the "appearances" used in the premises of minimal facts. Indeed, sometimes the articles, etc., written by advocates of the approach are confusing at precisely this point. For example, again and again people supposedly presenting the "minimal facts" will bring into popular presentations things that are not granted by a majority of scholars, such as Jesus' appearances indoors and outdoors, to skeptics, etc. This has caused many people to embrace the minimal facts model on the mistaken assumption that a majority of scholars admit far more than they actually do admit. And they are then very reluctant to let go of this assumption. It's too much of a shock for them to absorb, because they are so sure that minimal facts or minimalism is the best way to argue. The prominence of the debate format is part of the issue, too, since people assume that you must use something like this to have a punchy debate presentation.

The demonizing of anyone who points out these issues (aka me) as doing something invidious for criticizing other Christians' work certainly doesn't help in promoting clarity and getting the word out about what the minimal facts approach is and isn't able to support. It also doesn't promote a healthy discussion of the best way to proceed. This is part of why I'm not going to stop pointing these things out, especially since I'm one of the only voices with a following who is doing so.

Comments (45)

Dr. McGrew,

What books would you recommend that take this maximal data approach that you advocate?

Thanks.

Best Regards,
Dave

It depends on how you define it, but there are many books that either take it or support it, especially if one is talking about dead guys. Many of the ones by "the old guys" are available for free because they are no longer in copyright. In no exact order, with no pretense of completeness, and by way of illustration.

Older books:

A View of the Evidences of Christianity (William Paley)
Horae Paulinae (William Paley)
The Four Gospels From a Lawyer's Standpoint (Edmund Bennett)
Undesigned Coincidences (J. J. Blunt)
Horae Evangelicae (T. R. Birks)
The Criterion (John Douglas)
The Voyage and Shipwreck of St. Paul (James Smith)
John Who Saw (A. H. N. Green-Armytage)

More modern:

Studies in the Fourth Gospel (Leon Morris)
The Book of Acts in the Setting of Hellenistic History (Colin Hemer)
Easter Enigma (John Wenham)

Still more recent:

The Historical Reliability of John's Gospel (Craig Blomberg)
Can We Trust the Gospels (Peter J. Williams)
Hidden in Plain View (Lydia McGrew)
The Mirror or the Mask (Lydia McGrew)
The Eye of the Beholder (Lydia McGrew--forthcoming)

One almost wonders whether--for rhetorical purposes--we should counter the "minimal facts" approach with something like the "simple facts" approach: meaning that the Gospels claim to be based on testimony (both internally and in historical tradition), and the simplest approach is thus to treat them as the testimonial accounts that they claim to be. After all, to paraphrase Occam's Razor: We should not multiple the origins of a text beyond necessity (ie - attributing unnecessary literary devices to them, etc.). And since the Gospels can be defended as testimony, then the simplest and best approach is to do so.

Just a quick thought.

Rad Miksa

You have a good point about sheer terminology. It might encourage people's eyes to start to revolve to call it "maximal data," assuming, "This is going to take forever." I probably have had too much faith in people's willingness to listen. (Boy has that faith been misplaced!) If they listen, they will hear that there is indeed an efficient way of stating this. As I point out in the video, we can do it either deductively or non-deductively. The deductive statement is a Paleyan trilemma: Either the disciples were deceived, deceivers, or telling the truth. They were not deceived (mistaken) because that's not the kind of thing you can be innocently mistaken about, and all those people going insane at the same time in that way is highly implausible. They were not deceivers because they had everything to lose and nothing to gain, and partially or wholly independent opportunities to come to that conclusion. Therefore, they were telling the truth.

The nondeductive is a brief statement of the types of claims that they made and the conclusion that the best explanation thereof is that they really had these experiences and they were veridical--Jesus was truly bodily risen again.

Sadly, we are in too polarized a time--in almost every area of life--for people to listen in good faith. Battle-lines are being drawn in nearly all disciplines, and this is unlikely to change anytime soon. Moreover, most people--at least today--are swayed by rhetoric and emotion, not facts or reason (hence the hundreds of thousands of views and likes that some confused YouTube atheist gets, whereas a scholar gets a few hundred).

I like your trilemma. I have been mulling something similar to argue that the Gospels are based on testimonial evidence. Something like a 'Witnesses, Geniuses, or Miracle Workers' trilemma. Namely, the Gospels are of such a nature, and contain such clues of being based on testimony (including their apparent contradictions and difficulties, which is often what we would expect from witness accounts), that 1) their writers were either witnesses (or used witness testimony), or 2) they were geniuses that fabricated the Gospels but knew how to make it look like testimony, or 3) they were just miraculously lucky that the fabricated Gospels came out looking like testimony. However, since the 'genius' and 'miracle worker' options are implausible, that leaves testimony. Obviously, such an argument is only rudimentary at present, but I am thinking about developing it further.

By the way, Dr. McGrew, when is The Eye of the Beholder coming out (as there is nothing on the DeWard website as of yet)? I am looking forward to it.

Best,

Rad Miksa

Our hope is for early March, but we haven't announced an official release date yet, as we're still collecting blurbs for a little while longer, and then we have to set all of the final files before going live.

I wanted to mention in further response to Dave J. that Tim's and my Blackwell article does use a maximal approach, inasmuch as we conditionalize on the evidence that the Gospel accounts represent what those who would have been witnesses claimed. The free draft version of that is available here:

http://www.lydiamcgrew.com/Resurrectionarticlesinglefile.pdf

I've long thought you land strong blows against the minimal facts crowd, not just regarding what the argument actually can support but over how strong the evidence is concerning the nature of the appearances. Having said that, I have ended up finding myself somewhere in the middle. That is to say I think some sort of minimal facts argument would give moderate evidence for the resurrection such that it may not be something which will persuade all people with different plausibility structures, it will be strong if we have a plausible prior probability (which I think we can support).

Here's the gist;
* Paul's list in Corinthians 15, apart from the 500, will have included Peter or James as a participant in every appearance (Peter, Peter in the 12, James, Peter and James were apostles).

*Paul would have used Peter for information about the resurrection regardless of when he got the creed. Paul uses the term historēsai, an infinitive from historeō. It could mean a fact-finding mission, although such a meaning is not necessary. Notwithstanding, in the context of Gal. 1:18, Paul is likely using it in that sense.


* Paul lists at least one group appearance with which he spoke to a participant (the 12)

* Paul lists multiple appearances (if the appearance to all the apostles is not counted as a group appearance, then the members of the 12 and James, ateast, had two appearances.

*Paul's thinking about the nature of the resurrection for us mirrors the way he thinks Christ Rose. Throughout multiple epistles Paul clearly teaches a physical body that leaves behind a tomb. The Gospels all support this.

*stark changes to the sociological spectrum of beliefs (essentially NT Wright's work concerning the 'mutations' Christianity too). Throught the New Testament the resurrection is 1) the only form of afterlife (opposed to the sadducees). 2) central to the proclamation (even for some Pharisees the resurrection was peripheral). 3). Unified view of resurrection as 'Transphysica (see previous point about Paul and the gospel writers agreeing christ was physically raised. In Judaism there were different views on the resurrection from shining like stars to bodies identical to the ones we have now. Paul is clear on transformation and the gospels are even clearer). 4) the mutation that saw the Messiah as someone crucified. The belief in the resurrection is logically prior to the belief that Christ is the Messiah. A connection that was never made before).

*Paul and Luke make the distinction between appearances and visions of Christ. They criteria that differentiates the former from the latter seems to be that the appearances were extramental.

*empty tomb

*a recent point ive heard of is from Brant Pitre. This may not be direct evidence but I'll throw it out there because I find it interesting. The gospels repeatedly link Christ's resurrection with the scriptures and Christ speaks of Jonah in a fish for 3 days as foreshadowing his own resurrection. All very straightforward. Except the story of Jonah isn't something just someone who is dead for 3 days and resuscitated. It also includes the repentanbce of the Gentile nation of Ninevah. Ambrose and Eusebius point this out. Its one thing for the gospel writers to make up claims by christ predicting his resurrection. Its another thing to predict such a ripple throughout the gentile world that lasts centuries.

Id consider this a type of minimalist argument. Apart from the last point, its quite in line with what Craig argues for. Is the hallucination hypothesis a rival?

Group hallucinations are difficult. They are (at the very least) quite rare. Perhaps you can make a case in history for examples of group hallucinations but the best candidates are vague and visionary. The apparitions that Allison cites have weak evidence for group hallucinations and they are too detailed at any rate to fit with the concept of a group hallucination. Erhman's is better in that, perhaps, you could have a vague, undetailed and visionary group hallucination but it will cost him elsewhere. At any rate the rarity of group hallucinations count against it whereas we have little trouble explaining why miraculous resurrections are so rare. Also, for group hallucinations to be plausible not everyone present would experience a hallucination or see the same thing.

The more people who have hallucinations, the less likely the theory is. Either multiple group hallucinations happened (to the 12 and all the apostles) or at minimum 13 people had a least 2 hallucinations with one being a group hallucination further compounding how unlikely it is.

