Did Jesus Truly Rise from the Dead? IV

(Cont'd )

Was Joseph of Arimathea a Literary Creation?

In many ways, Joseph of Arimathea who was supposed to have asked for permission from Pilate to give Jesus a decent burial is an enigmatic character. John Dominic Crossan (Who Killed Jesus? 1995)  and Keith Parson (God and the Burden of Proof 1990) both believe that Joseph was probably a fictitious character, as is the character of Judas Iscariot who is said to have conspired with the Sanhedrin to betray Jesus with a kiss the night before his crucifixion ( John Selby Spong The Sins of Scripture 2005 199-204). Loftus advises us to read Randel Helms' Gospel Fictions 1988 to see how New Testament writers might from time to time construct stories based on Old Testament passages.

According to Loftus, there are a number of reasons which support our suspicion that Joseph of Arimathea may well be a fictitious character:

1. Unlike other Biblical towns like Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Capernaum, Damascus, there is no unambiguous record of the existence of a town by the name of Arimathea. According to Roy Hoover, "The location of Arimathea has not (yet) been identified with any assurance: the various 'possible' locations are nothing more than pious guesses or conjectures undocumented by any textual or archaeological evidence" ( Hoover in Copan & Tacelli eds. Jesus' Resurrection: Fact or Figment 130). No wonder that Luke, written to the Greeks after the gospels of Mark and Matthew, had to explain why they never heard of the town before but merely said that it was a "Jewish town" (Lk 23: 51)

2. Apart from being concerned with the burial of Jesus, there is no further mention of him anywhere else in the New Testaments. He was not mentioned as one present at the death of Jesus in any of the gospels. Neither was he one of those who witnessed the empty tomb. Nor was there any mention that he was a member of the early church. Yet it was him who asked for permission from Pilate to bury Jesus in the evening of the crucifixion. After checking that Jesus was dead, Pilate granted him permission. His role seemed therefore confined just to providing a location for Jesus' tomb!

3. It would probably take some time for Joseph to be told that Jesus had died, then to go through the bureaucratic procedure to see Pilate, further time for the centurion to go and check out if Jesus was really dead and report back to Pilate and for Joseph to finally get the relevant permission, and after the verification of Jesus death by the centurion to be told that permission had been granted . Then Joseph had to go home to get a shroud, find Nicodemus to bring a hundred pounds of myrrh and aloes (Jn 19:38), to take the body down, to bury it and then to roll a stone across the entrance--all before sundown. According to the other gospels, Jesus probably died at about 3 p.m. (Mt. 15:34-37; Mt. 27: 46-50; Lk 23: 44-46). Therefore, there  simply wasn't enough time to do all this . To deal with this problem, the non-canonical Gospel of Peter said Joseph  asked for permission at the time that Jesus was ordered to be crucified.

4. According to the Acts, Jesus was buried by his enemies! ""Even though they found no cause for a sentence of death, they asked Pilate to have him killed, when they had carried out everything that was written about him, they took him down from the tree and laid him in a tomb. (Acts 13: 28-29). Arimathea can't be one of "them" because both Matthew and John described him as one of Jesus' disciples.

5. All the members of the Sanhedrin high court voted to condemn Jesus to death, "Then the high priest tore his clothes and said...What is your decision? All of them condemned him as deserving death" (Mk 14:62). If Joseph was Jesus' disciple, how could he have condemned Jesus to death? John Dominic Crossan argue that "Joseph is described not as a member of the synedrion-council but a member of the boule-council, as if there were two councils in charge of the Jews.".( The Birth of Christianity: Discovering What Happened in the Years Immediately after the Execution of Jesus 554). Matthew however, merely said that Joseph "a rich man" and not a member of the Sanhedrin but John solves the problem by saying that he was "a secret" disciple "because of his fear of the Jews". How could he fear the Jews if he was one of them! Mark is also deliberately vague about whether or not Joseph was a believing disciple. He is said to be "looking for the kingdom of God" (Mk 15:43).

5. John 19:31 says that "the Jews" asked Pilate that the bodies of Jesus and the two thieves be removed. If so, then all three bodies were removed together but John later says also that Jesus was given a separate burial by Joseph (Jn. 19:38-42). If Jesus were buried in a communal grave for criminals, how could anyone prove that the body missing from the tomb was that of Jesus'?  To solve the problem, Matthew rephrases Mark's by saying that Jesus was buried "in his own new tomb" but instead of just a "stone" being placed in the entrance, it has now become "a great stone" (Mt.27:60). Luke adds that it was a tomb "where no one had ever been laid" (Lk 23:53)

Based on the above, Crossan thinks that the story of Joseph of Arimathea was "creative fiction" based on "prophecy historicized", in more or less the way that Luke concorted a census to explain why Jesus was born in Bethlehem, the city of David, so as to conform to Jewish prophecy that messiah should come from that line. Crossan argues; "First, if Joseph was in the council, he was against Jesus; if he was for Jesus, he was not in the council. Second, if Joseph buried Jesus from piety or duty, he would have done the same for the two other crucified criminals; yet if he did that, there could be no empty-tomb sequence" ( The Birth of Christianity 554) To solve the problem, Mark created Joseph as both a Sanhedrist and "almost" a disciple so as to overcome the antagonism of the early church against the Sanhedrin and at the same time to have an empty tomb story. Craig argues that it is unlikely that Joseph was an invented character of the early church because he had a name and a place of origin. Crossan counters the objection by saying that"The general early Christian tradition was to name those significant characters left nameless on the passion accounts" (Crossan Who Killed Jesus 173) e.g. the Gospel of Peter gives the name Petronius to the centurion who was in charge of the soldiers guarding the tomb. Pilate's wife, the centurion at the cross, the two thieves crucified with Jesus were all given names. The sword wielder and the one whose ear got cut off in the Garden of Gethsemane in Mark are later named in John's gospel as "Simon Peter" and "Malchus".(Jn. 18:10) If you invent a name, why not add a place of origin? In the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, Luke gives a character the name Lazarus (meaning "God has helped") and the rich man is later named "Dives" (meaning "wealthy") in the Latin Vulgate version of the Bible. And often Luke starts a parable with the phrase, "There was a rich man..." in the parable of the shrewd manager or  "A certain man" etc. (Lk. 13:6; 14:16, 15:11; 16:1; 16:19; 18:2; 19:12). Richard Carrier remarks that "Arimathea" can be translated as "Best Disciple Town" (Price & Lowder The Empty Tomb 238). Is this just another literary play of words by Mark? If Jesus' body was not specially buried, there would certainly not have any further story of his "empty tomb" and his subsequent ascension into heaven. His body would simply have rotted in a public graveyard for criminals and would have decomposed by the time of his alleged ascension seven weeks later (Acts 1:3; 2:1). It is significant that Jesus was 40 days in the wilderness  being tempted by the devil and rose to heaven 40 days after his death in the same way that  Moses was 40 years wandering in the desert before he finally reached Canaan. A coincidence or a deliberate creation of the writers of the Bible to emphasize its dramatic and symbolic character?

