I contributed a chapter to a great new book that was just released, a book I dare say is required reading for anyone who wants to be up-to-date on the “Did Jesus rise from the dead?” debate. It pits atheist professor Carl Stecher against Christian professor Craig Blomberg. And in response are two chapters analyzing who won, one by Christian apologist Peter S. Williams, and one by atheist Richard Carrier. Followed by replies to us by Blomberg and Stecher. Here I’ll add further comments on the result.
The Book
I highly recommend getting this book, for anyone interested in the subject, because it represents the latest in methods and arguments from both sides. This is the best they have. As infamous Christian apologist Gary Habermas himself says (and this from the “Distinguished Research Professor & Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Liberty University”):
In this debate on the central Christian doctrine of the resurrection of Jesus, the two chief scholars represented here, Craig Blomberg and Carl Stecher, speak capably and knowledgeably in favor of the major opposing positions. Additional respondents enhance the discussion. The opponents are nonetheless amicable and attempt to understand and make allowances for positions that are not their own, which always contributes to greater understanding. For those who appreciate dialogue as a means of clearing away poorly articulated views, this dialogue is a good place to either begin or for further study. Though I have always favored the resurrection position, the communication must continue for greater clarification and decision-making.
It’s available in print now:
There is also a kindle version. And possibly other digital formats.
I think this is so far the best attempt at defending the resurrection from any Christian you’ll encounter. So if you want to prep yourself for the best, this is the book to consult. Not only to see the best and latest Christian arguments. But to see the atheists’ best and fullest response to them—yet succinctly: each chapter is a very manageable read.
Resurrection: Faith or Fact? starts with an Introduction by Stecher explaining the project, followed by one chapter from each contributor on how we got here—including myself. So you also get a bonus chapter from me, an extension of my autobiography and account of my motivations beyond what you get in Sense and Goodness without God (as that is now almost fifteen years old). But it’s brief (“A Path to Secular Reason,” pp. 40-47). The principal chapter I contributed is of post-debate analysis (“A Skeptic’s Analysis,” pp. 195-219), which can even serve as an analysis of the whole history and field of resurrection apologetics to date, and why it doesn’t rationally succeed. The rest of the book contains two openings, rebuttals, and rejoinders each from Stecher and Blomberg, analysis chapters by Williams and myself, and Stecher and Blomberg’s closing statements in response. Plus a one-page recommended reading list from each of us. The whole thing clocks in at under 300 pages.
My Chapter
Of course still to this day my most definitive refutation of all attempts to claim the evidence proves Jesus rose from the dead remains my chapter on it in The Christian Delusion from 2010 (complete with Bayesian modeling in the endnotes). And my most thorough scholarly analysis of the three most likely competing explanations of the evidence is still the three corresponding chapters I contributed to The Empty Tomb all the way back in 2005 (expanded by an online FAQ).
But this book supplements those by showing how even now Christian apologists don’t really have any valid response to our case against them. Stecher himself advances a number of alternative theories that I don’t think are likely, yet are still more likely than the miraculous interventions of cosmic superhuman entities. And Blomberg and Williams don’t really have any valid reply to that. So what you get to see here, is how they construct and rationalize themselves out of this desperate conundrum.
As I summarize the situation (pp. 195-96):
Carl’s case against Jesus’ resurrection as a fact of history can be summarized succinctly as follows:
- Paul, our only contemporary source and the only contemporary witness to the risen Jesus we have any record from, does not report any facts about the nature or circumstances of the risen Jesus’s appearances, and certainly none that establish he was encountered in any way outside of momentary private visions, dreams, or hopeful confusions.
- The Gospels appear decades later, their authors anonymous, and manifestly fictionalize and invent details and whole episodes; and no one to our knowledge verified or fact-checked anything in them, so we cannot know that any of their content dates to the time of Paul.
When we add the first fact to the second, there is no way to know that Jesus rose from the dead, only that he was believed to have.
In short, “Carl’s argument requires us to distinguish and not confuse two different things: what Paul thought happened when he wrote 1 Corinthians 15:3-8; and the stories the Gospels tell.” Yet the Christian apologists in this book simply went on to continually do exactly that. Thus exposing a key cornerstone of the system of delusion they’ve constructed for themselves. They also, of course, resorted to a number of other fallacies and inaccuracies, particularly in misrepresenting and thus never really responding to many of Stecher’s arguments. Which is Apologetics 101. But to understand it, you have to see it in operation. This book’s perfect for that.
Peter Williams
Williams adds his thoughts in “Evidence, Explanation, and Expectation” (pp. 220-61). His attempts to rescue the resurrection from that failure of evidence is instructive. I won’t be redundant; my own chapter already refutes much of what Williams writes, and Stecher already responds in his own “Final Thoughts” (pp. 265-78). But here is what I’d add now (since my chapter wasn’t written with knowledge of this one):
Williams seems to think N.T. Wright was correct that the empty tomb and sightings of Jesus are as well attested as “the fall of Jerusalem’s Temple” (pp. 220-22). Christians often say false things like this. It’s illustrative of how their supernatural beliefs require believing false things even of the mundane. In fact for the Temple’s destruction we have not only detailed eyewitness testimony (from Josephus, who was there) and a contemporary’s account (from Tacitus, who was in government at the time and served soon after with the very men who prosecuted the war), but also a whole collection of direct and indirect archaeological, numismatic, and epigraphic evidence from the immediate aftermath years. None of which we have even for the sightings of Jesus; far less, an “empty tomb.” We actually have really terrible evidence for the latter; and for the former, no good evidence beyond the possibility of fleeting visions. This is what Christians keep refusing to admit.