Its difficult to explain how vague and visionary hallucinations produce a belief in a bodily resurrection especially when there were other straightforward cultural ideas to interpret the experience (no shining like a star) and a belief at that which is consistent (a Transphysical body). To make group hallucinations plausible not everyone will see exactly the same thing yet there's consistent agreement which includes a mutated, strange view of the nature of the resurrection.

The distinction between appearances and visions directly counts against the hallucination hypothesis. Especially as the Jewish culture at the time, no less than the wider gentile culture, were familiar with visions which were widespread. The consistent description throughout the New Testament stressing the extramental nature of the appearances cannot be accounted for by hallucinations but will need to explained away as fiction or apologetics. Yet it is from the earliest source through to the latest which makes the fiction response poorly motivated.

The empty Tomb is untouched by the hallucination hypothesis and so needs to be combined with another theory. The problem is, the probability of the empty tomb assuming the resurrection is 1. The natural hypothesis are all pretty weak which means the empty tomb will still have enough kick to add to the cumulative case. Going to the wrong tomb has been dealt with many times but I'm starting to think its better (or not as bad) as the stolen body theory. Which jew would steal a body? They were so repulsed by being made unclean they didn't even want to step on a grave. Why disturb a dead body? Its of no value. Its a struggle to find motivation for either friend or foe to steal the body especially if the foe doesn't produce the body when proclamations of resurrection happen soon after. I think this is why Allison had to appeal to something so outlandish as a necromancer. How many Jewish necromancers were there?

At the end of the day, I think there's enough to separate the hallucination theory from the resurrection so that we can say the resurrection is stronger. Though not strong enough that it does not need to be supplemented.


Let me stress that the above is assuming an essentially Liconian approach of relying on Paul without taking much from the gospel narratives except to see how they fit together with Paul and broadly with each other.

Our hope is for early March

Outstanding. That is sooner than I thought. Congratulations and I look forward to reading it.

Let me stress that the above is assuming an essentially Liconian approach of relying on Paul without taking much from the gospel narratives except to see how they fit together with Paul and broadly with each other.

Fair enough. But underlying this Liconian approach is some sort of assumption that we can establish, in a way acceptable and indeed accepted by the relevant skeptics, (1) that Paul's accounts are historically reliable, and (2) not only historically reliable in that Paul thought he was simply recounting what he had heard from the first-hand witness of James and Peter (and not embellishing), but that Paul was reasonably convinced that what they were recounting was an accurate eye-witness account (and not embellishing); and (3) acknowledged reliable in a way that the Gospel accounts are not.

There are quite a number of difficulties with such an assumption (or complex of assumptions). The first and foremost is that as an empirical fact, there seems to be no shortage of skeptical scholars who DON'T acknowledge the Pauline accounts as historically reliable or that Paul was reasonable in being convinced that what Peter and James recounted was an accurate eye-witness account. So, then you are reduced to the method of not only tallying how many scholars are on board, and how many are not, and (much worse) why the ones who are not are less to be trusted and the ones who are on board are more to be trusted. But once you have fallen into that situation, you might as well go whole hog and do the same for the gospels - and simply reject those skeptics whose arguments are without sufficient merit. And once you have done that, you can work within a smaller body of "skeptics", and then a much larger body of agreed-upon starting points.

The second is that there seems to be no "minimal" or "core" subset of assertions that have universal agreement. When you take all of the skeptics and tally up all the assertions they call into question, leaving only the assertions they are willing to grant plausibility to, the intersection of these is not a "core" or "minimal" group of assertions we can all agree on, the intersection subset is the EMPTY SET. So, (once again) you are stuck with the task of rejecting some of the skeptics because their work is unsound, getting into the nitty-gritty of winnowing out the skeptical claims (and thus some of the skeptics) in order to generate enough space to have a non-empty intersection subset. But (again) why stop there, even the skeptics who are (at first glance) not so freakish and fraudulent as the worst keep on making mistakes, errors, logical fallacies, historical fallacies, positing hypotheses that are as outlandish as anything Christians claim, etc? So, there is no good reason to STOP at some minimal body of agreeable details about the resurrection, a subset that 62.48% of the better scholars WOULD agree are reasonable if they realized how silly x, y, or z objection really is...

The third is that the gospels, Acts, and the epistles all support each other evidentially, and it is unsound to simply pick Paul's letters as reliable and the gospels as not reliable. There is plenty of reason to think that the gospels are reliable accounts (not embellished) and it is imprudent to simply put them down as unreliable and thereby giving the skeptics unjustified large advantages in the debate.

Justin:

Its difficult to explain how vague and visionary hallucinations produce a belief in a bodily resurrection
Let me stress that the above is assuming an essentially Liconian approach of relying on Paul without taking much from the gospel narratives except to see how they fit together with Paul and broadly with each other.

But that again is using the round-the-barn approach that I critique in the main post.

By the way, please note that the theory pushed more by Allison is something like an objective vision theory, not an hallucination theory. (These have similarities but also differences. Epistemologically one would expect the experiences to be visionary, but they are supposed to point to "something" outside of the disciples' own heads.)

As I say in the main post, It's difficult to explain how vision-type experiences would result in the belief in a physical resurrection only if you assume that the disciples were fairly rational in drawing their conclusion. Why think that your opponent is going to grant you that assumption? Of course he isn't! So, as I pointed out, the whole approach doesn't even meet its own advertising hype--namely, that it relies only on premises granted by a majority of a wide array of scholars, including skeptics and liberals.

Moreover, I *strongly* dispute the idea that this kind of "Liconian" approach can produce an argument with much force to it. Remember that we want people to have a very high posterior, and we need to have such a high posterior ourselves, if we are to be, for example, ready to die for Jesus. I myself would never be ready to die for something argued for in that way! It's too tenuous.

What that approach is doing is arguing in a roundabout fashion about what we think the appearances "must have been" like or "probably were" like in order to explain the disciples' belief, where their belief is the thing we really try to press as a premise.

In so doing one tries to set aside the accounts we really do have of what their experiences allegedly were like! There is something to my mind almost perverse, epistemically speaking. For one thing, if one grants even for the sake of the argument that Luke made up the "eating fish" part (for example), how is one to regain confidence in the idea that Jesus did things *like* eating fish that *justifiably* convinced the disciples that he was raised?! After all, if he really did such physical-seeming things, why didn't Luke record those real things that he did instead of something made up???

Do you see the problem? It seems to me that once we take the approach of trying to rely only on Paul because (as Licona expressly says in his resurrection book) we don't know the amount of liberty the evangelists may have taken in their accounts, we are coming perilously close to admitting that the disciples may just have believed irrationally on the basis of a floating appearance in the sky, which is *exactly* what the likes of Allison and Ehrman think may well have happened. (Ehrman isn't even prepared to grant group appearance experiences, by the way, but he says that *if* there were such group appearances, they were like vision at a distance.) And Allison, with his love of the paranormal, finds this rather attractive, since he thinks people pretty often have these sorts of spooky experiences and even half-believes that they correspond to something extra-mental anyway. But not a robust bodily resurrection and bodily appearances such as Christianity teaches.

I will say quite frankly that if this were the best we could do, I probably wouldn't be an orthodox Christian myself. I might flirt with the idea of a bodily resurrection, but I'd probably conclude that we can't know for sure.

Why would anyone hamstring himself in such a way? Or why make a deliberate method out of it?

I think that by this time, several of these guys think the Gospel narratives probably *were* embellished. They just disagree somewhat among themselves about how much. It may be said to be granting only "for the sake of the argument" but that isn't all that it is. And then other people in good faith come to think there is some virtue in such a method even though they themselves may wish/hope/believe that a more robust view of the Gospels' connection to witness testimony is defensible. But it's almost impossible for that not to be eroded as year after year they are given the impression that this is the best we can do.

Btw, Justin, I think you are confusing two different Jameses. James the member of the twelve is probably not the James whom Paul breaks out to mention in I Cor. 15. That is probably James the kinsman of Jesus, who by that time was a prominent leader in the Jerusalem church. James the son of Zebedee and member of the twelve was already executed by Herod Agrippa I.

Thanks for that Lydia.

I want to reply concerning the strength for the resurrection that I outlined above a little later but wanted to give a brief response concerning a few things.

* concerning the type of criteria that Licona and Habermas uses I agree with you and Tony insofar as your points shows its weaknesses. I dont use that criteria above (that the vast majority of scholars accept a fact. Hence my confidence in using a group appearance to the 12. Im happy to disagree with Erhman should he want to deny that).

* I think Allison is bringing much background issues to bare on how he evaluates the evidence. Two big issues that influence him would be his philosophical unease with the concept of a bodily resurrection as form of afterlife and his acceptance of the apparitions of the dead as objectively real phenomenon. The former sets quite a low prior probability for him I feel. He seems to take much of the reports on the latter at face value, he then collects multiple different types of reports to have something analogous to the christian claim. I think there's many weaknesses here to undermine his case.

