The Quandary of Some Christian Apologetics: History, Fact, and the Resurrection
Wednesday, December 15, 2010 at 12:33PM | by Otter 
He scores! While the resurrection is undoubtedly a tremendous historical claim, it is not for that reason a historical "fact" in any meaningful sense, nor is it possible to make it any more historically plausible. That's okay: it's a story of great power. But it will not bear infinite stresses as a historical claim.This is a conversation from the archives, sparked by a thread currently going on at The Flying Cow Tavern, a closed community. I wanted to jot down my reflections here.
Below, I use some comments from a friend as a jumping-off point for some reflections on the idea of "fact" as it relates to the Resurrection, with an eye on some major failures in late 20th century American Christian apologetics. In later posts I might tie those to the specific apologetics of guys like Lee Strobel and Josh McDowell.
The comment:
I accept the resurrection as historical fact. And if I start from that fact, and follow the various paths it points me down, I find that there are a lot of Christian doctrines that I end up being confident of. And some that I'm not confident of, but accept until I find evidence to the contrary. And some that I reject for a variety of reasons (experience being the main one).
I often come up against a wall of doubt in my faith, and at those times the resurrection of Christ is the reality that I can't explain away. I share that with anyone else who may be reading because it's the only thing that keeps me Christian. I don't assume that people who are reading my words should accept it because I do. I do hope that they might ask themselves the question: "Is the resurrection a historical reality that I'm confident of?"
Right.
What I want to probe here is the nature of two things.
One is the "historicity" of the event in the sense that "It happened; a video camera on Easter Morning at the Tomb would have seen a dead man get up and live." I have no difficulty with this, and I would like it clearly understood that I am not denying the historicity of the resurrection in this sense. How could I? How could anybody flatly deny it, epistemologically speaking? You can't prove a universal negative, that a thing never happened.
The other is a (related) subsequent set of claims about establishing the factuality of something:
I see the resurrection as 'fact' in one important sense: it either actually happened or it didn't. Similar to any other historical fact: Genghis Khan either actually existed or he didn't.
You point out that it's not objectively verifiable. True. But neither is Genghis Khan or so much of the rest of history that we readily accept as fact. Credible historical evidence looks very different from credible scientific evidence.
I have to disagree with my interlocutor (a) that the two cases are similar; and (b) about the nature of historical evidence, for a couple of reasons.
And those two points are related.
Temüjin, better known as Genghis Khan. Disinterested history agrees on his bad-assedness. Money quote: "The greatest happiness is to scatter your enemy, to drive him before you, to see his cities reduced to ashes, to see those who love him shrouded in tears, and to gather into your bosom his wives and daughters.”
In modern history, obviously you cannot treat the event itself like a scientific fact that you can go and look at. Absent our time machine, we rely on a couple of different procedures.
There are a lot of things that are not directly relevant here, such as what we call "material culture" or "material evidence" that supports a historian's account or doesn't.
But more to the point of our discussion, there is the "historical account" itself. And there are several reasons why the Resurrection isn't comparable to Genghis Khan.
In the first place, there is the principle of disinterest.
The gospels are uniformly written "that you might believe." They declare up front that they have an agenda. This does not make them inaccurate as modern history, but it prejudices us immediately (or should) against their commitment to objectivity and factual description (even assuming for a minute that the ancients valued factual description, which is a complicated assumption).
As it happens, there's good evidence that three of the four gospels are interrelated somehow (current thinking has it that Matthew and Luke used Mark as a source, which seems reasonable to me). This is something we see in history all the time: accounts that rely upon one another and must be "weighted" not as the testimony of three eye witnesses but rather as the testimony of one book (eyewitness or otherwise) that influenced (or even provided) the testimony of others.
None of which is to impugn the gospels. They are a unique literary genre, and not entirely like ancient history or biography. They follow unique rules.
But they aren't like the works that give us our certainty about Genghis Kahn in this way: we do not have a disinterested observer who tells us about the resurrection. In the case of Genghis, you have totally separate Chinese, Persian, and Southwest Asian accounts, all of which tell a broadly similar tale that happens to be supported by the material culture.