According to S. T. Davis, for the early Jewish followers of Christ in Jerusalem, the main question was not whether the tomb was empty but why? ( Risen Indeed: Making Sense of the Resurrection 1993  84)  Loftus agrees with Luis M Bermejo ( Light Beyond Death: The Risen Christ and the Transfiguration of Man 1985) that even if we were to affirm the empty tomb, we can still deny Jesus' bodily resurrection. And even if we admit that Jesus did rise bodily from the dead, that still does not prove that he is God or that the Christian interpretation of his life and death are correct. Thus Jewish theologian Pinchas Lapide accepts that Jesus arose but still denies Christianity in favor of Judaism.( Resurrection of Jesus: A Jewish Perspective 1983). Davis concludes, "The empty tomb by itself, does not prove the resurrection. It is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the bodily resurrection of Jesus....only if the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus is very strong indeed--so strong, in fact, as to outweigh the commitment virtually all rational people have made to the notion that dead people do not get up and walk around again. It seems to me perfectly possible for the naturalist to examine the relevant evidence objectively and carefully and still decide that no miracle occurred." (ibid 170-171) Crossan too thinks likewise: "I do not think that anyone, anywhere, at any time brings dead people back to life" (Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography 1994 95). Anthony Flew, ex-atheist turned deist says, " Confronted with testimonial evidence for the occurrence of a miracle, the secular historian must recognize that however unlikely it may seem that all the witnesses were in error, the occurrence of a genuine miracle is, by definition, naturally impossible."(Flew & G Habermas  Did Jesus Rise From the Dead? 1987 6), Robert W Funk thinks that "belief in Jesus' resurrection did not depend on what happened to his corpse." (Honest to Jesus: Jesus for a New Millenium 1996 259). Thomas Sheenan thinks that "Jesus, regardless of where his corpse ended up, is dead and remains dead." (The First Coming: How the Kingdom of God Became Christianity 1988 172-73). Marcus Borg  argues that "the discovery of Jesus' skeletal remains would not be a problem. I see the empty tomb and whatever happened to the corpse of Jesus to be ultimately irrelevant to the truth of Easter."( with N T Wright The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions 1999 130-131). Robert M Price, former Christian scholar and now atheist simply concludes Jesus Is Dead (2007)

What "Really" Happened When and After Jesus Died?

Loftus adopts John Selby Spong's speculative version of what might have happened soon after Jesus died. To Spong, "Angels who descend in earthquakes, speak, and roll back stones; tombs that are empty; apparitions that appear and disappear; rich men who makes graves available; thieves who comment from their crosses of pain--these are all legends. Sacred legends, I might add, but legends nonetheless...For me, the Gospel traditions are pointers toward the truth. They are not the truth.....The overwhelming probability is that the uncompromising truth was expressed in the phrase "they all forsook him and fled".

"Jesus died alone. He died the death of a publicly executed criminal. His body probably received the typical treatment given to those so unfortunate as to fall into that category. He was removed from the instrument of execution, placed into a common grave, and covered over. No records were kept, for no value was attached to those who had been executed. Bodies did not last that long in their graves anyway. Burial removed the stench of decaying flesh, and in a very short time only some unmarked bones remained. Even the bones were gone before too long. Nature rather efficiently reclaims its own resources.

"No one knows the exact date on which the crucifixion occurred. The synoptic Gospels and the fourth Gospel locate it near the time of Passover...There is, however, too much agenda in both the synoptic attempt to identify the Last Supper with the Passover feast and the fourth Gospel's attempt to identify the date of the crucifixion with the day on which the Paschal Lamb was slain, for me to take either assertion literally...The appearance of Joseph of Arimathea, the darkness over the land, the split in the temple veil, the ecstatic cry of faith from the centurion--all were elements of the developing legend. The hasty burial before the Sabbath was but a part of the burial legend. Thus no one knows how long Jesus lived on the cross, how he died, when he was taken down, or where he was buried, 'for they all forsook him and fled" That means there was no first day of the week visit to the tomb by the women to anoint him, since there was no tomb and no sense of when he died or where he was buried...The disciples went "each to his own home" ((Jn 16:32),

"And to Simon, who would someday be called Peter, home was Galilee. Since the record appears to indicate that Jesus and disciples came from Galilee to Judea by way of the desert east of the Jordan River to avoid the dangers of Samaria, my hunch would be that the disciples returned the same way. Since they had stayed in Bethany, according to the Biblical text, during the week before the arrest of Jesus, it would be natural to go there following his death, especially since it was on their way back to Galilee...I suspect that that it was in that home on that night that Simon's denial was admitted, and for which he received the bitter feelings of those in grief. Grief and anger are closely connected emotions, and that connection would be particularly so if this house contained one who was the woman closest to and most esteemed by Jesus. Surely such a person would not spare Simon's feelings if she felt him to be responsible in any way for Jesus' death.

"There are many elements in this story that cause me to wonder about the historicity of Judas Iscariot. Was his betrayal invented to make the behavior of the other disciples seem less shocking by comparison? Judas seems likely to be a creation of midrash. Even the reason Jesus had to be betrayed is not clear. Was he that difficult to locate? Then the details of the thirty pieces of silver that can be found in the prophet Zechariah (11:12), the two contradictory accounts of his death (Mt. 27:5, Acts 1:18), the story of the bread dipped in the bowl at the Last Supper (Jn 13:26; Mk 14:20 which reflects Ps. 41:9) and finally the name Iscariot itself....all of these details cast doubt for me on Judas' historicity...Mary Magdalene is portrayed in John as having a close and trusting relationship with both Simon and the beloved disciple...these people knew each other well, even intimately (Jn.20:3). I should note too that each time the women were listed in the Gospels Mary Magdalene was given the priority position of being named first. I do not believe that this is either accidental or coincidental. Women in the first century took their status from the status of the male to whom they were related...As soon as possible, I suspect, Simon continued his journey. He had to get home, for the safety of Galilee and the healing sense of yearning to be among familiar things beckoned him. Nowhere else would seem tolerable in this moment of his life. So into the desert he trudged, making the long journey east of the Jordan. Sometimes it took a week to ten days to travel this distance by foot. One could not walk during the heat of the day or in the darkness of the night, so travel was limited to the hours from dawn to early morning and from sunset and nightfall. There was little to fear during this journey, however, for anonymity was the reality for every traveler. Some number of days passed, therefore, before Simon made it back to Capernaum or Bethsaida, and even more days (possibly weeks) before the trauma wore off sufficiently for Simon to begin to put his life in order )  .." (Resurrection: Myth or Reality 233 238 241-243).