* I agree somewhat with your point about the strength of the case here. I dont think the direct evidence for the resurrection will achieve a higher posterior all by itself. Im in full agreement that the case I outlined would need a decent prior to finish with a good case. I think I can make that case though. Not more likely than not or even as likely as not but plausible enough before we get to the direct evidence (I would include facts about Jesus's life, actions and teachings here).

Concerning the strength of the case I put forward.

As I said in my first post, I think its moderately strong.

I take it that the hallucination (or vision) theory you are describing is something like this. To explain the appearances we could appeal to hallucinations, multiple different ones with at least one group hallucination. To explain the belief (or interpretation?) of the appearances as a bodily resurrected Jesus we could appeal to an irrational interpretation (there are a number of ways i imagine you could spell that out).

I'd say in response that the resurrection has some degree of strength over the hallucination in most points I brought up and the cumulative case is where the strength is.

With group hallucinations they are at least very rare with much debate as to whether there are any examples of them so they are certainly controversial in themselves. They best cases put forward consistently show patterns like not everyone being present having a hallucination and those that do have a hallucination dont see the same thing. That's inconsistent with the 12 appearance. Perhaps you could say there was a large group of people at the time and only a subsection experienced a hallucination including the 12 but I think that will raise problems for the vision theorist later on.

It has to posit the 12 had at least two appearances (by being included in the appearance to all the apostles and probably included James in that last group too as well as his own appearance listed). Giving the vision theory some room, we can assume that last appearance "to all the apostles" was not a group appearance but a summary of multiple individual ones. If taken as a second group appearance it compounds to weaknesses in my first point). A string of hallucinations contagion like May not be unheard but are, again, quite unlikely.


The belief that Jesus was bodily, physically raised. Do you not think that the claim they could simply have made an irrational inference is weak? Take the kind of sociological mutations Wright argues for. The claim that Jesus was physically raised was central to the christian claims, it was unified in that bodily resurrection was the only claim there was no competition for it even when preached to unsympathetic gentiles and it took a particular form that did not fit in to previous views of the resurrection. It wasn't a shining Jesus (which would seem to be an easy leap for something visionary and also seems to be the general pattern we see in accounts of potential group hallucinations by the way) nor was it a normal Jesus, as though he never died. Paul is just as clear here as the gospels that the resurrected body is different. One weakness on my part is a difficulty to articulate why this is, but i can't shake the feeling that a visionary hallucination would result in an irrational interpretation that has wide agreement and rejects easy options (like the type of body jews seemed happy to speculate about whilst also being antithetical to the preaching to the gospels).

Also keep in mind that for any plausible account of group hallucinations to get off the ground you'll need not everyone to have a hallucination and for those who do to have different ones. I could see how speaking afterwards could form a stable core so that we see the unity we do in the new testament but it would have to be within reason for those to think they saw the same thing. Yet the picture we see is as Wright said a mutation from the wider culture. Hallucinations are culturally conditioned however.

Paul and Luke clearly make distinctions between visions and appearances with extra mental aspects seemingly the difference. This makes sense in a culture that was intimately familiar with visions. Its natural to see why the distinction is even made actually, were Jews no less than gentiles would be prone to accept that visions were just as real. With that distinction in mind, just what would it look like for the apostles to be irrational in mistaking a visionary encounter for a resurrected body? They were aware of the difference! They consciously differentiated between the two. It would seem to me to be a better sceptical response to say the distinction was an apologetic invention. But that would seem to entail that they knew they were being irrational in some sense?

Also, consider how common visionary experiences seemed to be in the ancient world, it would seem to make the irrational jump from a visionary appearance to a resurrected body a large, irrational jump.

Insofar as the empty tomb has some independent strength that adds extra kick to the cumulative case. And I think it is the cumulative of these things that is where the strength lies, where there seems to be some strength to the visionary theory that very strength is a weakness in other areas potentially cancelling out whatever strength it first gave.

If you're planning to set aside scholarly consensus, what then is the advantage or motive for arguing in the roundabout fashion? Why not take the Paleyan approach that Tim and I have taken? In our Blackwell piece a major reason why the testimony of the disciples had such a high Bayes factor was (among other things) that we took the accounts in the Gospels to represent the content of that testimony. Hence, for example, the best explanation of the duration, polymodal nature (he was tangible, visible, and audible), intersubjective content, conversational nature, Jesus' eating with them, of their testimony was that he was physically raised. Hence, too, the pressure against their being *honestly mistaken* in thinking what they thought. In fact, I believe that if you grant that they testified as the Gospel accounts record, they would pretty much have to be lying outright in order to explain their testimony. But that hypothesis has enormous problems of its own. This is the Paleyan strategy. It is essentially a trilemma for the disciples--either they were deceivers, they were mistaken, or they were telling the truth (i.e., Jesus really was physically raised). It is the details of the accounts in the Gospels that make the probability of "they were mistaken" so minuscule. It is the details of the context in which they testified (per Acts) that maks the probability of "they were lying" so minuscule.

I have difficulty seeing any value to an approach that eschews doing this. It's going to come to that in the end anyway.

An example of what I mean by "it's going to come to that in the end anyway": In the symposium in Philosophia Christi involving Gary Habermas, Dale Allison, Stephen Davis, and William Lane Craig, Habermas *expressly* used such statements as that Jesus appeared to groups and individuals, appeared to skeptics, and appeared outside as well as inside as part of his argument. I think he also brought up Jesus' being tangible. Allison was quick to point out that Habermas can't use these premises unless he's prepared to argue that the accounts are not embellished. Allison stated quite strongly that he's been studying this for a long time and doesn't see how that could be done! (Habermas didn't have an opportunity to respond by the structure of the symposium, so that was the last word on it.) Obviously I think Allison was wrong in saying such a thing can't be done. But he was right in saying that Habermas was going beyond any sort of minimal or even "moderate minimal" facts in alluding to these points in the resurrection narratives in the Gospels. And Habermas *certainly* wasn't sticking to "doing it all through Paul." Well, I say, good for Habermas in that case! But since it comes to that anyway, then we need to welcome and be prepared to meet Allison's further challenge to the Gospels and his dubiousness about the accounts in the Gospels. Fortunately, we can be.

Actually, if one is taking seriously an objective vision hypothesis, God (or some Power) could have sent a group experience to all of the disciples together.

I take it that Catholics believe this happens in some Marian apparitions. They are taken to be objective, and sometimes experienced by multiple people at once, but they are not physical interactions such as those between the disciples and Jesus on earth if we take the Gospels at face value. In that case statistics about the rarity of group hallucinations would not apply.

That's part of why I emphasized the distinction between some sort of objective vision theory or paranormal theory and a true bodily resurrection.

Do you not think that the claim they could simply have made an irrational inference is weak?

It is somewhat weak, but since I don't know these people personally, again, not so weak that I'd stake my life on its negation. Rationality is not exactly the hallmark of the human race.

If, on the other hand, I have *details* of what they claimed, details that *do* make it rational for them to believe he was physically raised, then I can say, "Okay, yes, that would be a rational conclusion to draw. So were they lying, then?"

That's tremendously helpful, especially if it's important for me to get this right.

Here's a way to see it: If you read in a book that a woman named Sally claimed that she saw her grandfather physically alive from the dead, I think you would quite reasonably want to know in more detail what Sally claimed happened to her before you'd accept that claim with high probability. A lot of background statements about how Sally's culture accepts visions and can be expected to know the difference between visions and physical presence is pretty indirect if you're asking me to bet my life on the truth of Sally's conclusion.

Here's another way to look at it:

Suppose we imagine the person making the argument is trying to get the skeptic to agree that Jesus was physically raised while not challenging the skeptic's belief that the Gospel accounts are very embellished, so is the account in Acts 1, and for that matter, the account of the ascension (which is rather important) may just be invented out of whole cloth.

Doesn't all of that look like they had a thinner story that they had to beef up? Doesn't all of that embellishment and invention look suspicious?

It's not like you can just leave those embellishment and invention propositions untouched, set them aside, and leave them in place in the skeptic's probabilistic distribution and they have no other effects! If all of those are left in place because we're trying to "do it all through Paul," then we're envisaging an early church that has little idea of the details of what the apostles experienced and is forced to backsolve and make up stuff that it might have been like, given that the apostles are assuring them earnestly that Jesus was physically raised! They're backsolving and saying, "Well, in that case, let's have a story where eats with them. Let's have him walking by the Sea of Galilee. Let's have him invite them to touch him. And then later, since he doesn't seem to be walking around among us nowadays, I guess he *must have* gone away, so let's make up what that story would have been like. Maybe he went up into heaven and disappeared. The apostles keep saying he's going to come back again..."

That is *extremely* undermining to the idea that the apostles have a solid, rational, well-grounded belief in the physical resurrection of Jesus! It looks instead like there is a big hole where all of that detailed evidence should be, and that hole is being filled in with embellished accounts.