Williams then asks how it is that Stecher can claim some things in the Gospels are known to be true (such as, one might suggest, the governance of Pontius Pilate over Judea) but for the rest we lack any way to tell (pp. 223-24). Williams uses this as a wedge to push in illogical or inapplicable methodologies for separating fact from fiction, all of which fail to work in the judgment of literally every peer reviewed study of them to date (which scholarship I cite in my own chapter; but you’ll find a thorough collection of scholarly quotations refuting the applicability of these “criteria” in Chapter 4 of Proving History).
Which is all to ignore the actual answer to the question: for that which we affirm true, we have reliable independent corroboration. For Pilate, for instance, we have eyewitness attestation by Philo of Alexandria, multiple early critical histories (e.g. Tacitus, Josephus), even an autograph inscription by Pilate himself. That’s why we conclude the Gospels have at least that one fact right. Do we have such reasons for the “empty tomb”? No. Not even remotely. Do we have such reasons for the “sightings of Jesus”? No. Only one witness who tells us they were fleeting visions. Which gets us nowhere near “resurrection” as explanation. This is why Christians keep resorting to inapplicable “criteria” to invent evidence out of unverifiable tales: to avoid admitting that actually there is no evidence. Only legends.
Even if we accepted Stecher’s method of plausibility that Williams calls attention to, whereby “it makes sense” that Jesus would be an itinerant apocalyptic preacher because we independently know from abundant evidence that that sort of thing was common then (it’s not even wholly unheard of still today), “therefore” we can assume that’s true (an argument that is formally invalid and not actually a legitimate method in any field of history), that still doesn’t get us a resurrection. Resurrections aren’t “the sort of thing we know from abundant evidence was common then” (or ever). If we were to accept this method, we should conclude the empty tomb story was made up—because, we know from abundant evidence, making stuff up like that was common then (and still is today).
Even if we were to stretch the method beyond such a reasonable conclusion, at best we’d have to conclude the tomb became empty (if such it did) by any of the many natural means that we know, on abundant evidence, graves become empty. And “reanimating corpses” is not one of those means. Likewise “sightings” of the dead. So Christians keep doing this, too: fabricating the claim that magic is “plausible,” as a rationalization to avoid admitting what actually is plausible (pro tip: it isn’t magic)—by avoiding admitting how we know it’s plausible: by being well documented as happening a lot—like stolen and lost corpses, and dreams and hallucinations and intuitions believed real. Conversely, that which is not well documented ever to occur is by definition not plausible. It is a logically necessary fact that when the evidence for either is the same, the ordinary is always more probable than the extraordinary. Christians accept this fact for every religion but their own. So why the special pleading? Because admitting it was true of their own faith would destroy it. And that’s just too scary to countenance.
Williams then goes on for several pages confusing two different logical principles: that absence of evidence is not always evidence of absence; and that an absence of evidence remains a lack of evidence (pp. 224-28). Pointing out that, in certain cases, an absence of evidence does not disprove your speculations does not produce evidence for your speculations. Unevidenced speculations remain unevidenced speculations. Williams confusingly leaps from “we can explain why we have no evidence of our speculations” to “we therefore can affirm our speculations are true.” Which is simply not how evidence works (more on this point in my discussion of Blomberg below). This is indeed one of the most common illogical procedures among Christians. Because indeed, faith must rest on an avoidance of logic.
Williams then confuses “legends about eyewitness testimony” with “actual eyewitness testimony,” repeatedly listing Acts’ claim that Peter saw stuff as “eyewitness testimony” (he even goes on to claim we “have” the eyewitness testimony of all twelve disciples: pp. 228-32). Which is doubly irrational, given that, after the wildly implausible private scene in Acts 1, the stuff Peter (or indeed anyone) is said in Acts to have seen, ironically, is never the finding of an empty tomb, nor even any physical encounter with a risen Jesus. So when it comes to its public (and not private) history of the church (and indeed the very verses Williams cites), Acts does not even contain a claim of the testimony Williams is asserting. So it’s just all the worse that a claim of a testimony published a lifetime later by an unknown author using no stated sources is not “having an eyewitness testimony.” If we had a text written by Peter relaying his discovery of the empty tomb and detailing his subsequent encounters with Jesus, then we’d have an eyewitness testimony. But we don’t. Our only eyewitness source is Paul. Who mentions no empty tomb being found, nor any encounters with Jesus outside “revelation.” Fabricating claims of eyewitness testimony we don’t in fact have is another very common Christian rationalization tactic.
