Did Jesus Truly Rise from the Dead? I

Two of the biggest religious events celebrated by Catholics and other Christians each liturgical year are Christmas and Easter. The first relates to Jesus' birth, the second to his death and resurrection. I have already dealt with doubts about Jesus' birth in an earlier article. I shall now deal with Jesus's purported bodily resurrection. I rely upon the works of John W Loftus and of the various scholars appearing in chapter 20 of Loftus' book Why I Became an Atheist (08). Did Jesus rise from the dead as described by the various evangelists? What is the evidence that he did so? If he did, was he raised by God or did he rise by his own powers? If he did not, how should one properly understand the "resurrection" of Jesus? What should its meaning be for a Christian?

I am quite sure that if one of your close friends were to tell you a story that his hero John who died in a traffic accident three days ago, rose from the dead yesterday, you would look seriously into the possibility of whether or not he would need some psychiatric help. What is the difference between your best friend telling you that his hero rose from the dead and the evangelists telling us about more or less the same story of physical revival about Jesus, more than 2000 years ago? You would probably say, of course, there is a difference. John is just an ordinary mortal but Jesus is one of the three persons in the Holy Trinity!

How do we know that Jesus is indeed one of the three persons in God (a concept which is an eternal mystery even for Christians)? There is nothing about it directly in the Bible itself! And you would probably say that since Jesus is part of God or simply that he is God, of one being with the Father and the Holy Spirit etc. and that we know that doctrinally, God, as God, can perform what the scientifically literate would regard as "miracles". What is the basis of your claim? The Gospels of the Evangelists of course!

The next question would then be, "what is the Holy Gospel"? You would probably say that the Gospel is the Word of God. If so, it may be asked, "How do you know?" and "Can the Gospel be relied upon?". The Gospels were written by different people the earliest being Mark (some 40 years after Jesus died), then Matthew and Luke and then John (some 90 to 100 years or more after his death). Were they compiled from eye-witness reports? No evidence of that.

Gospels not Contemporaneous Records

We all know that hearsay evidence is notoriously unreliable because different people may report seeing and observing different things even if they saw the same event because the focus of their attention on different aspects of the situation may be quite different and that they often mix their interpretation of what they thought happened with what actually happened and would report accordingly. We also know that after three or four retelling, the fifth version may differ quite substantially from the first version of an eye-witness. Do we know how many times the stories in the four gospels have been retold before they finally got reduced into writing? Probably hundreds and thousands of times. What is the quality of the memories of the "teller" and "re-teller" of each such reteller of the tales about Jesus from the eye-witness to the final reteller? What is their respective literacy level? More generally, what is the level of their education with respect to matters we would now regard as science like physics, chemistry, biology and natural law, if any? Are they ignorant peasants or fishermen, small time traders or otherwise superstitious people or people whose minds are more attuned to what we regard as the scientific and empirical basis of their beliefs or more attuned to magical beliefs?

We know that even an honest eye witness may make mistakes of perception and/or of memory and therefore is only partially reliable because people tend to report what they "expect" to see or hear from a certain meaningful framework. We also know that with time, memories get hazier and hazier. Often what we report as "facts" are not really facts but only subsequently "reconstituted" accounts of what actually happened. Such an account is a  result not only of our memory, which itself may be affected or distorted by our emotions ( certain emotionally significantly aspect of the situation coloring our perception of what actually happened) and by our previous knowledge of what the world would normally be like or the logic of "what must have happened". We do so because we do not like to appear inconsistent in the way we look at the world. We know further from our social psychologists (in particular those who study human "cognitive dissonance") that we are subject to what they call  the "confirmation bias" ( ie. we tend to interpret "facts" in accordance with an interpretation scheme which does NOT contradict or is otherwise inconsistent with our existing interpretative scheme). Yet the earliest Gospel was written some 40 years after the death of Jesus and the last more than a century later. How much weight should we attach to such "evidence"?

What is Gospel any way? Does the word gospel not mean good news? In the final analysis, are the gospels not tools of propaganda of preachers within the relevant faith communities in the first and second century CE? Do they not have an axe to grind to exaggerate a bit for a good cause eg. for the purposes of making converts? These are questions all thinking Christians must ask themselves and carefully consider.

Few converted by so-called Resurrection of Jesus in his day

Loftus points out one peculiar fact which has often been ignored. "The curious fact is that while the book of Acts says many people believed, most people in Jesus' time did not. With rare exceptions, there is no record that Pilate nor his soldiers, Caiaphas nor the Sanhedrin, King Herod nor his court, nor the mob that yelled, "Crucify him" were converted to Christianity because of the weight of the evidence for his resurrection." Not even King Herod and some others easily convinced that someone could come back from the dead (This is John the Baptist: he has been raised from the dead (Mt. 14:1; Mk 6: 14-16)! According to Richard Carrier ("The Spiritual Body of Christ" in Robert M Price & Jeffrey J Lowder, The Empty Tomb 2005)"Skeptics and informed or critical minds were a small minority in the ancient world. Superstition and credulity ruled the day. Though the gullible, the credulous and those ready to believe or exaggerate anything are still abundant, they were far more common in antiquity and taken far more seriously. We are talking about an age of fable and wonder, where magic, miracles, ghosts and gods were everywhere and almost never doubted...how would a myth be exploded in antiquity? They had no newspapers, telephones, photographs or access or public documents to consult to check a story. There were no reporters, coroners, forensic scientists or even detectives. If someone was not a witness, all people had was a man's word, and they would most likely base their judgment not on anything we would call evidence but on the display of sincerity by the storyteller, by his ability to persuade, and impress them with a show, by the potential rewards his story had to offer, and by his "sounding right" to them...In times like these, legends had it easy.".

(To be cont'd)