This book is the definitive starting point for anyone intent on questioning or defending the resurrection of Jesus. Introductory and aimed at a broad audience, but thoroughly researched, all the key works are here cited and arguments addressed, and with sound reasoning. If this book cannot be answered, belief in the resurrection [of Jesus] cannot be defended.

— Richard Carrier, Ph.D.

That’s the promotional blurb I contributed for Jonathan M.S. Pearce’s new book The Resurrection: A Critical Examination of the Easter Story. And I don’t offer such things to authors unless I’m serious about what I say. Of course I am cited and quoted a lot in it, but that’s to be expected of any cutting edge work now as I’ve cultivated a long history of publication and expertise on the subject of resurrection apologetics (including my contributions on the subject to The Christian Delusion, The End of Christianity, Resurrection: Faith or Fact, and, famously, The Empty Tomb, with its accompanying online FAQ). But Pearce marshals a great deal more than that here, and it can be fairly said he cites or relies on pretty much everything on the subject worth citing or relying on, synthesizing a thorough survey of the field. As well, he addresses all the leading works in resurrection apologetics to date (his bibliography extends to fifteen pages). And he covers all the key arguments in detail. And you can dive further into anything he covers by following up through his sources cited. This is a valuable reference work and handy guide to arguments whenever dealing with resurrection apologetics today.

Pearce tends to do good and thorough work (his book on the Kalam Cosmological Argument, for example, is among the best and most complete you’ll ever find). And this is no exception. I might not always agree with his take on any given question, but he usually covers all the best options regardless and cites the key sources you’d need to check to decide for yourself. This work would also have benefited from an index, but the book is short and the table of contents sufficiently detailed to make up the loss. Indeed I have no particular criticism to explore beyond those generalizations, and instead will take stock here of how Pearce’s book illuminates the current state of resurrection apologetics as a whole.

Why Do Christians Even Care?

Paul put it plainly: “If Christ has not been raised” from the dead, then “your faith is futile: you are still in your sins; and those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost” (1 Corinthians 15:17-18). Therefore the entire Christian religion falls, if it is not reasonable to believe Jesus really rose from the grave. Resurrection apologetics is therefore crucial to keeping the Christian religion from collapsing into one more dead myth no one believes in anymore. They have to defend this; otherwise they may as well pack it in and join some other religion, or none (most youth today are choosing none). This is doubly crucial for conservative sects, which depend on the toxic abuse narrative that everyone is vile and can only be saved by total submission to Christian authority, which is Paul’s second reason Jesus has to have been resurrected: because his death is supposed to have magically saved us from our sins (by “atoning” for them, in advance, on our behalf), but if he wasn’t vindicated by God (by being “saved” from death; your accumulated sins understood then as being the thing that traps you in the grave), then he didn’t atone for anything either. So the core tenet of Christianity is cast down. Done and dusted.

Even the most liberal sects of Christianity, which downplay the literal details of the resurrection as likely mythical and merely symbolical (1 Corinthians 15:12-22), depend on at least the idea that Jesus got saved from death, enjoying an eternally healthy life in some other dimension, just like we will (if we follow him). Which was Paul’s point: Christianity is of no particular interest, if it does not offer any rescue from death; and if even Jesus wasn’t rescued from death, no one else is likely to be. Attempts to retool Christianity as an ethical culture sans delusional beliefs in immortality (modeling cultural Judaism) always result in further decline, as generation by generation, fewer and fewer people see any need for it. There are plenty of ethical cultures better thought out. Hence even the most liberal of churches are losing ground, just more slowly (Episcopalianism, declining; United Church of Christ, declining; historically black churches, declining; Unitarian Universalists, declining—in fact, there’s the same dismal number of them now as there were in 1961: a mere 150,000 or so, out of a U.S. population well over 300 million; overall, so-called Progressive Christianity has been just a way-station on the way to unbelief as overall support for Christianity in the first world declines, and not a growing movement replacing anything).

