Greek resurrection

One of William Lane Craig’s handful of constantly repeated arguments is presented most clearly in his debate with Bart Ehrman:

Fact #4: The original disciples suddenly and sincerely came to believe that Jesus was risen from the dead despite their having every predisposition to the contrary.

Think of the situation the disciples faced following Jesus’ crucifixion:

1. Their leader was dead.

And Jewish Messianic expectations had no idea of a Messiah who, instead of triumphing over Israel’s enemies, would be shamefully executed by them as a criminal.

2. Jewish beliefs about the afterlife precluded anyone’s rising from the dead to glory and immortality before the general resurrection of the dead at the end of the world.

Nevertheless, the original disciples suddenly came to believe so strongly that God had raised Jesus from the dead that they were willing to die for the truth of that belief. But then the obvious question arises: What in the world caused them to believe such an un-Jewish and outlandish thing?

Craig rams home, repeatedly, the claim that the resurrection belief inherent in the latter gospels (Matthew, Luke and John, remembering that Mark has been appended with the resurrection story) is not a Jewish type of belief.

Okay, I think that we can accept that that may be the case (without necessarily accepting Craig’s Argument from Resurrection).

However, it should be noted that all the relevant documents New Testament are written in Greek.  Think about this for a moment.  The lingua franca of the Roman Empire was Greek and relatively recent historical findings indicate that Greek was a commonly spoken second language in ancient Judea.  And with an invading Empire comes their culture, including their mythology and history.

We should, therefore, not only be asking whether resurrection is a Jewish idea but also whether it could be an ancient Greco-Roman idea.

Guess what!  When you look at Greek mythology, you find that resurrections are not so unfamiliar.

Asclepius is resurrected by Zeus.  Achilles is resurrected by Thetis (who wasn’t even a major god). Heracles is resurrected by Zeus.

Even more interestingly, there is a semi-mythical chap from the seventh century BCE mentioned by Herodotus who 1) was a miracle worker 2) died 3) had his body disappear mysteriously from a locked room and 4) was resurrected and made immortal.  Not only that, his resurrection was attested by someone who claimed to have met him on a road.

Now, I am not saying that the history of Aristeas as related by Herodotus is true.  What I am suggesting is that if we have a person who can write Greek in the first century CE, that person is going to be familiar with both Greek history (such as it was) and Greek mythology.  Furthermore, when Paul (apostle to the gentiles) wants to spread the word of this new religion that he has adopted, he is going to be aware of the fact that his product has to be at least as good as what is currently available in the market place.

Zeus does resurrections, so Paul’s god has to do at least one resurrection.  The demi-god Heracles was resurrected and Aristeas was resurrected, so Jesus has to be resurrected.

Simply stated, if Jesus was not reported to have been resurrected, then the religion would not have gained any purchase.

This is not, in itself, evidence that it is totally impossible that there was a person called Jesus who was crucified until fully dead, who was placed in a crypt from which he somehow escaped and who then appeared to various people before shooting up into the sky until hidden in a cloud (according to precisely one scriptural witness - Luke).

What it is instead is evidence of an alternative explanation.  So long as we have an explanation which does not require the supernatural, and there need only be one, we are not forced by Craig – or any other apologist – to accept the premise that the only explanation for early Christianity is a bona fide resurrection.

There are other explanations, so Craig’s ignorance is dissipated and his Argument from Resurrection fails on this basis.

A History of Lying

In The Method of WLC’s Madness, I talked about William Lane Craig’s misuse of “explanatory power” – explaining that he tries to use historical method inappropriately.

In A Pop-Up Refutation of the Resurrection, I pointed out that WLC (along with other apologists) refer to New Testament scholars as expert witnesses for the historicity of the biblical character Jesus.  There’s a major issue with this because those who devote their lives to studying the New Testament are biased.

This is not to say that there aren’t some scholars who emerge from all that study no longer believing the accuracy of the bible.  There are some indications that many who study the Bible deeply begin to doubt it, not just New Testament scholars, but also Seminary College students.