See, everything is connected. What we grant "for the sake of the argument" has consequences.

Fair questions. I suppose I've always thought you could leave the gospel resurrection narratives 'on the shelf' as it were as controversial. I wouldn't say that makes embellishment an assumption but a kind of 50/50.

Even then I'm of the opinion that there's enough overlap between Matthew, Luke and John (which is all congruent with what Paul says) that its not actually 50/50.

I dont need to tell you of the different theories people give for 'changing' the story. Theological reasons or whatever. But even if you accept that it seems clear that there's a kind of boundary on how much can be changed. Matthew has the woman grasp Jesus' feet, Luke has Jesus eat and show his flesh and bones and John is physical all over. If we doubt the specifics (say the woman didn't touch Jesus's feet and Thomas didn't touch Jesus's wounds) it seems a sceptic must Still accept the gospel writers were bound to embellish ways to say jesus was physical.

Or would you say that if we allow those type of embellishments, it undermines any confidence we have in the gospel narratives at all?

Matthew has the woman grasp Jesus' feet, Luke has Jesus eat and show his flesh and bones and John is physical all over. If we doubt the specifics (say the woman didn't touch Jesus's feet and Thomas didn't touch Jesus's wounds) it seems a sceptic must Still accept the gospel writers were bound to embellish ways to say jesus was physical.

That whole way of thinking has to be challenged. People have this odd idea that is just wrong that we can acknowledge that, for all we know, all the specific things were made up, and we can still be confident in some kind of lesson or point that they were made up to support! That's totally wrong. If anything, that plays into the idea that they were made up precisely to support that point and that nothing of the kind actually happened. For some reason, this was what the church wanted to believe and teach, and they had to fill in the gap in the actual evidence with embellishment.

Here's a thought experiment: Suppose you had three stories about a man who supposedly had ESP. And suppose you said that you doubt that those specific stories happened. He never actually guessed the thoughts of person 1, 2, or 3. It would and should be quite unconvincing for an advocate of his ESP powers to respond like this: "Well, but even if those specific stories of his guessing someone's thoughts are invented, it looks like his followers all *thought* he had psi powers, so they had to invent stories *in which* he had psi powers. So they all agree on the *motif* of his psi powers, and his having such powers is therefore multiply attested even if the specific stories are made up."

This would be a terrible argument. If the specific stories of his psi powers are made up, then his psi powers are not truthfully attested even *once*, much less multiply! Licona will use this fancy phrase, "Multiple attestation to a motif" that is totally misguided. It's just word magic. It betrays a complete misunderstanding of multiple attestation. You can't just acknowledge that for all we know, the specifics of a person's having powers or being physically raised were made up, but that we can wring some big significance (about truth) out of the fact that the inventions were all making the point that he had those powers or was physically raised. After all, the skeptic's *whole idea* is that they were invented to make that point! But in that case, they didn't happen.

Or would you say that if we allow those type of embellishments, it undermines any confidence we have in the gospel narratives at all?

It certainly undermines any confidence we have in the historicity of the physical aspects of them. After all, the whole point of "allowing those kinds of embellishments" is that *precisely* the physical details are the ones that were made up! So who cares that what they have in common is that they are physical? No kidding, says the skeptic. That's the point. They were embellished to make his resurrection look physical.

How, at that point, can we convincingly dodge back and say, "He did give them convincing physical evidence, but maybe *not this* convincing physical evidence, but we should believe it was convincing, whatever it was, because they believed it, so they felt they had to make up stories in which he was physical, even though all of the physical details we *actually have* are embellishments"?

That's cutting off the branch you're sitting on. At that point, the skeptic has every reason to press the conclusion that, at most, they had some much vaguer experience and then that got beefed up.

So I had in my mind multiple attestation for the fact that they thought he was physically raised (because all 3 gospels embellishing details to stress physicality attests that before they were written the community at large were all keeping traditions that the encounters were physical).

We couldn't use the gospels to get back to why they thought it was physical only that they did and it was widespread.

Also, i think there are motivations for embellishing and types of embellishment that will change how they reflect the source. Let's take outright invention and then fleshing out bare details. My idea was more the latter than the former. I think we would both agree that when Luke checked his sources, they all didn't repeat verbatim what happened or what they were told and that their memories were video recording perfect. That they had an accurate gist. My thinking then, is that core aspects or details were remembered by the witnesses and the communities they told. Whether it was Peter or one of the early church in Jerusalem, the claims that Jesus was touched (the gist of the even that was remembered) was maintained through multiple communities and churches. When it came to writing a gospel, the authors used these core claims and fleshed them out in a narrative form.

What do you think of that?

Also, wouldn't Paul be some kind of control here? So if Paul teaches a physical resurrection, that christ was physically resurrected, that he appeared to multiple people, that he ascended give independent attestation to those claims in the gospels?

This has been helpful because I'm being asked to make explicit reasoning that was before implicit and you are raising challenging points. I appreciate it.

Just another point to summarise how I think the gospels are involved (which may help you see how I think they help dealing with people like Erhman and Allison).

I think you can answer Allison somewhat without taking the gospels as substantially reliable. So you can still use the gospels as extra evidence for Jesus appearing to individuals and groups and to skeptics. Because 3 gospels attend to a group appearance to the 12. Luke attests to a single one to Peter and to Paul in Acts.

Also, to use the idea of multiple attestation to motifs, it seems to me that the skeptic would have to admit that the authors were constrained by that motif, it was the way that the communities and churches were remembering and retelling the stories. So you would have some extra attestation to a physical resurrection insofar as it was assumed by the authors. It was widely known.

If you take the role of the Jerusalem church in its authority, wouldn't this reflect on apostolic teaching?

So isn't the skeptic at least forced into a position were 1) the motif of being touched is widespread and authoritative enough to constrain what the authors can say and 2) given the relationship and authority the Jerusalem Church had this central, important 'memory' reflects apostolic teaching?

Also I'm using 'embellish'here in a kind of for argument sake sort of thing. To be honest, I'm agnostic between the strong reliability people like yourself, Blomberg and Carson argue for as opposed to Licona, Keener etc. Though reading about this in depth is next on my list.

If you take the role of the Jerusalem church in its authority, wouldn't this reflect on apostolic teaching?

Justin, I suspect that a pretty strong presumption is being made behind a comment like this, as to the timing and authorship of the gospels.

Here is what I mean: if the gospels were written, say, after 80 AD, at a time when all of the Apostles but John were dead (and John was not in Jerusalem), then it would have fallen to the Church at Jerusalem to affirm or reject the soundness of what had been written into the gospel accounts. And that church would have had reference to all the things they had repeatedly heard Peter and James and the other eye-witnesses say, as had (before they had died) become "standard" stories. Thus the written accounts would be compared to apostolic teachings as remembered and handed on. The affirmation of the gospel accounts would be by people who were not themselves eye-witnesses and thus were going by what they were told verbally by others.

But if the gospels were written earlier, while Peter and James and other eye-witnesses were still alive, then Peter and James etc. would themselves spoken affirmatively or negatively about their soundness. "The church" wouldn't compare the written accounts to teachings remembered and passed on, it would be the Apostles themselves comparing the accounts to their own memories, affirming directly with apostolic authority.

You can see that these two scenarios provide vastly different pictures of reasons / basis / acceptability for embellishment. I cannot imagine that any of the Apostles or other senior members of the Church who were eye-witnesses of the events accepting accounts that they knew were embellished. If the gospel author was trying to convey something or other that needed embellishment to carry it over, then the Apostles would have said something like "no, no, you can use the REAL events to convey that, because ..." and here give corrected details that carry the point with facts instead of fiction.

I also think that the skeptics mis-understand the nature of story-telling about events that are at one and the same time wildly improbable, incredibly happy, AND life-shaping / controlling / demanding. Suppose that something or other happened that convinced Peter and the Apostles to believe Christ was indeed the Messiah, in spite of being killed, and that he really did found a proselytizing church to spread the news and lead others. Right from the very beginning they would have been talking about that very something or other that convinced them. And right away, they would have run into skeptics, especially hard-headed Jews who thought the REAL Messiah would overthrow the Romans, not be murdered by the Romans: very early on they would have been providing those physicality details to their eye-witness accounts. Moreover, in the shock and wonder of the 40 days before the Ascension, they would have talked to each other about each and every time Christ appeared, and would have called forth every detail about them with each other. They would have hashed them back and forth and reminded each other about this and that detail, to laugh, to cry, to rejoice once more in the concrete truth "He's ALIVE!" The gospel writers would not have needed to MAKE UP details, there would have been well-recited details about every single appearance of Christ resurrected, from which to pick and choose what they wanted - they would have been CUTTING DOWN on the material available, not adding to it. Their job was to edit for conciseness (as John clearly indicates), not to record each fact known. The way the skeptics talk, they envision a Christian community in the 80s and 90s AD in which faith is based primarily on some vague, shadowy, generalized "impressive personage", which they then made up specific stories around to fill in the details. But there is no reason to think that Peter and James and Matthew and Andrew had not spent 30 years and more answering every question asked of them about "what did He look like" and "what did you eat when you were in Nazareth" and "which road did He take into Jerusalem that time?" etc. This would be natural, the expected. People would have had far MORE factual detail than made it into the gospels, not less. Only AFTER the accounts were formulated into the written word would that begin to displace reliance on the other accounts (verbal), and there is no reason in the world to think those verbal accounts are not every bit as detailed as those we give today, if not more so (since back then so few were literate).