People who know little about Christianity are often perplexed by the intensity or even need for resurrection apologetics. They often have the idea that Christianity teaches that if you live a good life, according to a certain code, you will get to be immortal, living forever in heaven (and avoid either staying dead or, worse, suffering some sort of eternal misery in hell). That isn’t what traditional Christianity teaches at all. All sects may say “faith without works is dead,” but most say it is faith that is the necessary condition—quite simply, non-Christians don’t get saved. Because you need a particular magical spell cast on you: you must accept into your soul the atoning blood of Jesus; otherwise, your sins weigh you down, anchoring you in the grave, or even sinking you to hell. But even the few sects of Christianity that do teach mere works can bring eternal bliss (that non-Christians can be saved by good deeds, and even Christians therefore don’t need much faith to be saved), still have to defend that belief. How do they know living by any particular code will make you immortal? They can’t point to anyone who was made immortal that way (or any way at all); so they have to point to at least one person who was, which would be Jesus. So if there is no good evidence of Jesus becoming immortal, there is no good evidence anyone will be, whether following Jesus’s moral advice or not.

Either way, Christianity lives or dies on a single proposition: that it is reasonable to believe Jesus survived his death and is living in immortal bliss on some other plane of existence. Because if he isn’t, Christianity is false; indeed, it’s just one more obsolete, poorly-constructed, and even more poorly motivated cult, just one more random mix of good and bad ideas like every other creed in history, wholly contrived by ancient, ignorant, and dishonest men.

Isn’t This Just More Flat Earthism?

Yes. Basically. Flat Earthers ignore all reason and evidence, and invent myths and stories to explain it all away, in order to maintain their faith that the Earth is flat—because that false belief grounds a whole science-and-government fearing worldview that brings them what they desperately need: a source of “social belonging, the need for meaning and control, and feelings of safety in an uncertain world” (“Flat Earth: What Fuels the Internet’s Strangest Conspiracy Theory?” by Stephanie Pappas at Live Science). Just like QAnon believers need to believe the Democratic party is an international pedophile ring (and not, for some reason, the Catholic Church, which actually was an international pedophile ring), because only that justifies an elaborate worldview that comforts their fears, which worldview requires total resistance to any Progressive message for advancing human society; so they have to defend all manner of crazy bullshit, to protect their precious fear-salve. So, too, Flat Earthers, Anti-Vaxxers, Moon Landing Mythers, Young Earth Creationists, even Holocaust Deniers. They all need to engage a massive engine of desperate and haughty-sounding apologetics proving their bizarre worldviews are “true.”

Resurrection apologetics is in no way any different from these. Belief in the Resurrection stands on no more evidence, and against just as much evidence, as all these other crank ideas. The only difference is that due to thousands of years of vicious oppression and global imperialism, there are more Christians than these other loonies. Which Christians use as an excuse to claim they are therefore not loonies just like “all of those other guys.” But numbers are not a product of verifiability, but cultural and political history. Just look at the comparable success of Mormonism and Islam. “We all have whackadoo beliefs; therefore our beliefs are not whackadoo” is a non sequitur. Full stop. And yes, the Christian worldview is whackadoo: see John Loftus drive home this point in “Christianity Is Wildly Improbable” (The End of Christianity, Chapter 3).

But I must caution: this is not the same thing as saying Christians are insane. Because the term “insanity” generally does not mean what most people think (see Problems with the Mental Illness Model of Religion). Christians are delusional, in varying degrees; but whether their delusion is debilitating enough to amount to an illness is only assessable on a case-by-case basis. Every human being labors under delusions; so merely doing so does not suffice to account someone insane. But delusion it still is. As I’ve explained before (in What’s the Harm? Why Religious Belief Is Always Bad), Christians who are highly liberal minded (for example, any adherent of Progressive Christian neo-theology, whereby nothing is certain and every good person is saved, or death isn’t even something to avoid) are only mildly delusional at best. Conservative Christians, by contrast, tend to be extremely delusional—albeit usually still functional and thus not “mentally ill.”