There is a psychological predisposition to avoid the sense that one’s life has been wasted on a complete fabrication.  This can be seen in the fact that even Bart Ehrman, who debated the historicity of Jesus with WLC, claims that Jesus existed, was crucified on the orders of Pontius Pilate and his body was not found in the tomb by whoever it was who went to check (the four gospels have four different accounts on this last item).  Ehrman does not, however, accept the resurrection as historically factual nor does he accept that Jesus was divine.  One is left to wonder why, once the key elements of the gospel accounts are removed, should any of the stories necessarily be true.

In this article, I want to address another problem, one which brings WLC’s intellectual honesty into question.   First, let us have a little closer look at some of words that WLC uses, repeatedly, in his resurrection argument.  Check out the following excerpts from debates (and two websites) spanning a period of eighteen years:

WLC-Krauss (2011): The historical person Jesus of Nazareth was a remarkable individual. Historians have reached something of a consensus that the historical Jesus came on the scene with an unprecedented sense of divine authority, the authority to stand and speak in God’s place. He claimed that in himself the Kingdom of God had come, and as visible demonstrations of this fact he carried out a ministry of miracle-working and exorcisms.

WLC-Law (2011): The historical person Jesus of Nazareth was by all accounts a remarkable individual. Although Dr. Law has recently defended the claim that Jesus of Nazareth never even existed, historians have reached something of a consensus that Jesus came on the scene with an unprecedented sense of divine authority, the authority to stand and speak in God’s place. He claimed that in himself the Kingdom of God had come, and as visible demonstrations of this fact he carried out a ministry of miracle working and exorcisms.

WLC-Ehrman (2006): … most New Testament scholars, as Bart Ehrman knows, do believe that Jesus of Nazareth carried out a ministry of miracle-working and exorcisms. Whether you believe they’re supernatural is an additional step. But there’s no doubt today that Jesus of Nazareth was what he thought was a miracle worker.

WLC @ BeThinking (2003): Today the majority of New Testament scholars agree that the historical Jesus deliberately stood and spoke in the place of God Himself, that he claimed that in himself the kingdom of God had come, and that he carried out a ministry of miracle-working and exorcisms as signs of that fact. According to the German theologian Horst George Pöhlmann,

Today there is virtually a consensus ... that Jesus came on the scene with an unheard of authority, with the claim of the authority to stand in God’s place and speak to us and bring us to salvation. With regard to Jesus there are only two possible modes of behavior: either to believe that in him God encounters us or to nail him to the cross as a blasphemer. Tertium non datur. [There is no third way.]

WLC @ ReasonableFaith (2001): The historical person Jesus of Nazareth was a remarkable individual. New Testament critics have reached something of a consensus that the historical Jesus came on the scene with an unprecedented sense of divine authority, the authority to stand and speak in God's place. That's why the Jewish leadership instigated his crucifixion for the charge of blasphemy. He claimed that in himself the Kingdom of God had come, and as visible demonstrations of this fact he carried out a ministry of miracles and exorcisms.

WLC-Crossman (1995): The majority of New Testament critics today agree that the historical Jesus deliberately stood and spoke in the place of God himself. The German theologian Horst Georg Pöhlmann reports, “Today there is virtually a consensus that Jesus came on the scene with an unheard of authority – namely, the authority of God…”

WLC-Zaas (1993, quoted in “Who Was Jesus”, Copan and Evans, 2001):

I want to close with a quotation from the German theologian, Horst Georg Pöhlmann. He writes,

“In summary, one can say that today there is virtually a consensus concerning that wherein the historical in Jesus is to be seen. It consists in the fact that Jesus came on the scene with an unheard of authority - namely, the authority of God - with the claim of the authority to stand in God’s place and speak to us and bring us to salvation.”

Pöhlmann concludes,

“This unheard of claim to authority, as it comes to expression in the Sermon on the Mount, for example, … presupposes a unity of Jesus with God that is deeper than that of all men, namely a unity of essence.

This . . . claim to authority is explicable only from the side of his deity. This authority only God himself can claim. With regard to Jesus, there are only two possible modes of behavior: either to believe that in him God encounters us or nail him to the cross as a blasphemer. There is no third way.”