To Loftus, "Simon Peter felt depressed after the crucifixion of Jesus. he had placed years of his life in Jesus' hands and heard him and seen his beautiful life, and now his hopes were all gone. He went back to Galilee to fish again, and the events of the last few years replayed themselves over and over in his mind. " The impact of Jesus on Simon had to have been enormous. No one was sure, including the Gospel writers, just how long Simon's life had revolved around the life of Jesus. Spong cites the following:
1. Simon had heard Jesus' teaching, he had watched his impact on others, Simon had seen the quality of Jesus' life, and above all else, he had been privileged to live inside Jesus' relationship with God.
2. Jesus had taught Simon to pray.
3. Jesus had loved him into being loving.
4. Jesus had called him across the barriers that that prejudice had erected against Samaritans, against women, and even against such Gentiles as the Syro-Phoenician women. Simon was stretched by each of these experiences.
5. Jesus had talked about the Kingdom of God breaking into history, about the final judgment, and about the end of time.
6. Simon had sensed from his words that Jesus' very life was in some way related to that kingdom and its coming. Perhaps Jesus was a sign of it; maybe he was the agent of it; or perhaps even the secret of his life was that he was somehow incorporated into the meaning of that kingdom.
7.  Simon had seen in Jesus a rare personal integrity that was displayed in the courage to be himself in all circumstances. When the masses came to hear Jesus and even to laud him, his head was not turned by their acclaim. When the forces of hostility closed in upon him, his face was not hidden in fear and his spirit was not embittered with rage. Jesus seemed to be freed of the need to be defined by the responses of others. Simon yearned to possess that freedom.
8.  Jesus also seemed to know to be present to others. He engaged each moment and each person with the intensity of eternity . When he was with one called the rich young ruler, who carried the signs of earthly power, and when he was with the women taken in adultery, with no power except the plea for mercy, the attention, the gaze, and the presence of Jesus to that person was portrayed as total. That person was perceived as being the only person in Jesus' life at that moment. In that moment, he seemed to challenge with his very life the hierarchy of values by which human beings judged one another. To Jesus, each person bore God's image, each person was worthy of God's love, and therefore each person had the potential to grow into the full life of God's Spirit
9.In the common folklore of that day, sickness and disease were thought of as the punishment of a sinful life, yet Jesus embraced the lepers.
10. Immorality was a sign of rebellion against the way of God but Jesus reached out to the woman of the street who anointed him and called to discipleship those who cheated others in their careers as tax collectors. In a society that suggested that women were not fit creatures to converse, Jesus was talking with the women by the well, taking her questions serious and offering her new insights. When guileless children came to him he welcomed them and rebuked those who felt that children were not fit to make demands on his time.( ibid 244-245)

To Spong: Simon saw all these and many more. God for Jesus was a powerful reality and Simon was in a position to share in that reality. God, to Jesus, was "Father" (with the Aramaic word Abba standing behind that concept, filled with connotations of intimacy, caring, love, forgiveness.) God for Jesus was like a father who welcomed his wayward son, a shepherd who searched for a single lost sheep, or a woman who swept diligently until she found a lost coin. To this God, all could come and pour out their hearts and express their needs, no matter how petty those needs might be. One might have been taught by this Jesus to say to God, "Give us this day our daily bread" or "Deliver us from the evil one" (Mt. 6:7 ff. Lk 11:3) or one might have been encouraged to emulate the clamoring widow who would not stop knocking on the door until her desires were met (Lk 18: 3-5). But one could also pray for the coming of God's kingdom or for a forgiveness so gracious, constant and limitless that it reached towards infinity. Simon could not have escaped some participation in these realities. (ibid 245)

Spong also thinks that Simon was also aware that there was about Jesus' life a sense of power that caused hints of miracle and even magic to enter not only his life but into other people's talk about him.Perhaps to Simon and to those who knew him best, Jesus seemed larger than life, which made him appear to them to have the power to control those forces before which most human beings feel helpless, such as the winds and the waves. Perhaps it was that in the storms of life, Jesus was always a centre of calm so that in time, those around him came to externalize his calmness into the world itself. Perhaps it was that Jesus fed those near him so deeply with spiritual food that they began to envision great hosts of people sharing in that spiritual banquet, at which there was always more food than could be digested, no matter how large the crowd. (ibid 245-246 )

Spong speculates that "Perhaps Jesus' presence was so great and his wholeness so apparent that he did effect cures in people. Perhaps some people needed only to touch the hem of his garment; others needed only to draw on his presence to find the courage to take that first step into wellness; and still others needed only to know God's love and forgiveness in a society that had taught them that pain, sickness and tragedy were signs of God's judgment and therefore of their sinfulness. Spong concludes that whatever the explanation, the life of Jesus seemed to call people into wholeness and wellness. "That was surely the experience for Simon. If that was so, then it should surprise no one that stories grew up around this Jesus that explained these phenomena as only first century people could explain them. I suspect that Simon heard these explanations; indeed, he may even have participated in creating them.... Simon saw mission, mystique destiny--all somehow associated with the meaning of Jesus and these things made an indelible impression upon him" (ibid 246-247)

Spong thinks that the great Easter message was associated with the Jewish feast of the Tabernacles(Booths or Sukkoth or Sukkot), a festival of first seven and later of eight days  It was a "great festival that rivaled and perhaps even surpassed, Passover in popularity during which huge numbers of Jews would journey to Jerusalem as they did for the Passover. But no Pascal lamb was slain and no memories of slavery were recalled...It was a feast all about the joy of harvest, about the freedom they had known in the wilderness wanderings when they lived in temporary shelters or booths, when even the sacred scrolls of God's presence were carried in a mobile tabernacle...The liturgy of the Tabernacles was built around readings from Zechariah, caps 9-14 and parts of Psalm 118 which were chanted in this celebration by the people as they proceeded to and around the altar of the temple. The Tabernacles' liturgy also focused on the symbols of light and water. Israel was to be a light to the nations of the world and out of Jerusalem would flow fountains of living water, which was a symbol for the Spirit that was to rule the world when God's kingdom came." (ibid 252)