The point of comparing resurrection apologetics to Flat Earth apologetics, Creationist apologetics, QAnon apologetics, or any Denialist apologetics for that matter (Moon Landing, Holocaust, Global Warming) is that they are identical. They employ the same tactics and rhetoric, are motivated and maintained by the same psychology, depend on similarly constructed systems of mythology, and are contrary to reality in all the same ways. And Pearce recognizes this: throughout his book he identifies and shows the relevance of several general psychological phenomena responsible for resurrection belief; as with Creationism or Flat Earthism or QAnon or Denialism, all a believer’s appeals to evidence and argument are just rationalizations to maintain a belief they need, rather than identify which beliefs are true. Getting at their motives is thus essential to any effort to get them to realize they’ve been deluded and to escape the hall of mirrors they’ve trapped themselves in. It is more important to know why a Christian needs to believe something than on what evidence he or she convinces themselves of it.

But the latter you still need a good handle on, because you can use it as a lever to get a Christian to see the hall of mirrors they are in for what it is (as countless ex-Christians can attest). By appealing to their commitment to truth, honesty, rationality (in those cases where they even actually share these values—those who don’t, we won’t change any mind of, and thus need instead to discredit and isolate, to impair their ability to spread their delusion further), you can with effort get a Christian to recognize that their arguments are fallacious and their evidence irrelevant or even non-existent, and that they have been lied to and deceived by a professional apologetics industry that has tricked them into thinking a litany of mere assertions are actual facts in evidence. Such as, for example, that the Gospel narratives of the resurrected Jesus were written by, or ever even known to, any eyewitness of the time: there is literally no evidence for that assertion, and even a lot of evidence against it; yet there are Christians still going around asserting it as a fact, upon which they can verify and rest their faith. Pearce locates a whole menagerie of such “assertions” promoted as facts in defense of “reasonable belief” in the Resurrection, and exposes them for what they are: factless assertions—often, in fact, contrary to fact. Just as we find in every other false belief system, from QAnon to Flat Earthism. Indeed, just as we see those theories develop mythologies and fake histories of what happened even in recent history, Christianity began doing exactly the same thing; and is now perpetuated by continuing to do it (from myths about a scholarly consensus favoring the historicity of an empty tomb, to myths about rapid legendary development being impossible).

Getting someone to realize they are trapped in a delusion also requires teaching them the psychology they need to look out for, and getting them to recognize that as happening in themselves, such as Pearce covers at various places: motivated reasoning (“wanting” something to be true rather than wanting to know what actually is true even if it’s not what we want), cognitive dissonance (escaping painful mental contradictions through often elaborate rationalization rather than any actually reliable methodology), and relying on our innately broken mechanisms of intuition rather than the tools that human civilization invented specifically to correct for their constant failings—namely scientific methods, logic and mathematics, a prophylactic understanding of rhetoric as a system of both public- and self-deception, and critical thinking. Most dangerous of all is an over-reliance on intuition rather than a developed and correct understanding of probability, which is evident in resurrection apologetics in numerous ways, from neglect of probability to base rate neglect and ambiguity neglect, even the conjunction fallacy, and the human tendency to ignore strong arguments when they are paired with weak arguments that are more easily dismissed (a person will attack the weak argument and conclude they also defeated the strong argument, or for some reason don’t have to). Even just innumeracy in general can trap someone in a delusion (see my developed example from the apologetic rhetoric of Gary Habermas).

The problem of course is that the Christian Delusion is so pervasive and so toxic to the future and welfare of humanity that we really do need to quell it and continue to assist in its decline. We also have to do the same with the equally toxic secular replacements that are now proliferating (from QAnon specifically to a new rising secular conglomeration of sexist-racist ideology generally). But we can’t neglect either. Thus countering resurrection apologetics remains relevant and important. Pearce’s book can arm you as a better and more effective ideological soldier fighting to kill off this belief, on the internet or in regular life. For a more rational, evidence-based replacement that doesn’t veer into the toxic craziness we are seeing the rise of, you can then steer people toward work like my Sense and Goodness without God (especially in light of the updates to it needed). And advise people to get themselves grounded in a more reliable epistemology so they can develop or choose rational, reality-based worldviews (see A Vital Primer on Media Literacy and Advice on Probabilistic Reasoning, for example; because everything in What’s the Harm? applies equally no non-supernatural belief systems).