Williams similarly “invents” multiple corroboration for these claims by ignoring the always-crucial condition required of it: you only have multiple corroboration if you have independent corroboration. He thus invents “seven first-century sources” that are actually in fact only one: the Gospel of Mark. Everything else he lists are just embellishments, legendary extrapolations, and expansions thereon, not a single one of which can be shown to have any independent source for any pertinent detail. Except of course for Paul. Who actually counts for zero here, as Paul attests to neither an empty tomb nor physical encounters with Jesus. So that’s zero sources. Plus one continually growing, unsourced legend appearing a lifetime later, none of whose contents can be corroborated as ever having existed before Mark. This “trickery” of inventing “multiple sources” in defiance of the logic plainly stated everywhere this method is formally advocated is another common Christian rationalization tactic.
But I must say Williams is correct (as I also note in my chapter) that Stecher’s doubts about an organized burial for executed convicts are unfounded (pp. 232-34); Judea was under treaty with Rome that mandated such burials in accordance with Mishnah law (thus forbidding disorganized mass graves or leaving the dead unburied in Judea, regardless of what happened outside Judea). But that Jesus would have been buried does not entail the disappearance of the corpse. And there is no evidence that happened, outside Mark’s invention of the tale (which Mark even says no witnesses reported). Because all other versions of that tale are just redactions of Mark’s. Paul conspicuously never mentions such a thing.
Williams seems to want to avoid this fact by accusing Stecher of “ad hominem” for pointing out that fundamentalists are dogmatically forbidden to admit historical doubts about the empty tomb (pp. 235-36). That’s not an ad hominem. Correctly identifying dogmatic bias in a survey of opinions is a valid argument: it establishes a fallacy of Argument from Authority. Williams then goes on to say some scholars who aren’t even Christians affirm the empty tomb, which is not actually relevant to Stecher’s point, which was that most scholars doubt the empty tomb (as Habermas’s own data actually show; hence even Gary Habermas has dropped this from his list of minimal facts). Indeed, outside fundamentalists, nearly all doubt it. Therefore one cannot cite “consensus” in defense of an empty tomb. Nor can one cherry pick a few exceptions and claim that is therefore a consensus. It’s just worse that all these exceptions cite reasons for affirming the empty tomb that are false (e.g. that women’s testimony wasn’t trusted in antiquity: see Ch. 11 of Not the Impossible Faith).
Williams then burns several pages gullibly believing Acts is a reliable source on Paul (pp. 236-38). We already know it’s not (see Ch. 9 of On the Historicity of Jesus). It doesn’t even present a coherent account of Paul’s vision, but three contradictory ones, none of them from any identifiable source (least of all anything actually said or written by Paul). And we know Acts routinely embellishes and rewrites historical facts, particularly of the supernatural. For instance, its account of glossolalia renders the truth, as we know it from Paul, far more spectacular than reality (cf. OHJ, pp. 124-25); we can expect it did the same of his visions. We therefore cannot get to any real history from fabulous details added in Acts.
Williams wants to defend the expectations that Jesus would rise from the dead, arguing Jesus likely told his followers to expect it and even hostile Jews would be concerned about a claim of it (pp. 239-40), evidently not realizing this increases the probability of hallucinating or dreaming a confirmation of it…or even indeed of stealing a body to inspire it; after all, Jesus repeatedly telling them the plan, sounds an awful lot like a plan; which is why William Lane Craig likes to deny Jesus predicted his resurrection (see my discussion of the plausibility of theft in Ch. 9 of The Empty Tomb). This does not help his case. But his argument suffers from a number of unjustifiable assumptions anyway, such as that Matthew’s addition to Mark of a wild tale of monster-paralyzed guards has anything to do with reality. In the original version, there is no knowledge or expectation Jesus’s followers would claim he rose from the dead; nor any plausibility to tales of Jesus telling them he would—which portray his Jewish followers as not even knowing what a resurrection was, nor ever understanding or believing him, which is odd behavior for fanatical cultists.
Williams likewise wants to defend Jesus against the charge of being a false prophet by insisting Jesus never said he would return within the lifetime of those then living (pp. 240-41), completely ignoring direct and explicit evidence to the contrary: that “this generation will not pass away until all these things have happened” includes “the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven” with “his angels,” who “will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of the heavens to the other” (Matthew 24:30-34). There is no “separation” of this event from any others Jesus lists. And this is exceedingly clear in other passages in the Gospels. Williams is just deluding himself here. As Christians have been doing for thousands of years. It’s the same stunt pulled by every cult that has ever predicted the end of the world: when it doesn’t come, they creatively “reinterpret” the prediction, ignoring how illogical and contrary to the prediction’s original wording and context their new reading is.