There is no such "external" corroboration for the Resurrection. We have the (interlocked) gospels of the Christian community: and I have no argument with someone saying that the first Christian community was utterly persuaded of the Resurrection. But it is hardly disinterested, and accepting its testimony on its own basis would be like accepting the (rather exaggerated) claims of Genghis himself as an authentic history. It might point you that way: but it's too self-interested to take at face value all by itself.
Putting all this another way, Genghis is properly speaking an "object." Any six or ten or a thousand scholars can sit down with the same evidence, and they can evaluate it. Since it's multi-voiced (coming from different sources), it's not open to the suspicion of being a local delusion. Enough material support is available to our scholars that we don't need to scratch our heads and wonder whether the written accounts we have were "making it up" for political or creative reasons. Details in their texts that lack support are weakened by that lack, but the general trend towards several independent sources adding up to a real Genghis and their general reliability gives us some confidence that on the sliding scale of certainty they are reasonably secure.
And yet it is evidence that we're in the habit of accepting. We do allow it to shape our 'knowledge' of the 'facts' and we don't feel compelled to qualify every sentence with "If Genghis Khan in fact existed . . . " All of our history books amount to stories that we choose to accept (or not, as the case may be).
This raises another good point. Very few people would deny that Jesus (or Genghis) existed. The reason is because the claim that Jesus existed is not extraordinary, and it requires no real support beyond the fact that enough people found him so compelling an individual. Genghis existed: the fear and respect he engendered left its imprint on texts all over Asia.
But if one of those texts were to say, "Genghis changed a horse into a butterfly," we would be in a different position. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. It isn't exactly that it "can't happen." It's that it's an extraordinary enough claim that we are justified in asking, "Why should I believe that?"
If ten totally independent sources claimed he had done it, we might seriously start to wonder what it all means. But in the case of the Resurrection, "totally independent sources" is not precisely what we have.
The historical record, so far as I understand it at this point, offers substantial evidence that the resurrection really happened, and precious little evidence to the contrary.
The "evidence" for the Resurrection is of one kind: testimony.
I'm emphatically not trying to disprove the Resurrection (I don't think you can any more than you can prove it), but I think when we talk about the "evidence" for it, we need to be clear.
Testimony is not the same as "evidence." 
Joseph Smith taking delivery from the Angel Moroni. With eleven signatures of witnesses, there's a good deal more support for aspects of this event than there is for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, considering that the four canonical gospels are actually unsigned. Or does historical fact stem from something else...?
Joseph Smith permitted eleven witnesses to see and handle the golden plates on which his revelation from God was delivered. This does not constitute historical evidence by itself, since the collective testimony of an interested community that is not subject to independent scrutiny cannot falsify itself unless one of the testators turns on the others. Inconveniently, the physical evidence, the golden plates themselves, were returned to the lending-library angel and are no longer with us. Furthermore, the witnesses are all dead and cannot be questioned to satisfy an independent researcher on the details that might put to rest doubts about the plates' authenticity.
Note that if Joseph Smith had said, "While sitting under a tree, a squirrel came by and dropped a nut," nobody would have asked to see the squirrel or the nut. The improbability of Joseph Smith receiving golden plates from an angel, though, does ask for at least some corroboration from a mind that wants to take it as "historical fact." Not necessarily from a mind that is looking for transcendent truth: but "historical fact" is a different kind of category.
Similarly the account of the apostles is uniformly (I think) that Jesus was raised from the dead: Paul goes so far as to say there were 500 witnesses.
But... well, that's it.
The Church then by its own assertion has a monopoly on this testimony. Nobody else has said a word about it.
The witnesses are dead. Nobody knows where the tomb is. And the "historical evidence" you write of is...? Well, no better or worse really than the testimony of Joseph Smith's witnesses, in historical terms.