For all of these reasons, Pearce includes sections on the underlying motives for maintaining “resurrection” belief today, including atonement theology and trinitarianism and supernaturalism, beyond just pointing out the connection between resurrection-belief and harmful ideologies, and thus the need to get rid of all this.

The Comparison

Pearce doesn’t make this comparison. But his book helped me see it. Consider QAnon, for example. Or Flat Earthism or even Holocaust Denialism, or any other like belief system. Apart from the components not being supernatural, these have all the same components as Christian resurrection belief.

For example, QAnon depends on an underlying ontological machinery behind reality called The Deep State (“a shadowy network of politicians and bureaucrats secretly collaborate to control the government behind the scenes,” incorporating even commercial and entertainment leaders, like George Soros, Bill Gates, and Jeff Bezos). Christianity just proposes a supernatural version of the same thing. God, Satan, demons and angels, magic and miracle, a whole apparatus secretly manipulating the world, one for good and one for evil. Forces of Light (Trump and Q) secretly battle the Forces of Darkness (The Deep State, the Pedo Cabal, the Fake News Industrial Complex), allowing all kinds of impossible things to occur and be claimed as witnessed (like hundreds of thousands of forged ballots). In the same fashion, Christians believe in an underlying even more ridiculous and improbable conspiracy theory: that an entire supernatural world of magic and superheroes and supervillains exists, yet remains hidden and evades all attempts to uncover it and prove it exists; and this cosmic conspiracy allows all kinds of impossible things to occur and be claimed as witnessed (like hordes of undead descending on Jerusalem, magically withered trees, the spontaneous drowning of thousands of hogs, and flying death-monsters).

Also like modern conspiracy theorists and their enthusiasts and “true believers” and “hardcore converts,” Christians were rampant in fabricating history, and rampant in believing any wild tale told without question, as long as it fitted their worldview and supported what they wanted to be true (e.g. The Rain Miracle of Marcus Aurelius: A Case Study in Christian Lies and How To Fabricate History: The Example of Eusebius on Alexandrian Christianity; most Christian literature in antiquity was literally the fabricating of histories and forging of documents and accounts: see On the Historicity of Jesus, Element 44, Chapter 5; and several more examples in Diarmaid MacCulloch’s BBC Series on the History of Christianity and my latest debate with Jonathan Sheffield). And Christians still are—as with the modern myths I just mentioned about the “scholarly consensus” regarding the facts and phenomena pertaining to resurrection apologetics, or about the supposed “journalism” that led to a supposed “atheist” converting to Christianity; and outright “fake facts,” like that a first century author named Thallus confirmed the existence of Jesus and other such myths. I show how gullible early Christians were, and how easily duped by myths and lies, in Chapters 7, 13, and 17 of Not the Impossible Faith (see also Establishing the Biblical Literalism of Early Christians).

The tools of rhetoric used to defend these claims are also the same. Like Motte and Bailey: a QAnoner will crazily advocate for the whole Democratic Party being an organized pedophilia ring operated out of a pizza parlor, and when that is exploded as bullshit, they’ll retreat to just expressing concern for victims of sex trafficking (e.g. the #SaveTheChildren campaign), and then once you move on, they’ll go right back to pushing the debunked bullshit; while a Christian will crazily advocate for an actual death-monster descending from outer space to stun soldiers with a paralysis-ray and single-handedly moving a one-ton tombstone and having a conversation with some handmaids about the magical restoration to life of a flying superhero who evidently had teleported out of the tomb while it was sealed, and when they face enough ridicule at that, they will retreat to defending some convoluted, incoherent theory about how the story can be both fake (the whole death-monster narrative is made up) and yet still true (the superhero did actually teleport out of the tomb and fly away, and the one-ton doorstone must have been moved by…someone else…who snuck past the guards?), because (we are now to believe) an author who would make up the death-monster shit must totally be trustworthy on those other details. And when you go away, they’ll be back in church marveling at how true the amazing death-monster story is.