Williams then gets wrong how historical reasoning works (pp. 242-43). He thinks a resurrection is a “simple” explanation, when in fact it requires some of the most complex moving parts imaginable—not just the existence of gods and magic, but a weirdly specific God with a very weirdly specific motivation, and a whole strange architecture of atonement magic. That’s far from “simple.” Thefts, lies, visions are all far simpler and vastly more commonplace. And that’s even before we get to the enormous complexities that have to be added to the hypothesis to explain why none of the evidence it would normally produce was ever generated (see my chapter’s conclusion in the same volume). Otherwise the supernatural hypothesis is highly disconfirmed by this missing evidence. Indeed it also thereby fails to have adequate explanatory scope and power—because the actual outcome is far more likely on mundane explanations, and far more observations can be explained by them (see my demonstration of this in Ch. 2 of The End of Christianity). It just adds to that that gods and magic are also not plausible explanations in our world the way thefts, lies, and visions are. Indeed they are massively ad hoc. Williams is thus completely wrong on every single point here.
Williams then goes completely off the rails of logic at this point when he tries to claim that Jesus’s honesty entails his resurrection (pp. 242-43). Even apart from the fact that we have no evidence of his honesty (unsourced legends of it a lifetime later would not be believed on this point for any other person in history), a man’s honest belief he will rise from the dead does not increase the probability he will actually do so, not even one jot. This is simply not a logically valid way to argue. But it is a typical way Christians argue themselves into their false beliefs. Similarly when Williams insists that Jesus fulfilling prophecy counts as evidence: we have no evidence Jesus really fulfilled any prophecy—again, unsourced legends that he did, written a lifetime later, would not be believed on this point for any other person in history. Thus Christians always abandon logic when it’s their own religion and not someone else’s (hence as John Loftus demonstrates, Christians never pass The Outsider Test for Faith).
Williams then tries to respond to Stecher’s alternative hypotheses (pp. 243-54). But at no point does he correctly describe any of Stecher’s alternatives. This failure I already adequately address in my own analysis chapter; because Blomberg did the same thing. Williams also doesn’t realize that the background knowledge we already have of the world makes all the assumptions Stecher relies on inherently probable, in precisely the way magic and gods are not—even in general, much less the extremely bizarre magic and gods Christian theism requires. I won’t even bother elaborating further how Williams also relies on Biblical Literalism and Inerrancy here as well, trusting all the Gospel narratives as 100% true and as omitting nothing pertinent. That’s not at all how Williams would treat any other religion’s legends, demonstrating Stecher’s very point about dogmatic bias invalidating Williams’ reasoning.
Williams also exhibits some innumeracy here; for example listing the low percentages of bereavement hallucinations being visual and auditory as evidence against that happening, yet that cannot be an argument against bereavement hallucinations being visual and auditory, precisely because his own data show there are nonzero percentages of them. Does he have data showing nonzero percentages of miraculous corpse reanimations? Or indeed of any miraculous power whatever? Quite simply, no. Math does not go well for Williams here. But innumeracy, I find, is another common failing in Christians. And this holds even despite the fact that I personally doubt the visions Christians had were of the bereavement kind; that is simply a possibility that has a larger base rate expectancy than miracles do. It therefore has to be ruled out; and we don’t have access to what we’d need to do that. Wild unsourced legends a lifetime after the fact just don’t cut it.
Williams then closes by trying to defend his massive architecture of ad hoc assumptions (pp. 254-61), in the usual way of all Christian apologetics: by leaving out all the evidence that would reverse his conclusions (e.g. see Bayesian Counter-Apologetics). He similarly doesn’t numerically understand the reason the Argument from Evil works against him here: all the excuses he has to invent to explain away the internal contradiction between what the Christian God (and indeed the cosmic Jesus himself) is supposed to believe and want and value, and what we instead observe happening in the world, vastly reduce the plausibility of his resurrection hypothesis, rendering it extraordinarily ad hoc.
Williams then makes an appeal for our salvation (pp. 259-61). Thus revealing the real reason he believes all this stuff. It’s not evidence and reason. It’s hope and desire. Everything else is just rationalization.
Craig Blomberg
Of course my chapter in Resurrection already responds to nearly everything importantly said by Blomberg in this book. Except for his last chapter (pp. 279-89), which was written to respond to mine by way of closing (he notably spares hardly a word in response to Stecher here; nearly every page is about me). Here I’ll add my reactions to that.
First, I won’t respond to claims Blomberg gives no evidence of (such as when he claims I misrepresent him, but gives no evidence I did; readers can judge that for themselves).
Second, I won’t dwell on many of his complaints that are extraordinarily trivial—for instance, why he wastes word count insisting I am wrong to say Mormons believe Jesus flew to America, only that he “visited America” (p. 280), is beyond me (it makes no difference to any point any of us made); and it’s additionally weird, given that I’m not wrong: Mormons do not believe Jesus walked or sailed to America. He flew (Acts 1:9-10, as referenced in 3 Nephi 11:21; hence Jesus lands in America from the sky, in 3 Nephi 11:8…we call that flying). This is typical of Christian apologists: getting basic facts wrong; and then arrogantly claiming those who got them right are wrong. Similarly, Blomberg’s claim that the evidence is better for Jesus appearing than Moroni mistakes what counts as “better” (pp. 280-81). For instance, he portrays late unsourced legends extant only in distant copies, as equal to original hand-signed eyewitness accounts. He also again gets basic facts wrong, claiming only Joseph Smith saw Moroni; in fact three other witnesses signed statements swearing they had, too. And so on.