Spong continues to speculate; "As the time for the festival neared, its contents quite naturally entered Simon's mind, and he began to associate it with his constant attempts to make sense out of Jesus' death. Familiar phrases from the liturgy of Tabernacles were called to mind: "I shall not die, but I shall live and recount the deeds of the Lord....The Lord has chastened me sorely but he has not given me over unto death. Open the gates of righteousness that I may enter through them and give gives to the Lord. This is the gate of the Lord, and the righteousness shall enter through it...The stone which the builders rejected has become the head of the corner. This is the Lord's doing; it is marvelous in his eyes...Let us rejoice and be glad in it". These words of the Psalm 118 spoke of the time when "the Lord your God shall come to Jerusalem and there shall he be continuously....the Lord will become king over all the earth...I shall not die but I shall live" and perhaps also the words of Zechariah: "They looked on him whom they pierced". Then as Simon broke bread with the other disciples who had gone back to their former trade as fishermen during one of their meals,"suddenly everything came together for Simon. The crucifixion was not punitive, it was intentional. The cross was Jesus' ultimate parable, acted out on the stage of history to open the eyes of those whose eyes could be opened in no other way to the meaning of Jesus as the sign of God's love. God's love was unconditional, a love not earned by the rigorous keeping of the law. God's love was beyond the boundaries of righteousness, a love that demanded nothing in return. Jesus' death was the final episode in the story of his life. It demonstrated as nothing else could or would that it is in giving life away love that we find love, it is in embracing the outcast that we find ourselves embraced as outcasts. It was a love that allowed us to stop pretending and simply to be. Simon saw the meaning of the crucifixion that morning as he had never before seen it, and Simon felt himself to be embraced even with his doubts, his fears, his denials in a way that he had never before been embraced. That was the dawn of Easter in human history. It would be fair to say that in that moment, Simon felt resurrected. The clouds of his grief, confusion, and depression vanished from his mind, and in that moment, he knew that Jesus was part of the very essence of God, and at that moment, Simon saw Jesus alive." (ibid 255). Jesus had become real to him again. Jesus lives again. It was a subjective vision sure but it is no less real for him. It was not objective. The realm of the objective is a category that measures events within time and space. Jesus "appeared" to Simon from the realm of God. That realm is not within history nor it is bounded by time or space! And Simon recalled Jesus' admonition to him, "Simon, if you love me, you will feed my sheep."." The risen Christ will be known when his disciples can love as Jesus loved and when they love the one whom Jesus loved, namely the least of God's children. In time, that would be incorporated into a parable and put on to the lips of Jesus, who would at that time be portrayed as the Son of Man who came in the clouds of glory to judge the earth (Mt. 25) (ibid 256). As Spong says, "it was in the words of later Christian theology, a new incarnation. God in Christ, Christ in the least of these. Yes, Simon saw Jesus alive in the heart of God." (ibid 257). "Simon saw. He really saw. Jesus had been lifted into the living God. It had nothing to do with empty tombs or feeling wounds. It had to do with with understanding that Jesus made God real and that God had taken the life of Jesus into the divine nature....Simon finally understood that death could not contain the one whom he now knew to be the Christ of God. This was the Holy One of God who for Simon, had the words of eternal life. Simon had seen the Lord. The risen Christ had appeared to one whom the church began to call Cephas in Aramaic, the Rock, Petros in Greek,...Simon opened the eyes of the others to see. Simon was the rock upon which the community of Christians came into being" (ibid 257-258) After this sudden flash of new understanding, Simon rounded up his companions James, John and Andrew and made their journey to Jerusalem and proclaim the new living Christ at the Festival of the Tabernacles. This was the Easter experience. It came first. It was from here that the legends grew. What was important was the truth of Jesus coming alive spiritually again for his disciples, not the legend themselves. To Spong, "Narratives and legends can be dissected, rearranged, interpreted, and even cast aside, without threatening either the integrity or the reality of the experience that forced both into existence" (ibid 260) .

Loftus agrees with Spong that this vision came "as much as six months after the death of Jesus. It was Peter who "opened the eyes of his fellow Galilean disciples so that they too, could see Jesus, risen...inside the liturgy of the celebration of the Tabernacles, the story of Easter unfolded" For similar speculations, Loftus advised us to read John Hicks The Metaphor of God Incarnate 1993 23-26, Marcus Borg & Wright The Meaning of Jesus: Two visions 130-35 and Gerd Ludemann What Really Happened to Jesus 1995 .Loftus cites also the examples of how other Christians dealt with failed prophecies eg. The Seventh Day Adventists and those of Jehovah Witnesses ( Walter Martin The Kingdom of the Cults 1985). He agrees with Michael Martin "Surely, it is not beyond the realm of psychological possibility, that in first-century Palestine, among the unsophisticated people who believed in the divinity of Jesus, one disciple's hallucination of Jesus could have triggered corresponding hallucinations in the others ( The Case Against Christianity 95) Dale C Allison also agrees. He says that once one disciple had told others about seeing Jesus, then the idea would have been planted in the mind of others, so how can we exclude the thought of psychological contagion?....The plurality of witnesses does not settle anything. Hypnotists can persuade a group of good subjects that they all see the same phantasmal object and religious enthusiasm can work the same trick." (Resurrecting Jesus 2005 297) In that connection, Loftus also approves the views of Bruce Malina & Richard Rohrbaugh in Social Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels (2003 327-29) according to whom in the ancient social world of first century Palestine, visions (which involved altered states of consciousness) were regarded as normal and occurred frequently before during and after the time of Jesus and was common among holy men and group visions also happened. Thus they regard the postmortem "appearances" of Jesus to be such "visions" as well as the views of Michael Goulder "The Explanatory Power of Conversion-Vision" in Copan & Tacelli Jesus' Resurrection: Fact or Figment (2000 86-103) and Gerd Ludemann The Resurrection of Jesus: History, Experience, Theology (1994 173-79)

Doctrine of Physical Resurrection of Jesus Result of Church Politics

Loftus believes that there was a gradual shift from the original view of Paul that Jesus' resurrected body was a "spiritual body" to the view that it was a "physically resurrected body"( Reginald H Fuller Formation of the Resurrection Narratives 1971 49) which may be connected with church politics. Beginning with Mark's invention of an empty tomb, the evangelists started to embellish the tale with more and more physical and other details.  According to Robert Funk, " As time passed and the tradition grew, the reported appearances became more palpable, more corporeal...the concern over appearances as the gospel took shape has to do primarily with apostolic right and succession...The move to replace a disembodied, supernatural figure with a more tangible, material bodily resurrection was actually triggered by a conflict with Gnostic views" i.e. it was the result of internal politics arising the empire building of different groups within the early church.( Honest to Jesus 260 269 272). Eventually, the followers of Paul lost out. From then on, Christians believed in the bodily resurrection of Jesus.

Loftus agrees with the conclusion of Paul Kurtz" one thing seems clear, that the evidence in the four gospels for Jesus' alleged historical resurrection is flimsy...What is clear is this: the evidence presented is neither remarkable nor convincing. This monumental event in history is thus not proven. it is not even likely or probable. It remains, in the last analysis, only an article of faith." ( The Transcendental Temptation 1991 157-158). He concludes therefore that an outsider to the Christian faith would not believe that God raised Jesus from the dead because of the paucity of historical evidence for it.  He thinks that a defender of miracles has a double burden of proof and that a reasonable conclusion based on the evidence is that Jesus did not rise up from the dead. To him, there is simply too many  superstitious beliefs in the Bible and the resurrection of Jesus is just one of them.