Tony that was well put, I think that's a plausible case.

What do you think of the case where the apostles are dead? Because we know James is still in Jerusalem still into the 50's right? I forgot about the discussion by Hemer on when Peter leaves Jerusalem i think he's speculates late 40's and no earlier.

So let's take typical dating of the Gospels 70-95 AD Mark to John. That's less than a decade from Peter and Paul's death (do you know when James was supposed to have died?) Around two decades for Matthew and Luke lets say.

I think this is a decent case. The Jerusalem Church would have had Peter for around decades before he left, James even longer. John returned a few times. By then it would seem to have organised the core details of the resurrection accounts into a stable pattern (the early dating of the creed in Corinthians still used by Paul decades later supports this). I think that stable core survives the death of the apostles to the writing of the Gospels largely intact. I think this is relevant for those who grant the 'multiple motif' idea.

Do you see where I'm going with this?

So I had in my mind multiple attestation for the fact that they thought he was physically raised

But if that's all we can get, that pretty severely limits how far we can go. Suppose we were given at probability 1 (!) that the disciples *believed* he was physically raised. Okay, now, how do we know that they were rational in that? If all we're willing to do with the Gospels is to keep on hammering on, "This shows us that they believed this," that doesn't add anything to our estimate of their rationality. We were just using that evidence to get us to conclude that they believed it. Now we want to know why they believed it, what the details were of what happened to them or what they said. See the "Sally" analogy, above. If for all we know the specific details of the Gospel accounts might have been made up just to *reflect* the fact that *they believed it*, then a) that's really suspicious as to whether they were attesting to credible details that would make them rational, b) whatevr they actually attested to is apparently lost in the mists, so we can't evaluate their rationality. This really comes up against a hard ceiling as far as how strong of a case we can make for it. I see no reason to limit ourselves in such a severe way, and I think we're in pretty big trouble if we do as far as asking people to make a life commitment.

Let's take outright invention and then fleshing out bare details. My idea was more the latter than the former. I think we would both agree that when Luke checked his sources, they all didn't repeat verbatim what happened or what they were told and that their memories were video recording perfect. That they had an accurate gist. My thinking then, is that core aspects or details were remembered by the witnesses and the communities they told. Whether it was Peter or one of the early church in Jerusalem, the claims that Jesus was touched (the gist of the even that was remembered) was maintained through multiple communities and churches. When it came to writing a gospel, the authors used these core claims and fleshed them out in a narrative form.

What do you think of that?

Well, to be honest, I think that this just shows how epistemologically damaging it has been for Dr. Licona to throw around the phrase "accurate gist." It's a very serious problem with his way of talking and writing. Consider the following scenario: Luke hears a disciple say, "Jesus' resurrection was physical. He was physically present with us." Maybe he even heard someone say, "They could touch him." Nothing about who touched him, when, where, how many, etc. He then *makes up* the story where Jesus invites them, in a group, to touch him. Or the author of John (is this supposed to be a real disciple, or maybe we should imagine some "Johannine community") *makes up* the story of Doubting Thomas. Or the author of Matthew also hears, "Somebody was able to touch Jesus" and *makes up* the story of the women grasping his feet.

That is not an accurate gist. "Somebody touched him somewhere, somehow" which is floating around as a claim in the Christian community, may or may not be true, and a made-up story about some particular person touching him is not accurate in any meaningful sense of the word just because it contains this bit of tradition, claimed to be passed down from the apostles, that somebody or other, somewhere, somehow, touched him.

That's a terrible use of the word "gist" and an even worse use of the word "accurate."

Now, perhaps you might suggest that it was actually an apostle who said, "People were able to touch him" or "someone touched him" rather than some non-apostle. But in that case, why wouldn't he tell the story? The real story? Rather than just such a brief statement? And why would we have a made-up story instead?

Moreover, if what we have is a made-up story, then no, absolutely not, it is not an "accurate gist" if the story itself is made up, just because it reflects a much vaguer statement even by an apostle that "somebody touched Jesus." We really *must not* use the word "gist" in that way.

The story of Doubting Thomas is a whole story. It isn't just a tiny detail to make it up.

The problem with the way that Licona and unfortunately others use these terms is that they jump from some trivial error, made in good faith (e.g., what if someone said there were eleven disciples present when there were really ten) to the idea of wholesale invention based only upon some extremely broad *conceptual* idea, they misleadingly apply a phrase like "accurate gist" or "just adding some details" to the latter, and then they imply that the only people who could possibly see any problem with this are hardline inerrantists. I'm afraid that's just really poor reasoning. It has something of the motte and bailey about it: "All I'm saying is that maybe not every tiny detail is correct." Well, no, that's *not* all that's being suggested.


Also, wouldn't Paul be some kind of control here? So if Paul teaches a physical resurrection, that christ was physically resurrected, that he appeared to multiple people, that he ascended give independent attestation to those claims in the gospels?

Short answer, since he wasn't present, no. He can't attest of his own knowledge in any independent fashion that Jesus walked among them, ate with them, etc. His own experience, *by his own account*, was far different. In fact, I tend to think that a big problem with the "do it all through Paul" approach is that people are forced to fuzzify these differences. At the best, Paul had an experience of a bright and shining Jesus who appeared to be floating above the Damascus Road, who spoke to him relatively briefly, and whose words could not be understood by his companions, who apparently didn't see him either. I know that people tend to get tetchy about this, but that is *far* more vision-like than anything attested in the Gospels. I know of people who will really insist that Jesus could have been struck by a rock if you threw it hard enough up above the Damascus Road, because by golly he had to be physically present to Paul just as he was physically present to the disciples. (Usually this is based on the entirely garden-variety word "seen" in I Cor. 15, which is pretty weak sauce.) But even they can't make the *contents* of Paul's experience any more intersubjectively verifiable, any more physical-like, any more polymodal, than they were. The fact remains that Paul never had a chance to sit down at a table and eat a meal with a tangible Jesus.

I do use the conversion of Paul and what he claimed as evidence for the resurrection. But the argument is indirect and, in essence, amounts to an argument that Paul had a veridical religious experience originating outside his own mind and pointing to the propositional truth of the religion to which he himself connected it--namely, the new "way" of Christianity that he was previously persecuting. But this has pretty much nothing to do with his independently, *personally* verifying the physical nature of Jesus' resurrection appearances. For all that Paul's experience indicates, it appears fairly "vision-like" in nature.

Certainly Paul could attest that the disciples were teaching the resurrection. That appears to be without doubt. And it is quite probable that he understood them to be teaching the physical resurrection.

But here we are again, aren't we? Even if we had *at probability 1* that the disciples were teaching the physical resurrection, we want and need to know how rational they were in believing that. Heaping on more and more evidence and "attestation" that merely takes us back to that bottleneck doesn't make the argument *from* that proposition to the *truth* of the conclusion that Jesus was physically raised any stronger. For that we need to know more about what they were saying, in detail.

Hmm. Its a challenging response there.

You did outline one way I was intending to go. My idea was that the multiple motif would be evidence for a stable, widespread 'tradition' (by which I mean a social memory that stems from an eyewitness). This widespread tradition would have been controlled by the Jerusalem Church which itself would have been molded by the 12.

So to take the example of Luke, I would say that he personally heard that Jesus was touched by multiple people, belonging in those sorts of concentric circles. He'd probably heard the story before his travels (wider community) from Paul (so third hand from Peter) from Philip the Evangelist (someone with past encounters with the 12 and Jerusalem Church) and perhaps from one of the 12 if they were there when he visited Jerusalem. Either way, each 'chain of transmission' would trace back to the 12 and the Jerusalem Church.

Now, if an apostle is ultimately responsible for the claim that Jesus was touched why would it be so bare? Well, for one thing that may have been the most important part when speaking to Gentiles and for another, as the previous paragraph suggests, the claim was sent so far and wide it might have been the main thing people cared about. Considering there are so many appearances floating about, perhaps people didn't care to much who touched him, when it happened or when (I mean regarding when, I dont see why it would be implausible to think that when this was being explained to people it was being summarised as before the Ascension after 40 days).

The point about Paul was also regarding his testimony about what the apostles preached.

So, adding on to my initial outline for a case for the resurrection, this would be a way to judge the rationality of the belief in the resurrection if the gospels could be used to at least support that the apostles claimed he was touched. With the difficulty of the vision theory accounting for the other reasons I mentioned this is still in the ball park of having moderate strength. By this I mean it will depend somewhat on a plausible prior.