Blomberg also misunderstands our arguments. He mistakes Stecher’s statement that he is not presuming naturalism, as saying Stecher regards supernatural explanations to be as plausible as natural ones (pp. 280-81). No. Stecher says we can regard supernatural explanations as extremely improbable even if the supernatural exists. Exactly what I also explain in my chapter. Thus Blomberg gets wrong what we both argue, claims in result that I misrepresented or added to Stecher (when in fact I said exactly the same thing Stecher did: see Stecher’s own words, pp. 172-75), and then bemoans how unfair that is. This is weird behavior. But another typical of Christian apologetics. These any reader can catch for themselves. I hardly need reply to every instance of Blomberg doing such a thing.
Nor will I bother much with straw men. For example, Blomberg mistakenly “assumes” I am just repeating Hume in my argument about the relative base rates for the mundane and the miraculous, and proceeds to rebut Hume (pp. 281-82); which has no relevance to what I said, which differs importantly from Hume. Thus Blomberg avoids having to address what I actually said, by instead pretending I said what Hume did. Any reader can catch this out by simply not trusting Blomberg: don’t fall for his rebuttal of Hume as a rebuttal of me; read what I actually wrote instead, and look for whether Blomberg says anything actually applicable to that. Please do the same in every other instance where he tries straw manning what I wrote.
Once we sweep past all that, we get finally to a relevant attempt to answer something I said: Blomberg tries to argue that “just because” the evidence indicates the original Gospel of Mark contained no appearance narratives, we should not therefore “assume” there were none known to Mark (pp. 282-83). But this has the logic of evidence exactly backwards. One can speculate all one wants, but we still don’t have any evidence Mark knew of any appearance narratives. Much less of what was in them. “Maybe he did” is not evidence he did. It’s not in fact evidence of anything. Which is precisely the problem I pointed out: Blomberg cannot show any of the Gospel narratives predate Mark. “But they might have” is not a rebuttal to that inescapable point. Yet Blomberg does this over and over again for several pages (pp. 283-85). Christians often do this: they try to shoehorn speculations into the status of evidence, and then, trick accomplished, claim we were wrong to say there is no evidence. That might convince someone keen on deluding themselves; it won’t convince anyone genuinely committed to being logical.
The lack of evidence is a lack of evidence. Anyone who tries to escape that conclusion is servicing a delusion. And what we lack is any evidence any of the narratives in the Gospels existed prior to them. Paul only mentions visions. He mentions no details of them. Nor any missing body. And that’s all we get to hear about for decades and decades. There is simply no way to insist that later legendary stories were “known” to Paul, or anyone in his day. We have no evidence that’s the case. Even if it was the case. Because we can only operate today from the evidence available today; not evidence we wish were available today.
Already the conclusion follows—we cannot know what we do not know. It’s only the worse that it is peculiar none of those remarkable things were ever heard of before—as amazing and relevant as an empty tomb and reanimated corpse would be to Paul’s entire argument of 1 Corinthians 15, somehow he appears never to have heard of them (see The Empty Tomb, pp. 122-42). As extraordinary as it would have been that a reanimate Jesus hung out and dined with 120 followers for 40 days (Acts 1:1-4), Paul says there was only one occasion on which “hundreds” saw Jesus, not an extended period of such appearances (and of all other appearances, none apparently occurred “all at once” to any group). And none appear to have been different from his own vision, which he says was an inner revelation, not meeting a reanimated corpse (and no, Paul never says anything about his vision being “post-ascension” or in any way different from anyone else’s). And so on. (Just read my chapter Blomberg is responding to.) So the evidence is worse than missing here. The Gospel narratives appear to be contradicted by earlier eyewitness accounts; not endorsed by them.
Blomberg then goes on to the Dying-and-Rising God mytheme, which clearly makes him uncomfortable, as it does most Christians (pp. 285-86). Oddly, I called him out for making factually incorrect claims about these gods, and Blomberg replies by claiming that’s impossible because he “gave no account” of them; in fact he did (see for yourself: p. 130; among the falsehoods there: that Isis killed Osiris (!), that Mithras was fathered by Isis and Osiris (!), and that in myth Osiris “never left the underworld” after his resurrection). He then goes on to make even more false claims about them here, despite my having directed him to the very survey of evidence he strangely asks me to have provided (his claim I didn’t, on page 285, is directly contradicted by my having done so, on page 215, note 21; I couldn’t list the material for limited word count, but he is here directed to it).
His new false claims include: that in myth Inanna was not “bodily resurrected” (she very clearly in fact was: OHJ, p. 47), that no ordinary humans rose from the dead in any extant myth (in fact we have several examples), that Romulus didn’t have a resurrection body when he ascended to heaven (contrary to the standard theological physics of the era), that restoring Bacchus to life again by physically reassembling his mutilated corpse is not a “bodily resurrection” (!), and that Zalmoxis worshipers taught Zalmoxis didn’t really die and rise. The latter is particularly hypocritical: Blomberg dishonestly resorts to the Christian apologetic tactic of representing an anti-Zalmoxian polemic as actual Zalmoxian beliefs (a trick played by apologists before him: Not the Impossible Faith, pp. 100-05). If that were fair play, then I’d get to claim Jesus “didn’t really die and rise, either,” because anti-Christian polemics portray his death and resurrection as faked. That’s not exactly honest.
