Transcription
If Jesus claimed to be God, died, and three days later rose from the dead, that's pretty good evidence he's telling the truth, right?
All right, let's see it.
So, I can summarize the evidence using four words that begin with the letter E. Because Easter begins with E. First, E stands for execution. That Jesus was surely dead after being executed. Not only do we have five sources outside the Bible that talk about his death, but no less of a source than the Journal of the American Medical Association, a secular, scientific, peer-reviewed medical journal carried an investigation into the death of Jesus. And this was their conclusion. Quote, "Clearly, the weight of the historical and medical evidence indicates that Jesus was dead even before the wound to his side was inflicted." So, this part of the argument has merit to the degree that someone is responding to the claim that Jesus didn't actually die on the cross, but just was seriously injured and then didn't resurrect, just recovered from their injuries. I suppose that's an argument that is brought up from time to time. But part of this argument is based on a false claim. The Journal of the American Medical Association, in absolutely no sense whatsoever, conducted an investigation into Jesus's death. It published a paper that was written by three people who were not directly associated with the Journal of the American Medical Association that tried to make a medical case for Jesus's death based on the New Testament, based on some other sources and based on the assumption that the Shroud of Turin was Jesus's burial cloth. And so what that paper did was suggest that as long as we accept the historicity of what's being shared in the New Testament of what the Shroud of Turan may preserve artifactually regarding Jesus's death. Uh Jesus would have died on the cross. So that's what that paper was discussing. It's not demonstrating that Jesus actually died. It's saying if we take all of this as historical then yeah this would have killed Jesus. That's what that paper is arguing and it again was not an investigation into Jesus's death conducted by the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Second E stands for early accounts or early reports that he rose from the dead. Some people believe that the resurrection was a legend and we knew it took time for legend to develop in the ancient world. One scholar said at least two generations of time to negate a solid core of historical truth.
So this is a very easily refuted category error. But to begin, Lee is referring to this book Roman Society and Roman law in the New Testament by a an Sherwin White which was published in 1963. And Sherwin White develops this notion of mythical narratives taking generations to develop based on historical events and usually public historical events. But this is a very different thing from specific claims of historical events that are associated with those larger narratives. And I'll give a couple of examples. The Challenger explosion. I can recall having a TV wheeled into my elementary school to watch the news reports about this. Within days of the Challenger explosion and in some cases the very same day of the Challenger explosion, there were reports circulating about people having seen the astronauts wave out the window of the space shuttle or having heard communications just before the explosion that never actually happened or having seen that the astronauts initially survived the explosion. Claims like that developed very, very quickly after this event, and they're just not true. None of that happened. But those claims spread far and wide because all it takes to spread a false claim far and wide is somebody to report it and other people to find it valuable. And another example is 9/11. the very day of 9/11, there were people reporting that uh these buildings exploded before the planes ever hit them or that they saw additional airplanes flying around that never existed. There are a lot of different ways that claims can be made and can be popularized widely immediately after significant events. And so the notion that you would not have accounts of resurrection appearances popping up within months of the execution of Jesus because mythical narratives take generations to develop is just a laughable category error and is not true in any sense whatsoever. All it would take is for some people to report having seen the resurrected Jesus for those stories to spread like wildfire. And the more they're reported, the more they would be believed, the more they would be reported by others who are just reporting that earlier reporting. So it's very easy to account for how resurrection appearances could spread very soon after Jesus's crucifixion. But we have preserved for us in the scriptures a report on the resurrection of Jesus Christ, including named eyewitnesses and groups of eyewitnesses, including skeptics, that has been dated back by scholars to within months of his death. within months. And if somebody wants to read it, it's at 1 Corinthians 15 starting at verse three.
So here Lee is talking about the tradition that Paul reports having received and then passes on in 1 Corinthians 15 3-8. But he's being a little squishy with some of the details. So here are those passages and the resurrection appearances start in verse 5 and that he appeared to Kayas that would be Peter then to the 12 then he appeared to more than 500 brothers and sisters at one time most of whom are still alive though some have died then he appeared to James then to all the apostles last of all as to one untimely born he appeared also to me so some of Lee's claims are a bit of a stretch so for instance he said that this report has resurrection appearances even to skeptics. The reality is what Paul reports is that Jesus appeared to James, his brother, who apparently was not a follower of Jesus during his earthly ministry, but at some point became a follower of Jesus. And so, it's not skeptics plural. It's one person who at one point was a skeptic. And we don't really have any evidence that allows us to conclude that James went from skeptic to believer because of a purported resurrection appearance. We don't really know when James became a believer, much less why. Also, the notion that this is a report that dates to within months of Jesus's crucifixion is a little problematic. Scholars aren't really trying to figure out when this report started. They're generally more confident that they can determine the terminus antiqum or the time before which in other words the latest time at which this report would have started circulating. And so most of them will say it occurred no later than a couple to a few years after Jesus's crucifixion. I don't think we have enough data to determine a terminus postquam a time after which in other words the beginning of the chronological window of when this report began to circulate. We can't really know that. At best we can say it was in circulation within a couple to a few years of Jesus's crucifixion. But once again the fact that reports about resurrection appearances were in circulation even months after Jesus's crucifixion. that given the broader window within a couple to a few years after Jesus's crucifixion, that doesn't mean that it's likely historical. As I've already discussed, claims about constituent events associated with larger public events can begin to spread the very day of the larger historical events. So going back to the earlier claim that legends or mythical narratives take generations to develop. Uh that's just a category error that has absolutely no applicability whatsoever to resurrection claims circulating shortly after Jesus's crucifixion.