So to take the Sally analogy;

If Sally by herself claimed to have believed her grandfather was resurrected from the dead i wouldn't believe it.

If she claimed groups of people saw him, and multiple more people at least had individual sightings (lets say Sally isn't clear). Let's say Sally is in a culture where visions are common but she makes the distinction between extra mental appearances and visions and describes those she lists as having been the former, the idea of resurrection she describes about future resurrected bodies differs from the way her culture thinks of resurrected bodies (and she expressly links future resurrected bodies to be like her Grandfather's) and argues there is an empty tomb.

I think at the least that's a bit difficult to explain. Something weird happen but I don't know what.

But then say there was religious context to make this resurrection intelligible, that Sally's Grandfather make claims to being to do what God can, perform miracles, have outstanding moral teachings. And let's say we have good reason to think God exists and that given human nature a resurrection is the best account of what a plausible afterlife looked like and that if God were to act with a sign to signal it was indeed a true revelation then a resurrection would be a fitting thing to do - then I'd think we'd have reasonable grounds to think it happened.

What do you think?

Lydia im embarrassed to have glanced at your Facebook page to see ive dragged you through quite the repetition of what you've said in the last week or so. You've been a Saint in replying and engaging with. As has Tony.

I saw a comment you made about work of independence you have done. Id love to read all I can from you on the subject. Would that be books or paper's you've written? Where would I find it?

Lydia im embarrassed to have glanced at your Facebook page to see ive dragged you through quite the repetition of what you've said in the last week or so. You've been a Saint in replying and engaging with. As has Tony.

I saw a comment you made about work of independence you have done. Id love to read all I can from you on the subject. Would that be books or paper's you've written? Where would I find it?

Interesting discussion. Lydia do you think indirect evidence can accumulate to be quite strong?

In answer to Callum: That *entirely* depends on the epistemic situation. For example, what the indirect evidence is evidence for and other info. about conditional probabilities. Suppose that the indirect evidence is evidence for some proposition Q that would be quite limited in how much it could support P anyway, even if it were certain. Then we have a) the fact that the evidence for Q is indirect plus b) the fact that even if Q were certain, we would have fairly limited evidence for P from Q. In that case, piling on more and more arguments for Q doesn't by itself make the inference from Q to P any stronger. It just raises our credibility for Q. This is what I meant by a "bottleneck" in my comments above. And I think this is the case with a lot of attempts by minimalists. They keep piling on indirect arguments (some of them rather weak, some stronger) that "the disciples believed Jesus was raised" or "the disciples taught that Jesus was physically raised," and they don't seem to understand the epistemic point that doing so doesn't strengthen the inference *from* "The disciples taught that Jesus was physically raised" or "the disciples believed that Jesus was physically raised" *to* the conclusion "Jesus was physically raised" unless that evidence *also* tells us about the details of the experiences they claimed.

Justin, interesting thought experiment. So I'm going to take it that Sally is supposed to be roughly in the position of Paul in your example. I'll go through a bit at a time:

Let's say Sally is in a culture where visions are common but she makes the distinction between extra mental appearances and visions and describes those she lists as having been the former

I hate to have to say it, but Paul doesn't do this in I Cor. 15 nor in any statements we have recorded by him, even in Acts. In fact, his indiscriminate use of the word "see" for his own experience of seeing Jesus and for the experiences of the disciples on earth rather tends to blur this distinction. The closest he comes is the somewhat embarrassed "last of all...as of one born out of due time." I don't blame Paul for this. Frankly, I think he was a little touchy about his own apostleship and not inclined to dwell upon the difference. But the fact that he includes his own brief seeing (see my comments above about the differences between what happened to him, even at its most robust, and what supposedly happened to them) in the list has actually caused a good bit of confusion. It has given skeptics an excuse to go back and downplay the robustness of what the other disciples experienced! Allison even went so far as to suggest that perhaps the 500 and James saw Jesus only after Pentecost. (I'm not making this up. He just said it in these recent interviews.) And added that, for all we know, Jesus might have appeared to be floating up in the sky when they saw him, as he was for Paul. We have to admit at least that Paul doesn't *say* that wasn't what it was like.

Too much interpretation of I Cor. 15, coupled with a desire to make it do more than it was intended to do, read the Gospels *into* I Cor. 15. That wouldn't be so bad if we weren't trying to make it bear so much evidential weight, but its brief, summary nature is a perfectly fair thing for the skeptic to point out when Christians do try to make it bear that much weight.


the idea of resurrection she describes about future resurrected bodies differs from the way her culture thinks of resurrected bodies (and she expressly links future resurrected bodies to be like her Grandfather's)

Here the analogy *mingles* the disciples with Paul. If Sally is like Paul, then she doesn't claim to have seen her grandfather in a physically interactive way. In fact, let's suppose that she admits that she didn't! She admits that he was just floating up in the sky and had a super-brief dialogue with her. Then she also teaches about future resurrected bodies and links those to be like the body of her grandfather. Um, okay, and so? At that point the person giving the testimony isn't even a person who had a fully, robustly, physical-like interaction with the allegedly risen grandfather while he was on earth. (She herself thinks that it was after he ascended into heaven!)

Then presumably we're supposed to imagine that we have some other stories, which for all we are willing or able to defend *might not even be the stories told by the people themselves* and *might be heavily embellished*. In these stories, some of Sally's friends do have chats with her grandfather while he's on earth, but we can't talk to her friends, we can't find out whether they really had these experiences or claim to have these experiences, and we feel like we have to grant for the sake of the argument that these stories might have grown in the telling and might have been written by totally different people who didn't have the experiences, had only a very bare idea of what the friends said, and made up the specific circumstances. And *in those possibly made-up stories*, her grandfather doesn't glow and shine, but we have some texts somewhere that make us think that maybe her culture would have described him as glowing and shining if they were making up a story about a resurrected person. I'm sorry, but that's weak sauce, especially if you're asking me to commit to worshiping her grandfather.

and argues there is an empty tomb.

Once again, we can't read the Gospels into I Cor. 15. Paul never so much as mentions the empty tomb in I Cor. 15. He gives no account of finding it empty. He says that Jesus was buried and rose again. If we take it that this was a physical resurrection, then we infer extremely indirectly that he *believed* that the tomb, whatever it was like, was empty. But we have very little idea of how Paul even believed this, how he thought Jesus was buried, how much of a story he even got about finding the tomb empty, or anything of the kind. He does not *argue* that there was an empty tomb. He certainly doesn't mention going and seeing it or even hearing any specific story about its finding.

The Gospels mention an empty tomb, but they do so by way of specific stories about people finding it empty! It's simply terrible epistemology to imagine the specific stories being invented and then try to extract and take a stand on some propositional content entailed by the stories and take that to be justified. No way, no how, not at all. That doesn't work.


Now, if an apostle is ultimately responsible for the claim that Jesus was touched why would it be so bare?

Because if that's all we have, we don't know if the apostle was personally present, how he himself knows this, what the touching amounts to, whether it could have been someone's dream, whether Jesus perdured before and after, whether he appeared to be walking around on earth while the event occurred, whether multiple people verified this appearance of being tangible, etc. Allison describes a girl who, he says, had a grief hallucination while lying down in bed after her grandfather's death, and in the experience she felt she could touch his beard. Now frankly, she might be lying. (Allison scarcely ever admits that people might be lying, which is a huge weakness of his approach.) But suppose she wasn't lying. Then she could have fallen asleep and had an extremely vivid, hallucinagenic dream. Occasionally one does seem to be able to touch things in a dream. Notice too that she didn't think her grandfather was risen from the dead. (As far as I know.) So even a single experience in which a person thinks he can touch someone can still be pretty far from evidence that the person is risen.

In fact, as I've pointed out before, many types of experience could be evidence that the person *isn't* risen, or at least isn't on earth at that moment, if the most rational conclusion would be that one is experiencing some kind of contact with that person in the afterlife.

But then say there was religious context to make this resurrection intelligible, that Sally's Grandfather make claims to being to do what God can, perform miracles, have outstanding moral teachings. And let's say we have good reason to think God exists and that given human nature a resurrection is the best account of what a plausible afterlife looked like and that if God were to act with a sign to signal it was indeed a true revelation then a resurrection would be a fitting thing to do - then I'd think we'd have reasonable grounds to think it happened.

All of that would help somewhat, but definitely not enough to make me conclude that Sally's grandfather was physically alive and interacting with people in a physical body after his resurrection.

And this for several reasons:

1) The same doubts of the fleshed-out accounts that cause the reasoner to be radically unsure about the specifics of the appearance accounts (other than Sally's) also reflect on the nature of the teachings and the miracles. Once we have a view of these authors as making stuff up for a theological agenda, once we do *not* think of them as historically reliable, that has other effects.