Blomberg also leans on the fallacy of arbitrarily deciding which parallels count when they actually don’t. For example, that the dying be “human” rather than a god. That distinction is as irrelevant to the mytheme as what color hair the dying has. The resurrection mytheme requires only that the subject be killable, that they actually die, and that they actually return to a new embodied life. That’s what dying and rising means. All other distinctions are trivia, the mark of the creativity or religious adaptation of each mythographer. This argument is also disingenuous. Jesus is uniformly recognized as divine, a supernaturally empowered “Son of God” in the Gospel myths (so Blomberg’s claim that he is distinctively “human” in his myth is again not quite honest); and many dying-and-rising gods were as human as Jesus was, being, just like him, born of mortal women by divine agency. Blomberg is thus coming dangerously close to lying here. That is very typical of Christian apologetics: to not honestly represent uncomfortable evidence.
And that’s it. Blomberg closes with some moot thoughts about differing presuppositions that don’t even purport to resolve anything (pp. 287-88), and finishes with that most embarrassing of all Christian arguments: that the reason the evidence for the resurrection is so surprisingly poor, is that God deliberately hid all the good evidence so as not to violate our free will (p. 289). Which is an argument that doesn’t make sense even if free will actually worked that way (and it doesn’t), because evidence does not violate free will, as if my convincing you of something with exceptionally good evidence were a crime against your consent (it’s not and never can be); but worse, freely choosing to follow someone is not the same thing as knowing they exist and their offer is legit. Blomberg’s argument confuses these. It is morally irresponsible to follow anyone on insufficient evidence they’re legit. Exactly the opposite of Blomberg’s assumed premise. And Blomberg would admit this for literally every other cult and ideology on earth. Yet somehow, common sense flees him the moment it’s his cult and ideology we are talking about. Which makes this a big fallacy of Special Pleading. Which is precisely how delusion works. It constructs an artifice that superficially lets you forget a problem…as long as you don’t think about it too much.
Conclusion
The attempts in this book to rescue Christian belief in the resurrection from its obvious disconfirmation and implausibility are pretty much the best you are going to find. That they are still so illogical and inaccurate is thus what tells you their belief is false. I highly recommend you buy and read the whole thing. And if you are still uncertain of the merits of the Christian case, you can revisit my points here. But if some argument or claim in that book is made (by either side) that you don’t see me having addressed in my chapter there or in my analysis here, please post it in comments below, and I’ll give you my assessment. I would find that quite valuable. Otherwise, for the most comprehensive treatment, Pearce’s New Take-Down of Resurrection Apologetics Is a Must-Have.
Another great article Richard.
Why should the Gospels be believed any more than the Book of Mormon. In fact the Book of Mormon actually has a better claim to being the true revelation of god (small g) as Smith saw the vision, dug up the plates and wrote the book all within 7 years.
The gospels were written decades later (perhaps many many decades later) by people who did not know JC. Didn’t know his disciples (Despite claims to the contrary with the tosh about Peter and Mark and those church fathers who were supposed to be besties with St John -according to dubious later sources.)
And with the best will in the world the letters of Paul are more than likely an edited together collection of letters of unknown source – claimed to be by one author – that appear suddenly a long time after they were supposedly written.
If its a straight choice between which is more accurate the Gospels or the Book of Mormon I think the Book of Mormon has to win every time (the Musical not the scripture… dum, dum, dum)
Excellent bonus chapter! Thanks Dr Carrier.
The only thing that I would love to see you address in some detail is the claim made by Williams (and by others, most recently in the scholarly Christian literature by Dr Brant Pitre) that there are no copies of the Gospels we have that lack the attribution of authorship titles we find in the NT; and that the choosing of Mark and Luke (who were not claimed eyewitnesses or apostles) as authors of Gospels would be unlikely to be invented if not true; and that using the Destruction of the Temple prophecies as a reason to date them after AD70 is begging the question against the supernatural, and that there are not other solid reasons for a claim of dating the Gospels so late and for denying the ancient traditions of Authorship. Thanks in advance for any light you can shed on this. Steve Glover
Indeed, I have addressed that stuff in various places.
There is of course no such thing as “begging the question against the supernatural” because we have abundant evidence claims of the supernatural are evidence a story is false, so it isn’t begging any question to say usually such stories are false (see Proving History, index, “miracles”), i.e. usually prophecies are retrofits and not genuine; and even Christian apologists, when honest, will admit this—as they will of literally every other religion or sect they are sure is false (see my discussion of Newman on Prophecy).
On the naming of the Gospels see my discussion in Three Things to Know.