The Final Nail

In a section called, "The Final Nail in the Coffin: Philosophical Concerns", Loftus raises a number of interesting theoretical problems about the idea of bodily resurrection generally.

1. Will the atoms of which I am composed of, which at one time was an atom in the ground, or in a plant, a maggot, a lion, a bear, a shark etc be considered mine before they entered me or after they are shed from my body? Some bodies are lost at sea, burned at the stake or cremated  and with their ashes spread to the four winds. Since these human bodies no longer exist, he asks, "how can there be a bodily resurrection for them?"  

2. The bodies we now have are not the bodies we had in months or in years past. J D. Bernal argues, " It is probable that none of us have more than a few atoms with which we started life, and that even as adults, we probably change most of the materials of our bodies in a matter of a few months" (Science and History Vol 3 1969 92). Assuming that our bodies can be resurrected, which body gets resurrected?: the one at age 10, 40 or one suffering from Alzheimer's disease?

3.  Genetics have shown us that who we are is very much affected by what kind of bodies we got. As Linda Badham says, " "Our personal experience and emotions are intimately linked to our body chemistry. Indeed the limits to what we are able to think at all are set by our genetic endowment: so that one man's physiochemical equipment enables him to be a brilliant mathematician, while another's lack condemns him to lifelong imbecility....The subject of my conscious experiences would seem to be very much at the mercy of my physiochemical constitution." ("Problems with Accounts of Life after Death" in Philosophical Religion: Selected Readings ed. Michael Peterson et 1996 446 -447). If so, Loftus argues that " I cannot do without my body and still be the same person. So if I am given a perfect body in the resurrection, I will not be the same person. Besides, does it even make sense to say resurrected people will all receive perfect bodies? What does a perfect body look like?...Will some bodies have lesser stamina or strength? Will others not be as beautiful? Will some of them not allow for as much intelligence, or verbal skills? Are these things not imperfections? But if these resurrected bodies don't have any imperfections, doesn't that entail there will be no differences, and if so, will everyone be exactly the same? ...For Christians to say resurrected people will be rewarded differently with these differences or imperfections, because of sins of omission here on earth (ie lack of obedience) simply means not all sins are forgiven by God after all!" One solution might be for God to create a replica of our bodies with our personal memories programmed into it, as proposed by John Hick. (Philosophy of Religion 1990 120-25 and his Death and Eternal Life 1987). Loftus asks: how could a replica of our present body be transformed into a glorified perfect spiritual body and yet still be a replica of our body? If it is possible for God to create one replica of me, then he could also create multiple replica of me and if so, how can it be said that each replica is truly me?

In his Final Note, Loftus quotes with approval the limitations of our knowledge by Dale C Allison's book Resurrecting Jesus (2005); " History keeps its secrets better than many historians cae to admit. Most of the past--surely more than 99% if we could quantify it--is irretrievably lost; it cannot be recovered. This should instill modesty in us...The accounts of the resurrection, like the past in general, come to us as phantoms. Most of the reality is gone. it is the fragmentary and imperfect nature of the evidence as well as the limitations of our historical-critical tools that move us to confess, if we are conscientious, how hard it is to recover the past. That something happened does not entail our ability to show that it happened and that something did not happen does not entail our ability to show that it did not happen...Pure historical reasoning is not going to show us that God raised Jesus from the dead....We inevitably evaluate matters by means of our presuppositions...Probability is in the eye of the beholder. It depends upon one's worldview, into which the resurrection fits, or alternatively does not fit...Arguments about Jesus' literal resurrection cannot establish one Weltancschauung (ie. worldview). So the "resurrection" of Jesus belong to the Christian web of belief, within which alone it has its sensible place. Outside that web, it must be rejected or radically reinterpreted....One who disbelieves in all so-called miracles can, with good conscience, remain disbelieving in the literal resurrection of  Jesus after an examination of the evidence"( Resurrecting Jesus 337-42)  and Loftus concludes "I indeed have the needed confidence to deny Jesus resurrected, especially given the paucity of historical evidence on its behalf.".

I have read many accounts about the resurrection of Jesus, without a doubt, Loftus' is the most comprehensive and most closely argued. Does that mean the Christian must abandon his faith? To me, that really depends on one's personal decision. We may take the resurrection of Jesus metaphorically and continue to practise our faith as if Jesus were truly the Son of God. There are many excellent reasons why we can view the life of Jesus as an exemplary life. He embodies all that is best, most noble in the human spirit. He is larger than life. To the extent that he embodies, like no one else, the principle of love and the principle of life, he can truly be regarded as the Son of God. Alternatively we can admit the limitation of our own knowledge and leave the question open as one beyond our ability to fully know and understand. We know that the views of science are always provisional and also that at the moment, the area of our ignorance is far vaster than the area of our knowledge. At the recent inaugural lecture of my former classmate upon his appointment as  the head of The Institute of Advanced Studies at the  University of Science and Technology of Hong Kong, I learned that the greater part of the universe is filled with what cosmologists and physicists call "dark matter" about which scientists know practically nothing. We may very well be in more or less the same situation with regard to the possible existence of an entity Christians and other followers of the Abrahamic religions call "God".  There is thus good reason to keep our mind and our heart open. As a last option, if we feel confident that we are both right and fully informed, we may choose to abandon our faith altogether and perhaps follow another faith which does not posit the existence of a supernatural, all powerful, all knowing and all loving God, Buddhism perhaps?

Did Jesus Truly Rise from the Dead? III

(Cont'd)