2) It's very suspicious in itself if all the detailed accounts we now have of the person's actual interactions with people after his resurrection are heavily invented. If we really envisage the disciples merely teaching broad propositions and not telling detailed stories, or the real detailed stories (whatever they were) being lost and others invented in their place, this in itself casts doubt upon the truth of the religion and the rationality of a belief in Jesus' true physical resurrection. One can imagine, for example, a disciple who firmly believes that Jesus was physically raised but has very little to say to substantiate that (say that what he experienced was a relatively brief interaction), says what he believes, and then other people embellish this into a story that makes it sound more robust. That has to affect our own confidence in a specific doctrine of Jesus' robust physical resurrection.

Remember that Wolfhart Pannenberg gets listed as a scholar who "believes in the physical resurrection." Um-hum. What Pannenberg apparently believes is that God whisked Jesus' body out of the tomb, he went off to heaven immediately, and the disciples just had visions thereafter. He even gave William Lane Craig a hard time when Craig studied under him years ago and derided him as a "fundamentalist" for trying to harmonize the resurrection accounts, which he (Pannenberg) rejects. This with a little German sneer: "Bitte, Herr Craig." Craig tells the story. One wants to say, "Bitte, Herr Pannenberg. Do you think that's an argument?" Then people, including Bill Craig himself, walk around and don't explain all of that but just say how great it is that Pannenberg "affirms the physical resurrection" and how this must mean that the case is so strong, even without the Gospels. Well, no. That's not really an orthodox view. If I were more of a skeptic I would think that Pannenberg is just trying simultaneously to be "properly critical" (as a skeptic would view it) of the resurrection narratives while maintaining some kind of vaguely semi-orthodox-sounding religious view.

Well, maybe you could get about *there* if you don't defend the Gospel narratives more than that, though frankly, I think Pannenberg "should" probably throw out the empty tomb as well while he's at it (given his low view of the accounts in the Gospels), but that's not orthodox Christianity. Maybe with the case you outline someone could become more or less a liberal Christian--Jesus is very special. Maybe Jesus did some miracles. Jesus sorta kinda rose from the dead. The disciples experienced "Easter faith," and we can, too. I won't make a proclamation on whether Pannenberg was saved, but let's just say I wouldn't want to be *there* myself, and I'd not consider that I'd done a very good job as an apologist if *that* were where I was steering people.

For my work on independence, see the bibliography at the end of this post. The Themelios article and a couple of others are available easily.

http://lydiaswebpage.blogspot.com/2021/01/miracle-reports-independence-and-mutual.html

I think it is interesting and somewhat disturbing to see that both WLC and Licona really promote the idea that Dale Allison is a believer in the resurrection, even emphasizing his being convinced by the evidence, when he himself so strongly emphasizes his own ambivalence and, he believes, the ambiguity of the evidence. Moreover, he is pretty clearly not an orthodox Christian, since he doesn't unequivocally affirm Jesus' physical resurrection. I don't say this to insult him. He doesn't seem to be trying to hide it. But for some reason they keep hyping him as a Christian, and Licona referred to him as a "fellow believer" in the recent interviews. See also my remarks above on Pannenberg.

This creates confusion but it also seems to be "dumbing down" what it means to be a Christian and to believe in the resurrection to the point that it includes pretty blatantly liberal, modernist sets of beliefs under that heading.

What's going on here? Combine this with the fact that they will say over and over again things like, "If you believe the resurrection, you're a Christian" or "if the resurrection happened, Christianity is true." These aren't true either. Plenty of known heretic groups have affirmed the resurrection. The Socinians affirmed the resurrection far more firmly than Dale Allison did, but they denied the deity of Jesus. As far as I know, Mormons affirm the resurrection.

It seems to me that there is a connection between the relative weakness of the minimalist case and the relative weakness of the current apparent criteria for minimalists to declare someone to be "a Christian" or "a fellow believer" or to "affirm the resurrection."

Combine this, too, with increasing statements such as Craig Keener's recent statement to Bart Ehrman about affirming events in the Gospels: "I go beyond the evidence." (Supposedly by the leading of the Holy Spirit.)

Quite frankly, I believe that we are heading for a kind of neo-Barthianism in evangelical circles. And the irony is that it will be driven by apologetics! Evangelical apologists insist on using a very limited case. They then declare a big tent policy in order to call people "Christians" who believe very limited conclusions and are basically theological liberals, in order to make it appear that their own very limited case is effective at inducing people to be Christians: *Just look* how strong the case is! It's even convinced *so-and-so* to *affirm the resurrection* even though he is dubious about the Gospel accounts. He's a *fellow believer*. Rah-rah.

Then they themselves believe more than that, but they declare that they believe this "as Christians" (apparently a different *kind* of a Christian from those people at the edge of the big tent?) not "as historians."

What is the message, then? If you go by objective historical criteria, the best thing you can get evidentially supported is a thin, somewhat ambivalent affirmation of something that you call "the resurrection." Then you wait around and hope that the Holy Spirit does some kind of work in you so that you can go beyond the evidence and hold to a thicker, more orthodox type of Christianity.

This is not good news.

See also the redefinition of the phrase "mere Christianity" so that it isn't even anything C. S. Lewis would have recognized as "mere Christianity" but something far less than that. But it sounds good.

Thanks Lydia that makes so much sense (regarding your answer to my question).

Epistemology is messy!

Come to think of it, this whole attempt to lean on "Jesus isn't shining brightly in the Gospels" as some sort of evidence of something (that they *would have* made him shine brightly if they were making it up to correspond to their predictions of resurrection, I gather?) *combined* with the emphasis on Paul is a really bad mix. Why? Er, because Paul is blinded by the vision on the Damascus road. So...if you're trying to make this big analogy between what Paul experienced and what the apostles experienced, and you're trying to use some kind of criterion of dissimilarity to authenticate the Gospel accounts, what happens to Paul's account? Since Jesus apparently is shining there!! (In fact, I even had one person who was insistent that Paul is not having a vision argue that the only reason the other people on the road didn't see him clearly is that they were too blinded by the glow.)

At some point or other the difference between Paul's experience and that of the disciples has to be acknowledged, one way or another. At which point we once again are going to need to start talking about the details of the Gospel accounts.

I don't understand what is so unreasonable about the theory that nothing in Acts 9, 22 and 26 that Paul supports the hypothesis that Paul was an "eye"witness of the risen Christ. It may be that other NT texts can support this, but then again, if the most explicit NT accounts of how Paul experienced the risen Christ, do not justify the inference that Paul was an "eye"witness, surely this has to impose some degree of negative impact on apologetics. Especially if you think Luke the careful historian appreciated the value of "eye"witness testimony.

Perhaps there is a reason that Paul's recounting of this experience in Galatians 1 is so ambiguous...what he experienced was something less than obvious. Yes, that might show Luke's and Paul's honesty, but only in a way that hurts the hypothesis that Paul was an "eye"witness of the risen Christ.

Suppose that the indirect evidence is evidence for some proposition Q that would be quite limited in how much it could support P anyway, even if it were certain. Then we have a) the fact that the evidence for Q is indirect plus b) the fact that even if Q were certain, we would have fairly limited evidence for P from Q. In that case, piling on more and more arguments for Q doesn't by itself make the inference from Q to P any stronger. It just raises our credibility for Q. This is what I meant by a "bottleneck" in my comments above. And I think this is the case with a lot of attempts by minimalists. They keep piling on indirect arguments (some of them rather weak, some stronger) that "the disciples believed Jesus was raised" or "the disciples taught that Jesus was physically raised," and they don't seem to understand the epistemic point that doing so doesn't strengthen the inference *from* "The disciples taught that Jesus was physically raised" or "the disciples believed that Jesus was physically raised" *to* the conclusion "Jesus was physically raised" unless that evidence *also* tells us about the details of the experiences they claimed.

That was helpful I think I see your point now.

You've given me much to think about.

Id appreciate your thoughts on some push back.

1) Concerning Paul and the distinction between appearances and visions, when he says 'Last of all' does he not indicate here that this was the last appearance? After all he does mention in other places visions of the Lord which he doesn't accept as an appearance.

2) I do think the teachings by Paul on the resurrected body has more weight to it. Consider that Paul spent two weeks with Peter and the vocabulary and context in galatians indicates a fact finding visit so although Paul wasn't an eye witness of a physical Jesus he is second hand testimony to eye witnesses. Consider also that immediately after the creed Paul notes to the Corinthians "Whether then it was I or they, so we preach and so you believed." Which indicates that the Corinthians have already heard this from the apostles (perhaps Peter and Apollos). Its the connection with Peter and the interactions the Corinthians have had with Peter that make the case that the view of the resurrected body reflects what the apostles thought.

3) Although you couldn't use Paul to fully substantiate the empty tomb, isn't it common for sceptics to take it seriously even given a so-so view of the Gospels? Allison is happy to give arguments for its authenticity and ive seen you link Craig's response to Allison where he gives an example of the sort of arguments made for the empty tomb

Concerning Paul and the distinction between appearances and visions, when he says 'Last of all' does he not indicate here that this was the last appearance? After all he does mention in other places visions of the Lord which he doesn't accept as an appearance.