On dating the Gospels we have much more than what you list, including evidence Mark used the Wars of Josephus (or knew sources Josephus used on the War) and that Luke used the Antiquities. Mark’s knowledge of the war also extends beyond the retrofitted prophecy of Mark 13, to include the fig tree allegory, demonic pig slaughter, and beyond. I cover these details in Ch. 10.4 of On the Historicity of Jesus.
But more important than all of that is that these Christians are starting with a fallacy in the first place: assuming that anything possible is therefore probable; rather than admitting ignorance when ignorant. If we do not know the Gospels were written before 70-120, we do not know the Gospels were written before 70-120. No amount of “but they could have been” gets you any other result. All historians admit this about all other sources…it’s only Christian apologists who deviate from standard, non-fallacious historical reasoning about the dating of texts (see Ignatian Vexation for example).
Thanks so much again Dr Carrier. Definitely helped to clarify things a bit.
My one remaining question though is how were the names chosen for the Gospels? Why would they attribute two of them to authors or sources who were not claimed eyewitnesses or apostles (in fact had never even met Jesus) such as Mark or Luke? And do we not know Luke was a real person, a companion of Paul, mentioned in his epistles? And that a John Mark was a companion of Peter mentioned in his epistle? Why not simply attribute Mark to Peter if we are trying to lend credibility and stature to a Gospel, as I would think the person or group organizing the “canon” would want to do?
Thanks again, Steve Glover
We don’t know why any Gospels received any names. Much less particular ones. But the legends around them are inconsistent legends not connected to any specific texts (or even our texts, e.g. Papias knows a “Matthew” Gospel written in Hebrew, which cannot be our Gospel, which was copied from Mark’s Greek and uses Greek scriptures as a base text and thus can’t ever have had a Hebrew origin) and some details evolved later rather than at assigning of the name and so can’t help us in explaining the assignment.
The most we can guess is that it appears names were chosen from the letters of Paul (Trobisch proposes a logic of it in his book on the first edition of the NT) when they were assembled together as a four-Gospel canon to combat Marcion’s.
There actually were Gospels assigned to purported eyewitnesses (e.g. the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of Thomas). They just weren’t chosen for this canon. The first canon doesn’t survive, and it included only one Gospel, a different version of Luke-Acts. Which purports not to be written by a witness but by some later historian (possibly then named by Marcion; or indeed possibly not, and it only later assumed he was using the same Gospel), and hence could not be assigned to a witness, and any name would have suited, particularly one you could claim associated with Paul; the legend that Luke was a doctor comes from someone picking the most educated companion Paul ever mentions and perhaps assuming they would be a likely skilled writer, but Luke is only in Colossians identified as a physician, and as that letter is a forgery, that that Luke was a doctor is a fiction, so we know their authorship of Luke-Acts is a fiction as well.
Meanwhile, the other Gospels were also circulating unnamed and none identified themselves as written by a witness nor were written as such. Those legends were invented later owing to convenience and confusion. But when names were assigned, authenticity would be undermined by associating them “suddenly” with witnesses, as surely such would have been mentioned and known before then, and surely the texts themselves would say this, not just the titles (whereas Luke and John both explicitly say they were not written by witnesses, so none could be assigned to those texts). That is why the authenticity of the Gospels in the current canon required picking obscure names and inventing legends about them.
The only exception is Matthew, a name legend then spun referred to a witness. But we know that’s false, as Matthew is a rewrite of Mark and thus cannot be a personal memoir (and again, it does not say it is one, either, yet would be expected to). Possibly it was picked because a Mark and a Matthew are mentioned by Papias as authors of Gospels, yet neither of which we can confirm are our Gospels of those names. That may simply have inspired someone to so-name two Gospels and thus attach them to the legends spun by Papias.
In any event, none of the Gospels say they were or were previously known to be written by witnesses, so witnesses could not have been assigned to them credibly (and the one attempt to do so, Matthew, is demonstrably not a credible assignment). And two could never have been so assigned (Luke and John) as they both explicitly say they were not themselves the witnesses (John mentions a lost written text from a purported witness as a source, but IMO, that was originally meant to be Lazarus, a fictional character, and thus likely a fictional source; see OHJ, index, “Lazarus”).
I found the last comment about the naming very valuable but didn’t understand the argument regarding John.
You mentioned that Matthew is the only exception where they picked the name of an eyewitness but isn’t this also the case for John?
To be clear, I didn’t mean they picked Matthew as a witness; I mean later legends arose that Matthew was a witness (“a name legend then spun referred to a witness”).
The Gospel never says the character named Matthew wrote it. The name was assigned later, and we don’t actually know whether that was the reason. The legend arose even later than that—unless it did arise at the same time, as part of the naming propaganda for the fourfold Gospel edition, but that is speculative. Matthew is the only Gospel whose later-assigned name is that of a character in the same book. This is not the case for Mark, Luke, or John. But we are only speculating as to whether that was why that name was chosen for it—since that wasn’t the procedure used to name Mark, Luke, or John, and these names are believed to have all been assigned at the same time by the same person, whoever assembled the anti-Marcionite edition of the fourfold Gospels. See Three Things to Know about New Testament Manuscripts.