Inherent Incredibility of the Resurrection Account

The biblical account relating to the death and resurrection of Jesus are full of episodes which are hard to believe and seem to go against common sense. e.g.
1.  Why would Nicodemus carry about a hundred pounds of mixture of myrrh and aloe to place on Jesus' body when he was buried (Jn 19:39).
2.  If John's gospel is right and Jesus was given a proper Jewish burial (Jn 19:40), why did the women come to finish the job only on Sunday morning (Mk. 16:1) since they had already watched the burial and the sealing off the gates to the tomb (Mk. 16:47).
3. Why did they come to anoint the body of Jesus only three days after his death and not on the day of and before Jesus' actual burial, knowing that the Palestinian climate is so warm.
4. If they knew that the tomb had been sealed, why they thought they could still somehow  gain access to it when they went there to anoint the Jesus' body again? Did they expect it would already be opened for them by the angels?
5. We also know from other historical evidence that it was not the custom of the Jews to use spices in caring for the dead.
6.  In addition, we learn that Jesus' disciples went back to their job as fishermen (Jn: 21)  even after seeing with their own eyes and believing in the resurrection of Jesus. Why didn't they immediately set about proclaiming that Jesus was the true messiah?
7. The story of chief priests and elders posting a guard at the entrance of Jesus'  tomb is most incredible. What prompted them to do so in the first place? Since the women did not tell the others what happened, how could the Jewish high priests etc. have known about the resurrection of Jesus and believed in it sufficiently to post a guard over Jesus' tomb (Mt. 27: 62-66) when not even the disciples believed or expected Jesus to rise again!
8. Even if the Jewish high priests and elders somehow believed in such a report , Matthew's report of their conversation is not credible (Mt.28: 11-15). Matthew claimed that the guards at the tomb saw an angel of the Lord roll back the stone and sat on it, the angel's appearance was like lightning and their clothes white as snow (Mt. 28: 2-4) and the guards were so afraid and "they shook and became like dead men". We're told that despite having witnessed such a miracle, they were paid off to deny it. Remember, the guards were not posted until the day AFTER Jesus' crucifixion. Why? Even disregarding this, if they could be bribed not to say anything about what they saw. ie. that Jesus actually resurrected and left of his own accord, is it not more likely that Jesus' body was removed by his own relatives by paying a bribe to the guards, assuming that for some reason, they had actually been posted over the entrance to Jesus' tomb as alleged? After all, they would be the ones most concerned about his fate.
9. And why should Joseph of Arimathea want to claim Jesus' body? Up to that point in the Bible, we did not know who he was and we do not know what his relation to Jesus was.
10. If the Roman soldiers should report the matter to anyone, they should have reported the matter to Pilate, not to the chief priests and elders (Mt. 28: 64).
11. And what was the lie that Matthew said they were to tell after receiving the relevant bribes? That they were asleep and that Jesus disciples stole his body! That would be an open admission of their dereliction of duty! Is that likely? And why should the chief priests want the soldiers to lie in the first place? In any event, it was a stupid lie. If they were asleep, how could they know exactly who it was who stole Jesus' corpse? Besides even on their own version, how could such a big and heavy stone over Jesus' tomb be removed without waking them up? If so, those who heard the lie would certainly draw the inference that they couldn't possibly know what actually happened and that would be quite sufficient to stop the lie spreading and hence Jesus' disciples could continue to claim that Jesus really did rise from the dead. The alleged lie was completely ineffective as a lie!
12. If it is claimed that the Jewish leaders did not deny that there was an empty tomb and was merely trying to explain it away as claimed by William Lane Craig.( "The Guard at the Tomb" New Testament Studies 30 1984 273-81), there is no independent Jewish sources that that was indeed what the Jewish leaders had in mind. If so, this means that the Jewish leaders were trying to deal with an early claim by Jesus' disciples that Jesus did rise from the dead. But according to Ralph Martin ( New Testament Foundations Vol 1 1975 243), Matthew was probably written some time in the 90's of CE. If so, Matthew would be responding to the claims of the Christian in his time and not at the earlier time shortly after the death of Jesus as claimed by Craig. To Loftus, Matthew's gospel is merely responding to the struggles of the church of his day when the Christians' Jewish opponents claimed that the disciples stole Jesus' body and then claimed Jesus rose from the dead. If so, then according to Stephen T Davis (Risen Indeed 1993 74) the empty tomb story was invented by Mark and written outside of Palestine during or after the Jewish war because only then would verification of this claim be difficult.
13. Paul claimed that Jesus rose according to the Scriptures (1 Cor 15: 3-4). But the Scriptures do not say anything of the kind. Some claim that the relevant cross reference was Hosea 6: 2 but actually Hosea 6: 2 says, "After two days, he will revive us; on the third day he will restore us, that we may live in his presence." According to Loftus, Hosea 6: 2 was originally meant as "an exhortation to Israel to hope in a forgiving God after being punished by him. Others claim that Psalms 16: 9-10 quoted by Peter in Acts 2: 26-27 which says "you will not abandon me to the grave, nor will you let your Holy One see corruption." as referring to Jesus . But the original meaning of this passage was King David's prayer for recovery from sickness.
14. Some apologists claim that if the early Christians were prepared to die for their faith, then what they believed in must be true. But many people who are not Christians are prepared to die for what they believe in too e.g. Muslims, Mormons, followers of Jim Jones, kamikaze pilots etc. As Michael Martin says, "The fact that people are willing to to die for their beliefs can show...strength of character, extreme devotion and even fanaticism. But it is hard to see that it indicates that what is believed is true or even that the evidential bases of the belief should be taken seriously". He asks whether if we treat Paul's conversion as evidence of the truth of the resurrection, whether or not we should count Muhammad's conversion to Islam from polytheism as evidence for the claim that Jesus was not resurrected (because Muslim deny Jesus' resurrection)?

No independent Corroboration of the Resurrection of Jesus

According to Loftus, there is no confirmation by either Jewish or pagan sources that:

1. Jesus rose from the dead. The only evidence is a pseudonymous quote inside Josephus to that effect (Antiquities 18:3, 3) but even conservative Christian scholars agree that it was a later interposition placed there by Christian scribes. The only other evidence is the Turin Shroud, a strip of cloth believers say covered the body of Jesus as he rose from the dead that produced a stunning image of a man who fits the description of someone who had been crucified. It was first noticed around the year 1355 CE but recent carbon dating of the shroud showed that it was 99.9% certain that the shroud originated in the period 1000 to 1500 and 95% certain that the cloth dated from between 1260 and 1390. ( Joe Nickell Relics of the Christ 2007 111--179)
2.  The earth was covered by darkness for three hours (Mk 15: 33) or that the Temple curtain was miraculously torn in two (Mk. 15:38) or that there was an earthquake (Mt. 27:51) or that the tombs were opened and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised and that after they came out from the tombs, they entered the holy city and appeared to many (Mt. 27:52). Surely if such things really happened, it is most surprising that there is no mention of it by any other independent source like e.g. Josephus.
3. Paul claimed that 500 people saw the risen Christ at the same time (1 Cor. 15:6). If so, it seems most surprising that there was no mention of this anywhere else except in the Bible.

Gospels may not be intended by their authors to be  read as history but as midrash

It is obvious that we do not have any narrative told by neutral observers or by Jesus' opponents. Everything which came down to us were written by people with theological and evangelicalistic aims, like preacher's stories intended to win converts. Because of this, Michael Martin warns us that "we should be suspicious of their reliability".  What they wrote therefore contains a lot of midrash (an attempt by Jewish rabbis to penetrate into the spirit of the relevant sacred text, to examine the text from all sides, to derive interpretation not immediately obvious, to illuminate the future by appealing to the past). John Selby Spong argues that "the question to ask of this Midrash tradition is not "Did it really happened?". That is a Western question tied to a Western mindset...The proper question is: 'What was there about Jesus of Nazareth that required the meaning of his life to be interpreted through the stories of Abraham and Isaac, Moses and Passover, Exodus and wilderness, Sinai and Promised Land, Hannah and Samuel, David and Solomon, Elijah and Elisha, the Servant figure, the Son of Man, Pentecost and Tabernacle, and a thousand other choices that served to incorporate the life of Jesus into the meaning of God known in the history of the Jewish people?" ( Resurrection: Myth or Reality 50 53). As a result of being cut off from this midrash tradition, "it resulted in extravagant literal claims for the historicity of what were in fact Midrashic retellings of ancient themes in new moments of history". (Spong  Resurrection 11-17)

What was understood by "Resurrected Body"?