It looks to me like he's listing *people*. Last of all he appeared to *me*--Paul, as the last apostle. Naturally the appearance on the Road to Damascus is the "biggie" in his mind, but it isn't at all clear to me that he's making a strong distinction between that and other times when he had visionary interactions with Jesus.

Be that as it may, the facts just are what they are. At the most robust, Paul's experience wasn't the same as the apostles'. There really is no way to get around that. We have the accounts in Acts. They are just different.


I do think the teachings by Paul on the resurrected body has more weight to it. Consider that Paul spent two weeks with Peter and the vocabulary and context in galatians indicates a fact finding visit so although Paul wasn't an eye witness of a physical Jesus he is second hand testimony to eye witnesses. Consider also that immediately after the creed Paul notes to the Corinthians "Whether then it was I or they, so we preach and so you believed." Which indicates that the Corinthians have already heard this from the apostles (perhaps Peter and Apollos). Its the connection with Peter and the interactions the Corinthians have had with Peter that make the case that the view of the resurrected body reflects what the apostles thought.

But look back at the paragraph you quoted. Remember the bottleneck? We're just back there once again! Okay, so, this is insisting again and again on the argument, "This *was* what the apostles taught." And? Suppose we were given at probability 1 (mark that) that the apostles taught the bare proposition, "Jesus was physically raised from the dead" but that we don't have any details of what they said they experienced. You can't get blood from a stone. You can't get us any further with that just by saying over and over again more and more things about Paul, and how he was preaching the same gospel as the apostles, and he spent time wiht them, and so forth. The fact remains that none of that adds *anything* by itself to our understanding of why they thought this, whether they were rational, what they experiened, or what the specific evidential situation was. Were they telling detailed stories? Do we have those or some kind of susbstitute? What were their original stories like? For that, saying over and over again that Paul spent time with them and that this means they thought Jesus was physically raised simply gets you no further forward. People *have* to realize this.

It's been very useful to me that this may be why people are confused about the strength of the minimal facts case.


Although you couldn't use Paul to fully substantiate the empty tomb, isn't it common for sceptics to take it seriously even given a so-so view of the Gospels? Allison is happy to give arguments for its authenticity

But Allison has terrible judgement. His "Fordian" side, which he charmingly discusses in the interview, believes that weird things happen all over the place! He's happy to take seriously the idea that the bodies of Buddhist gurus shrink down to the size of a forearm and that we have photographs of them, looking like little swaddled babies.

Is there *some* indirect evidence for the empty tomb from things like, "The opponents of Christianity would have displayed the body otherwise" and the like? Sure, there is some. But when you throw the Gospel accounts under the bus as much as Licona & co. do, it's not all *that* strong. Maybe, on that basis, the tomb was empty because otherwise the counter-push would have been otherwise. I myself think that's probably the strongest argument in the absence of the Gospel accounts. Much stronger than the vague implication from I Cor. 15. If the body was there, why didn't they display it? Did they in fact develop a narrative that the disciples stole it? That would be kind of an admission if they did. Maybe they did. Bill Craig goes around the barn a few times and finally concludes cautiously that the story of the guard in Matthew 28 is true. But boy, is he cautious in his wording and conclusions. So...That's where this approach leaves you. It's not nothing, but it's not much at all, either.

Thanks for your patience. I see what you mean by bottleneck now. I thought there were a few different connections you could make from Paul to the apostles which avoided it but I agree now there's not much.

Is there *some* indirect evidence for the empty tomb from things like, "The opponents of Christianity would have displayed the body otherwise" and the like? Sure, there is some. But when you throw the Gospel accounts under the bus as much as Licona & co. do, it's not all *that* strong. Maybe, on that basis, the tomb was empty because otherwise the counter-push would have been otherwise. I myself think that's probably the strongest argument in the absence of the Gospel accounts. Much stronger than the vague implication from I Cor. 15. If the body was there, why didn't they display it? Did they in fact develop a narrative that the disciples stole it? That would be kind of an admission if they did. Maybe they did.

That reminds me of something. This shows just how little I know about so-called "current scholarship", but just what are the leading scholarly theories about the empty tomb? That is to say, who credits as being historically acceptable, and why? Do they credit it because of the gospels? And if so, how do they do that WITHOUT crediting the gospels more generally? I mean, it's not like the stories based on the empty tomb are CLEARLY more historically sound than the other stories and details. If a gospel writer can make up stories out of whole cloth (like some scholars insist), what precisely prevents them from doing it about the tomb?

Tony, good question:

In evangelical scholarship and apologetics at least they generally push on what is called the "criterion of embarrassment" to argue for the empty tomb, plus a big fanfare to the effect (which is really not quite true) that Paul "attests" to the empty tomb in I Cor. 15.

At most, Paul implies it very indirectly. In fact, he says nothing explicit about it there and would have heard about it only from the apostles or women, who are also the sources for the tomb discovery accounts in the Gospels! Soooo...It's not really an independent attestation. But they don't get that, because they don't understand independence. They should have asked a formal epistemologist who specializes in witness independence. But she was deemed unqualified. But I digress.

Anyway, about the criterion of embarrassment: This is the idea that the empty tomb stories have women first discovering the empty tomb. Women, being looked down on in the original culture, would (goes the argument) be especially unlikely to be invented as the original witnesses to the empty tomb if those stories were *completely* made up. This is taken to support the empty tomb without, however, generally supporting the reliability of the Gospels.

In general this is related to the criteriological or passage-by-passage approach, which I discuss in the video below (and in Chapter VIII of my forthcoming book on John's Gospel). Basically it reverts to, at best, agnosticism about any fact or passage that doesn't meet at least one, and preferably two or more, of the preset "criteria of authenticity" set out by the originally quite liberal historical Jesus project.

Sorry, here's the video link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrXVbvGGmZQ

This is the idea that the empty tomb stories have women first discovering the empty tomb. Women, being looked down on in the original culture, would (goes the argument) be especially unlikely to be invented as the original witnesses to the empty tomb if those stories were *completely* made up.

First of all, it DEPENDS on the fact that in that culture, women were considered to be unreliable witnesses, and that general observers of the time (even those unbiased about Christian claims) would have hemmed and hawed over this witness testimony because it came from women. THOSE observers would NOT be swayed by the thesis that "this story is more likely to be true because the apostles would not have chosen to make it up as coming from women, knowing the cultural bias against such testimony." Only later observers (i.e. centuries later) would even consider such a thesis. But the account was written in that earlier culture, and (arguably) no such writer could possibly forecast later cultures breaking down the bias. To me this looks distinctly like an anachronistic ploy.

And it's patently silly to formulate the empty tomb as being wholly dependent on the testimony of women. Peter and John went to the tomb to verify the women's story. Arguably, ALL of the apostles eventually saw the empty tomb. And lots of other people, but at a minimum the accounts say that Peter and John did see it. So, it's not just based on the women. It's not like the attribute of "empty" ceases to be equally convincing to the second viewers after the first viewers have reported it is empty.

Anyway, ON ITS OWN, that's a pretty weak sort of argument for reliability. So, without relying on reliability being lent from the larger picture, these people have set themselves a pretty shoddy structure.

But the account was written in that earlier culture, and (arguably) no such writer could possibly forecast later cultures breaking down the bias. To me this looks distinctly like an anachronistic ploy.

I myself do sometimes talk about the criterion of embarrassment, because we're supposed to envisage (hypothetically) a person sitting around and making up a story, and we could say that such a person's mind, in the cultural context, would naturally move toward having men first discover the tomb. The idea being that it would scarcely even occur to him to invent having women do it. So it's one of these things where you say, "This is especially unlikely to be invented."

It has *some* force, but I certainly would not present it to, say, Dale Allison, Bart Ehrman, or Wolfhart Pannenberg, all of whom think the Gospel accounts are heavily embellished and unreliable, as if it could stand on its own, without challenging that underlying idea about embellishment. And *especially* since at that point they are going to oversell it. They're not just going to say, "Dale Allison thinks it's somewhat *interesting* and *curious* that it is women who discover the tomb in the stories, and *maybe* this means something like that really happened with women." No, they are going to say, "Dale Allison grants the empty tomb." "Dale Allison believes in the empty tomb." No matter how often Allison makes it clear that he's maybe treating it as just barely more probable than 50%, they're going to hype it. Like, "We won!!"

I don't think you can do that with the criterion of embarrassment alone, all by its lonesome. It has to be part of a larger cumulative case.

But the question remains: since men (according to the account) also went and checked out the empty tomb, what does it matter whether women first discovered it? If women are unreliable, then rely on the men.

It's not like the women SAW the tomb becoming empty, i.e. saw Christ coming out of it for the first time. Their witnessing it empty is not privileged compared to the men witnessing it empty, they BOTH saw it empty. So, the account is not relying on women alone for the claim that the tomb was seen empty.

Perhaps the embarrassment comes more from the fact that Christ did not appear first to the men, he showed himself first to Mary and to the other women, and only later to Peter and then to the Eleven. But that's not really an "empty tomb" issue as such.

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