Likewise to defend their myths Christians will make up fake facts about ancient women’s testimony not being trusted in courts or relied upon in relating histories or never being invented in sacred fiction, about the Jewish elite being able to commit capital crimes and offenses against God like robbing graves to prove a by-then-completely-unrecognizable corpse is still in them, about our having eyewitness narratives of meeting a resurrected Jesus, about the Gospel narratives “seeming” too authentic to be fake, about unknown fact-checkers actually having verified the Gospel accounts (and we can know this because nothing written by any such people exists), about a mass witnessing to the only-imagined presence of a spirit being impossible, and on and on. Does this behavior sound familiar? These are exactly the kind of fabricated rationales all conspiracy theorists resort to to “prove” their points and denounce skeptics as the gullible ones. False information about how the world worked and what was in it; false claims about how easily stories can be fabricated and how quickly distorted; the same excuses to dismiss all the absences of evidence, and all the contrary evidence; the same insistence that any real explanations of events are “more improbable” than their own totally convoluted whackadoo alternatives; mere assertions employed as factual premises in arguments; and all the same fallacies of logic.

I’ve long pointed out that resurrection apologetics depends on an illogical shell game with the evidence: our only eyewitness source refers to nothing but inner visions of Jesus (which in the terminology of the time could even mean mere dreams, or even just “feelings” of an entity’s presence); while our only accounts imagining Jesus as showing up for real and demonstrating he had a physical body you could hang out and have lunch with, were not written by any eyewitness, nor anyone we can establish even knew an eyewitness, nor vetted or vouched for by either. Like QAnon myths and legends and “witness accounts,” those stories are patently ridiculous, and would be pegged as obviously mythology if they vouched for any other religion. And those are precisely the stories we cannot connect back to any reliable witness or any actual verifiable fact at all. Whereas the only accounts we do have from a witness, decades earlier, evince an entirely typical cult of mystics and spiritualists talking to imaginary spirits. We already know how such cults work throughout history; they are a dime a dozen. We thus cannot connect that to any cosmic conspiracy theory about real hidden magical spirit powers. And that’s simply that. QAnon can’t connect the dots either; they have to fabricate connections between the stories they want to be true, and any actual reliable evidence they are true, and pass those fabrications off as factual. Exactly what Christians do.

Conclusion

You might see many more parallels and analogies yourself throughout Pearce’s book on The Resurrection, which he structures to first show that the underlying theology of it doesn’t make sense (atonement theory, trinitarianism, supernaturalism), then show that a plain reading of the Gospel accounts in order shows we are dealing with literature and not history, then show that Christian apologists aren’t entirely honest with their audiences and readers about the facts, then survey the peculiar absence of evidence for so incredible an event that is hard to explain, and then show the literary and propagandistic way the Gospel stories were fabricated. Then he tackles specific apologetic tacks: that Joseph of Arimathea is real and therefore so is the resurrection; that the burial account is realistic and therefore the tomb really was found empty; that women placed at the tomb in those accounts must really have witnessed that; that reports of “seeing” Jesus afterward can’t have been dreams or hallucinations or any other kind of natural mistake or useful lie; that both the tomb’s being venerated and the tomb’s not being venerated prove the resurrection really happened; and then finally the old saw, “Well, you can’t explain it,” or when that gets exploded, “Well, all your explanations are improbable.” In the process Pearce analyzes the incoherence of resurrection apologetics, its psychological defects, how it doesn’t comport with or follow from the actual facts, and how proposing it is reasonable to believe always depends on unreliable epistemologies. His citations and bibliography then direct you on every issue to further reading should you want to get into it more. I think anyone who wants to master or advance resurrection apologetics or counter-apologetics needs to read and make use of this book as a complete survey of what you need to know and address.