The third E stands for empty, the empty tomb. The strongest evidence is even the enemies of Jesus admitted the tomb was empty because when the disciples began proclaiming that Jesus had risen, what the enemy said, "Oh well um the disciples stole the body." So they're admitting the tomb is empty. They're trying to explain how it got empty.
Yeah.
So this is not really what I would call evidence because it's being presented as if we can confidently conclude both that there was an empty tomb and that Jesus's enemies claimed Jesus's disciples stole his body. But both of those things are things narrated in the gospels and they're not supported by any external evidence. So this only constitutes evidence for the resurrection if we're presupposing the historicity and the inherency of the gospels because it's the gospels where we get the report of an empty tomb. It's the gospels where we get the claim that the guards went to the high priest and said ain't nobody and the high priest said okay just go tell everybody that Jesus's disciples stole his body. We have no corroboration of either of those claims from any of the external available data. So, uh this is not really evidence to which we can appeal for the resurrection. It could be evidence but it requires its own interrogation, its own examination of its historical qualities. And I don't think that we can confidently arrive at the conclusion that those claims are historical.
The final E is eyewitnesses. Most of what we accept as being true from the ancient world is based on one source or two sources of information. So I don't think it's accurate to say that we only have one or two sources of information for most of what we know about the ancient world. Certainly that is true of some of the things that we accept about the ancient world. But for many of the things we know about the ancient world, we not only have literary sources, but we have iconographic, we have inscriptional, we have numismatic, we have archaeological data, we even have the bodies of some of the important figures from the ancient world. So a lot of what we know about the ancient world is established by the convergence of a lot of different types of sources of information. And I find it kind of a silly apologetic tactic to ignore all the other types of evidence that we have for reconstructing the ancient world and just retreat to talking only about biographical sources because that generates this kind of false sense of parody regarding the kinds of sources we have for the life of Jesus and the kinds of sources we have for the lives and the exploits of other figures from the ancient world. The reality is that there are many figures in the ancient world for which we have a wide diversity of types of sources of information that corroborate each other and converge on the reconstructions that we engage in of their lives and their exploits. And we don't really have that for Jesus. So I think that Lee is being a little bit misleading with where he's going with how we reconstruct the ancient world here. for the conviction of the disciples that they encountered the resurrected Jesus. We have no fewer than nine ancient sources inside and outside the New Testament confirming and corroborating the conviction of the disciples that they encountered the resurrected Jesus. That is an avalanche of historical data. It's not really an avalanche of historical data, but I think it's pretty safe to conclude that there were disciples who had a strong conviction that they had encountered the resurrected Jesus. That in and of itself is not particularly strong evidence that Jesus actually resurrected. We have that kind of testimony for all kinds of events that we can conclude didn't happen because people misunderstand things. People misinterpret things. People misremember things. People misreport things. People perceive things that aren't really there. I've talked about this a lot of times in the past when I bring up the cognitive science of religion and the role of psychology and cognitive psychology in understanding things like bereiement visions and things like that. So, there are all kinds of explanations for how the disciples got to very strong convictions that they encountered the resurrected Jesus that would be recorded in sources that were written decades later that don't actually make Jesus's actual historical resurrection any more plausible than it already is. So, this isn't really a strong argument for the resurrection of Jesus unless we're willing to go along with Lee's narrative and presuppose all the presuppositions that he's not telling us about along the way, including inspiration, inherency, historicity, univocality, all those kinds of things. And also accept his misrepresentation of how historical criticism works. So, I don't think this is a particularly convincing argument, but it doesn't have to be because apologists are just trying to perform confidence, conviction, and academic competence for an audience that already agrees. And as long as the performance sets off the tuning fork in the loins of their dogmatism, then the job is done, and that's all that they need to do. And the fit for this video has been Amphibia.