So, actually, they are not Craig’s words, they are Horst Pöhlmann’s words.  And who, exactly, is this Horst Pöhlmann?  He’s an obscure German theologian whose book, from which Craig quotes <<Abriβ der Dogmatik>>, does not have an English translation – this is despite being quoted by Craig repeatedly since as early as 1993 and despite having been in print (in six German editions) since 1973.  Nobody other than Craig seems to quote Pöhlmann, other than indirectly when quoting Craig.

When using the quotation (which he often fails to credit, possibly because Pöhlmann is so obscure), Craig doesn’t use the same words every time as one would expect with a quotation but rather employs “creative tailoring” to the extent that he thinks he can get away with it.  I’m left wondering whether a less obscure author, or one who regularly wrote in English, might have been less forgiving of such flagrant and repeated abuse of his work.

On his websites, bethinking.org and reasonablefaith.org, Craig is relatively honest – assuming that, prior to his summarisation, Pöhlmann had made clear that he was talking about slightly more authoritative “New Testament scholars”, rather than just “Christian Apologists” or “Christians”.  He seemed to have been more honest in his early years, in the debates with Zaas and Crossman, although there are a couple of early debates in which he did not present this argument at all.

The crib notes that WLC now appears to work from, if he hasn’t simply memorised the entire speech – which seems quite likely – now have him saying that historians have reached a consensus on the nature of the “historical Jesus of Nazareth”.

This simply isn’t true, except perhaps if the consensus in question were to be “this whole resurrection thing never actually happened”.

I don’t think you could call this misuse or a mistake on Craig’s part.  This is – plain and simple – an oft repeated lie.

You can go to Hell for that sort of thing …

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If a visitor from Germany ever pops in, one with access to <<Abriβ der Dogmatik>>, and they could be so kind as to inform us as to what Pöhlmann actually had to say on the “consensus” and whether it was a consensus of theologians, New Testament scholars, Biblical scholars, Christian Apologists or historians, I’d be very grateful.

The Method of WLC's Madness

In his debates, William Lane Craig repeatedly claimed that one of the strengths of his arguments for god is their “explanatory power” – the explanatory power of a creator who initiated the Big Bang, the explanatory power of a creator who finely tuned the universe, the explanatory power of god resurrecting Jesus and so on.

His Argument from Contingency:

1.    Everything that exists has an explanation of its existence (either in its own nature or in an external cause).

2.    If the universe has an explanation of its existence, that explanation is God.

3.    The universe exists.

4.    Therefore, the explanation of the universe is God.

And his Argument from First Cause:

We can also formulate this reasoning in the form of a deductive argument:

1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.

From which it follows logically that

Therefore, the universe has a cause

Again, as we have seen, the best candidate for such a transcendent cause is God.

And his Argument from Resurrection:

1.    There are three established facts about Jesus: his empty tomb, his post-mortem appearances, and the origin of the disciples’ belief in his resurrection.

2.    The hypothesis “God raised Jesus from the dead” is the best explanation of these facts.

3.    The hypothesis “God raised Jesus from the dead” entails that God exists.

4.    Therefore, God exists.

I did touch on this before, in Explaining Evidence, but I stumbled on a useful page on Wikipedia which expands on the historical method.  This is where Craig gets his “explanatory principle” from.

This methodology works, to a limited extent for the resurrection argument and only the resurrection argument, merely because some people claim that the Bible is history.  None of his other arguments are related to history, they are more in the domain of science (or rather of pseudoscience the way he handles them).  Scientific discussions should heed the scientific method, not the historical method.  Nobody was around at the time of the Big Bang, so there was no history to synthesise!

The reason why the methodology doesn’t work (not even for the resurrection argument) is that within the historical method, when done by real historians rather than theologians, a hypothesis is supposed to answer more questions than it raises – it is supposed to be less ad hoc than other explanations.

The major problem with a god solution is that the god solution raises questions that are more difficult than those it answers.  That’s negative explanatory power.