What did the early Christians understand by the  resurrection of Jesus? To them, the resurrected body could be touched (Lk 24:39; Jn 20:27), could engage in eating (Lk 24:42-43), its physical appearance not easily recognizable even by his disciples (Lk 24:16; Jn 20:14), could pass through walls (Jn 20:19) or appear out of thin air (Lk 24:36), disappear at will (Lk 24: 31, 51) and appear with clothes on (?) (my question is, if so, are his clothes material or physical too?). Actually, we don't know much about the qualities of Jesus'  resurrected body. The only description we have is one attributed to Paul in 1 Corinthians 15, dated around 55 CE: "There are heavenly bodies and there are earthly bodies (v 40)...Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable(v 50)" and our new bodies will be different from our old as wheat plant from its seed (v 26-37). According to David Edwards,( Edwards & John Stott Evangelical Essentials 1988 207) "in the ancient world it was believed that a seed dies in the ground (cf. Jn 12:24).  The continuity pictured by Paul is continuity through death, which is why Paul dwells on the contrast". To Paul, Christ will "transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body" (Philippians 3: 20-21) and that "if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands (2 Cor. 5: 1-8). Jesus thought of the resurrected body in more or less the same way. To him, there will be no marriage in heaven because believers "will be like the angels in heaven" from which they "will shine like stars" (Mk. 12: 24-27; Mt. 13: 43)

What did Paul See?

Paul said that Jesus appeared 6 times to various people and that "last of all, he appeared to me" (1 Cor. 15: 8). We learn that Paul saw Jesus on the road to Damascus (Acts 9, 22, 26). He did not say that Jesus appeared to him in a way different from his appearance to the others. But he said he saw a bright light and heard a voice identifying himself as Jesus but we know that he never saw Jesus before he died. Did he see a physical body?There is no elaboration as to exactly what Paul saw or otherwise experienced. Was Paul suffering from an epileptic seizure like that of Dostoievsky in which he experienced God? A visual and auditory delusion?  To Willi Marxsen," what is being spoken of is a vision" ( Jesus and Easter: Did God Raise the Historical Jesus from the Dead 1990 69). Paul admitted as much (Acts 9:17; 26:19). If so, does that mean that Paul is saying that the others who claimed to have seen Jesus also had a vision?  The word used by Paul is "ophthe" (appeared), which is the same word used in the Greek Septuagint translations of the Hebrew Old Testament (LXX) to describe the "appearance" of God and angels (Gen 12:7; Exodus 3:2; 6:2-3) and the same word was used to describe Zechariah's vision of the angel Gabriel (Lk 1:22), of Abraham's vision of God (Acts 7:2) and the Epistles several times to describe Jesus' appearances ( 1 Cor 9:1) ( see  Richard Carrier "The Spiritual Body of Christ" in Price & Lowder The Empty Tomb 105-232). Perhaps it is for such reasons that Spong says, "There is no sense in Paul of a physical resurrection of Jesus back into the life of this world. God did not, for this apostle, raise Jesus from the grave to life on this earth. Rather, for Paul, God raised Jesus from death into God's presence: from the grave to God's right hand...The essential thing to note about Paul's understanding of the appearances to him is that it was identical with every other appearances on his list. That is, it was not a physical, historical encounter but a revelatory manifestation of the living Christ from heaven"( Spong op cit 50, 53) Richard Carrier argues that Paul's understanding of Jesus' resurrection does not require a resurrected body but that independent from Paul and later in time, the author Mark invented the story of the empty tomb and that "the empty stone tombs originated as a symbol, not a historical fact. It then became the subject of of legendary embellishment over the centuries, eventually becoming an essential element in the doctrine of a particular sect of Christian, who spurned Paul's original understandings, and insisted on a resurrection of the flesh instead."( op cit. 158-9).

Progressive "Creation" of the Resurrection Legend

If we were to read the various accounts of Jesus' resurrection by following the chronological order in which such accounts appear (Mark, Matthew, Luke and John in that order), we would have discovered a trend: the later the account, the more details of the resurrection are added! Mark's account ( the earliest) is the simplest. He merely says that the women found "a young man" sitting at Jesus tomb "But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you." So they went out and felt from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. (Mk 16: 7-8) By the time we get to Matthew, we have now got Joseph of Arimathea as " a disciple of Jesus" (Mt 27:57) who buried Jesus' body "in his own new tomb" (Mt.27: 60). The boy or young man in Mark has now become an angel (Mt. 28: 2-3, 5) and there was now " a massive earthquake" (Mt. 28:2) along with "a guard at the tomb" (Mt 28:4) and women who met Jesus (Mt. 28:9). As Carrier says, "There can be no doubt that we are looking at extensive legendary embellishment upon what began as a much more mundane story." ( op cit 165).

If we were to look at the accounts of Jesus' appearances in Luke and John, we would discover a similar trend toward more embellishment the later the account appeared. In Mark, there is no account of any appearance of the resurrected Jesus at all. In Matthew, we find people "clasping Jesus' feet" (Mt. 28:9). In Luke, we find descriptions of "eating" with Jesus and a description of Jesus' body (Lk 24: 37-43). In John, we find the doubting Thomas story where Jesus "proves" his bodily presence (Jn. 20: 24-29). The conclusion is obvious. As Peter Kirby says, "Since all accounts of the empty tomb are dependent on Mark, the story hangs by a slender thread."( "The Case Against the Empty Tomb" in Price& Lowder The Empty Tomb 2005 237).

This trend towards elaboration the later the account can similarly be discerned in the story relating to the birth of Jesus and also to the status of the Mary and the doctrine of Immaculate Conception . Mary in the later Pseudepigrapha was said to be a perpetual virgin even though Jesus had siblings (Mk. 3: 31-35)!

Why No Veneration of Jesus' Tomb by the early Christian Church?