What distinguishes John is that our final redaction of that (scholars agree that is the third redaction; we do not have the original edition, or the middle-edition preceding ours) does actually claim to have had a written eyewitness source (but it does not name them; at all, least of all “John,” and the original edition appears to have meant this to be not a John, but in fact the resurrected Lazarus, who is a fictional character: see Ch. 10.7 in OHJ). GJohn does not say how much came from this supposed written source; and that written source is probably fictional anyway (and even if real, was itself fiction; possibly even the original edition of GJohn).
Luke also says he used written sources, but in that case, we know them: Mark and Matthew. Luke does not name them, but since a huge amount of Luke is verbatim from Mark and Matthew, it’s obvious who was meant (they aren’t named in Luke, and Luke never names or identifies himself, because those names were all added to them after Luke wrote). Some have speculated a third source for Luke (some Kings-based Gospel, sometimes called Proto-Luke) but it’s just as likely that material is simply invented by “Luke.” And of course there is a speculated Q source but the evidence really does not support that (see Why Do We Still Believe in Q? and The Backwards and Unempirical Logic of Q Apologetics).
P.S. Thank you for all the typo correction comments in other threads. I don’t keep them. But I do act on them. I love getting to correct typos!
In this paragraph*:
I have a vague feeling that I can’t precisely articulate that your argument in the first part of the paragraph contradicts the last part of the paragraph, that is Jesus explicitly telling them acts a plan but that they also didn’t understand him. Could you please help me resolve this? I am sure it’s a misunderstanding on my side but I couldn’t reconcile it on my own.
I also didn’t understand the sentence about Matthew’s addition to Mark’s story and how does it affect Williams argument here. Could you please elaborate more on that?
I know I have failed to quote block in all my comments so far and you have always generously edited my comments for that. I would be thankful if you instruct me on how do it myself if my attempt here fails.
The paragraph is describing an inconsistency in Christian apologetics. As often happens, Christians who maintain one thing, create a problem; so to avoid that problem, they switch to the opposite tack, but then that creates a new problem. They are thus trapped in the horns of their own dilemma.
Here, apologists either have to deny Jesus predicted his resurrection on the third day (despite the Gospels repeatedly having him do so), in order to eliminate the consequences of that theory (that this establishes grounds to fake or expectantly mistake his resurrection); or else, if they accept that Jesus did predict this (in order to keep the Gospels free of lying), they have to then insist that, somehow (?), no one understood him to be predicting that (until after the fact, when they are all like, “Ooooohhh! THAT’s what he meant. Crazy I missed that the first time.”). Both options are implausible.
In reality, the Gospels almost certainly made this up. Precisely because it’s implausible that Jesus would say this repeatedly and literally no one understand him. Especially since, if this is real, then the disciples had access to literally hundreds of hours of conversations with Jesus where they’d surely ask him to clarify and he’d certainly endeavor to be clear, as there is no real need to say something and then intend it not to be understood—that only happens as a device in fiction, not in the real world.
Evidence for this is how Matthew changed Mark’s story from the Messianic Secret (where, implausibly, no one ever understands Jesus, not even his right-hand men) to the Messianic Advertisement (where even the Jewish elite fully understand him to have predicted his resurrection on the third day). Matthew accomplishes this not just by saying this, but by having the elite then even assign a guard to the tomb specifically to prevent the prediction being faked. (Which means even ancient readers could figure out the causal sequence, prediction –> fake it / mistake it.)
So we have three options here.
(1) Mine, which is that this is all obviously fake (fiction after the fact), and the real inspiration for visions of a risen Jesus were crank interpretations of scripture (as I explain now in OHJ). In that case, Williams is completely outside reality.
(2) Williams’, which is that everything Matthew says happened (even though Mark, Matthew’s own source, had never heard of it and portrays exactly the opposite), in order to preserve the Gospels from being unreliable (making things up) and Jesus from being a false prophet (predicting something that didn’t actually happen). In that case, Williams’ own theory comes with a self-destructive liability: his own theory has now created a cause for the resurrection to have been faked or mistaken (thus increasing rather than decreasing the probability it didn’t really happen, the contrary of Williams’ goal).
(3) What happens to be William Lane Craig’s position (sometimes; Craig changes position on this by context as rhetorically needed, because he’s a practiced liar), which is that the Gospels retrodict predictions onto Jesus that never happened. Craig says this explicitly to eliminate the argument against Williams (that Jesus predicting it increases the likelihood of it being faked or mistaken), and thus make the opposite argument (that the disciples were not expecting it, therefore it can’t be explained other than as having actually happened, to their surprise).
What I am doing is pointing out that (2) suffers the very problem noticed by (3) (which has been pointed out by Williams’ own people). I myself don’t believe (2) or (3). I’m just noting they both are self-defeating, because they entail things that undermine the Christian wielding them (by either creating a cause for fakery/mistake, per (2), or admitting the Gospels make stuff up, per (3)).
Thank you!
My goodness, being not well-versed in the Christian tradition (including the NT) and apologetics made this paragraph indecipherable to me until you explained it in detail here.
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Noted. Thanks a lot.