If Jesus really rose from the dead and an empty tomb was left, then one can legitimately ask why it is that the earliest disciples of Jesus did not venerate the tomb of Jesus? According to James D G Dunn (The Evidence for Jesus 1985 67-68), "There is no evidence whatsoever for Christians regarding the place where Jesus had been buried as having any special significance" with pilgrimages and veneration. According to Eusebius (Via Constantini 3: 25-52), the alleged tomb of Jesus was not worshiped until the fourth century! Byron McCane  argues, based on the Jewish burial customs of the day, that Jesus was probably given a 'dishonourable burial and not an honourable burial as argued by William Craig (Paul Copan & Ronald T Tacelli (eds) Jesus' Resurrection: Fact or Figment: a Debate between William Lane Craig and Gerd Ludemann 2000 160-204). According to him, Jesus' body was dumped in disgrace in the Jewish graveyard of the condemned: " The shame of Jesus' burial is not only consistent with the best evidence, but can also help to account for an historical fact which has long been puzzling to historians of early Christianity: why did the primitive church not venerate the tomb of Jesus?" (Roll Back the Stone: Death and Burial in the World of Jesus 2003 89-108).

(To be cont'd)

Did Jesus Truly Rise from the Dead? II

(Cont'd)

In the first part of this blog, I have dealt with a number of reasons why we should be careful about what is being said in the New Testaments and not take everything at face value but only with a very large grain of salt. In the second part, I shall examine a little closer the kind of evidence we actually have to help us come to our own conclusion about what might really have happened. If Jesus really rose from the dead, it must be viewed by anyone as a miracle!

Are Miracles believable?

David Hume has said long ago that it is not reasonable for us to believe in a miracle unless it would be more "miraculous" or incredible if we were not to believe that it really happened than that it did not. He says that it is more probable that a miracle has not happened (no natural law has been violated) than that it has (natural law being violated) because "there must be a uniform experience against every miraculous event, otherwise the event would not merit that appellation.". In the modern world, there is a strong presumption in favor of the view that the natural law will not be violated. Loftus cited in support of his view that there was probably no resurrection of Jesus what is said by biblical scholar David F Strauss (The Life of Jesus Critically Examined 2006) when the latter said: "We may summarily reject all miracles, prophecies, narratives of angels and demons, and the like, as simply impossible and irreconcilable with the known and universal laws which govern the course of events." Hume found miracles incredible for, inter alia, four reasons:
1. claims of miracles are usually made by uneducated and superstitious people who lack common sense, integrity or a good reputation.
2. there are many instances of fraudulent miracles which goes to show only mankind's love to believe a wondrous and extraordinary story.
3. miracle claims often originate amongst tribes which are uncivilized, ignorant and barbarous but not nowadays.
4. competing religions support their beliefs by claims of miracles, hence such claims cancel out each other.

In The Case Against Christianity (1991), Michael Martin argues that to assess whether or not evidence of miraculous resurrection is reliable and the weight of such evidence, we should look at five factors as follows:
1. if the evidence of various witnesses are consistent, that would increase their evidential weight;
2. eye-witness evidence should be preferred to hearsay evidence;
3. if the eye-witness are known from other sources to be reliable and trustworthy, that would increase their evidential worth;.
4. independent confirmation of the evidence of the witness makes it more believable whilst lack of such independent evidence makes it less so.
5. if the purpose of the author in writing the relevant text leads us to believe that the document was not a reliable historical account, then this should lower the evidential weight of the relevant statement .
To me, these are sensible criteria.

Do we have eyewitnesses? Only the apostle John claims in his gospel that he ran to the empty tomb with Peter (John 21: 24) and the only evidence of Jesus' post-resurrection appearance is that from the apostle Paul. What we have are probably multiple-hearsay accounts written some 40 to 100 or more years after the death of Jesus which are later doctored, containing obviously fictional elements by people each with a clear theological and apologetic agenda, contradicting many known facts and inconsistent with each other, has little independent non-Christian sources corroborating the happening of the "miraculous" bodily "resurrection" of Jesus which would certainly not be believed were it to happen nowadays. And there is thus no evidence to suggest that their records are particularly reliable. Even the Christian scholar Richard Bauckkham admits in Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: the Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (2006) 93 that "Historical work, by its nature, is always putting two and two together and making five--or twelve or seventeen."  Loftus doubts if the author of John was one of Jesus disciples, as is often thought,  because of the generally anti-Jewish sentiments expressed in that gospel.

We should note that Mark, the earliest of the gospel upon which Luke and Matthew based theirs, the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus (written about by the other evangelists and by Paul) are conspicuous by their absence! All that women visiting the empty tomb said was that they had been told that Jesus had been raised and that when they left, they did not tell anyone about it because they were afraid.(see John Selby Spong Resurrection: Myth or Reality? (1994) 60-61). Those who heard the story did not believe it initially (Lk. 24: 11 and John 20: 24-29) including Thomas. John elaborates that Jesus appeared to Thomas "even though the the doors were locked". If so, then Jesus must have either appeared out of thin air or have passed through the wall! It was claimed that Jesus then told Thomas to put his finger in Jesus' hands and his hand in Jesus's side. How could Thomas touch Jesus' wound and hand if it were not a physical hand or a physical body with blood still oozing out from that bleeding wound? Or has the bleeding somehow stopped? If not, then it must be a vision which Thomas had! In addition, to speak will normally require a pair of lungs and a larynx! Did the post-resurrection Jesus have both a functioning heart, a functioning lung and a functioning pharynx? If Jesus was still breathing (John 20: 22), then he must have retained all such organs as well as a blood circulatory system. But then, did he not lose all his blood at the crucifixion? It is said that often, Jesus' disciples did not recognize him during his post-resurrection appearances. (Jn. 20:14; Lk 24:16)

Conflicting Accounts by Various Evangelists as to what Happened after Jesus' Resurrection

There are conflicting accounts of what actually happened after Jesus rose from the dead:

1. Mark, Matthew and Luke conflict with John in that there the women visited the empty tomb, encountered the angels and successfully relayed the angelic message but in John, the women did not encounter any angels on their first visit and were not told to relay any messages.
2. In Marks and Luke, the stones had already been rolled away when the women arrived but in Matthew, they saw the angels, there was a description of an earthquake and the stone was removed only after they arrived.
3.  Luke claimed that Jesus appeared on the first Easter Sunday to 11 men (Lk 24: 13, 36) suggesting all disciples except Judas whilst John denies that Thomas was there (Jn 20: 19-24)
4.  In Luke's version, Jesus rose to heaven in Bethany on the same day as his resurrection (Lk 24:51) But in Acts 1, Jesus ascended from the Mount of Olives 40 days after his resurrection!
Michael Martin (The Case Against Christianity 1991 83) thinks that the gospels are either inconsistent or "can only be made consistent with the aid of implausible interpretations"  Willi Marxen (The Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth 1970 74) argues that "The conclusion is inescapable: a synchronizing harmony of the different accounts of the resurrection proves to be impossible". Spong concludes in his Resurrection: Myth or Reality  (1994 105) : "When we embrace all of their versions in our minds at one time, we discover that all we have in the Bible about Easter is an inconsistent, contradictory, mutually exclusive witness"

(To be cont'd)

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)