It's quite true that the Apostles died for their faith, and this might perhaps prejudice us to accept their testimony. "To whom shall we go?" Peter asks Jesus. "You have the words of life." But this cuts both ways: on the one hand it's a mark of commitment, but on the other, it's a pretty frank admission that all their eggs are now in the gospel-basket: there's no backing out, now. While it might inspire faith or confidence, it doesn't really help that they are committed to this testimony when it comes to evaluating its historical weight... or rather, if it does, then to be honest we'd have to look at the testimonies of faiths and political convictions all across history to see what we too conveniently write off as fanatacism... suddenly we've admitted zeal as evidence of historical veracity, and that's going to create a few problems: the most zealous people you'll care to meet are Holocaust deniers or radical Islamic terrorists, and they might well give their life for their cause.
It's easy for people to dismiss the resurrection based on the assumption that such things can't/don't happen. But I don't think the issue is that it "can't happen." It's that if it's extraordinary, you need more than a story to raise it to the level of "fact."
Paul, rightly identifying this as true, offers his 500 (unnamed, unquestioned) witnesses: we can put them down as evidence of Paul's seriousness about the historicity of the Resurrection, but we can't put them down as "evidence," since we don't know who they are, and we can't question them, and they can't contradict Paul. In other words, he could as easily have posited six thousand witnesses, and we still wouldn't be any closer to a historical object until he named them and produced them.
But ultimately what it comes down to is, the burden of proof (and in history there is a burden of proof) falls on the claimant. Christianity comes saying, "A man rose from the dead." History says, "Alright, show us your evidence.
"We have four gospels."
"Four witnesses, good..."
"Well, two are sort of borrowing from the first. And they present a slightly more elaborate account."
"Hmm. How different?"
"Well... pretty different, but the core story is the same."
Pursed lips. "Okay, what about the fourth witness?"
"Totally different account."
"So... uh, what exactly DID happen?"
And here we of course get to the "core" of the story, that a man was raised from the dead, a claim so audacious that the burden of proof vaults off the charts, and all we have are five (I count 1 Corinthians and the 4 gospels) differing accounts, and dead witnesses.
Oh, and just to make matters worse: a conspiracy theory that anybody who denies it has been bribed and threatened (Matthew 28:11-15).
Would you accept Genghis Khan's horse-turned-into-butterfly under these circumstances?
What's the conspiracy theory you mention? Is it plausible at all?
Conspiracy theories are just the many ways one has of casting doubt on (or even co-opting) contrary evidence.
"The government denies that aliens crash landed in the desert: that's just what the government would do if it were true! So that strengthens our case!" In the conspiracy mind-set, the government's denial that aliens crash-landed in the desert actually strengthens the case that aliens did crash-land in the desert.
The trouble with conspiracy theories is that disconfirmation becomes confirmation, but only in the mind of the believer. He takes a particle of justifiable mistrust in government, and expands it into an assumption about how we can know things are true.
Here's what I mean:
If your testimony says, "There actually were two witnesses to the Resurrection: the guards at the tomb," your historian says, "Excellent! Just what we need! Bring 'em in!"
Two disinterested (even hostile!) witnesses who can tell you that the Resurrection happened? This is testimony-gold: it satisfies the demand for disinterested confirmation.
Unfortunately, the Christian testimony then shuffles its feet and says, "They won't testify to the Resurrection, I'm afraid."
Historian says, "That's not so good. Why not?" (As a historian, remember, he regards the burden of proof as being on the one who claims that something happened.)
Christian says, "Well, they were bribed and threatened to say that we stole the body."
Historian wavers between asking the Christian, "How do you know that they were bribed?" and instead decides to bring them in, and they say, "Yeah, the Christians came in the night and stole the body."
Christian leaps up triumphantly and says, "See? That's just what I said they'd say! My story is true!"
Disconfirmation becomes confirmation, doubt becomes evidence to the believer...
...but the Historian raises his eyebrows coldly.
Reader Comments (4)
I've run into more than one person who insists that the Bible, Old and New Testament alike, is 100% fable and all the persons mentioned therein are fictional. The thinking seems to be that if one finds Christianity per se to be unbelievable, the ancient documents accepted into the canon cannot have any relationship to reality whatsoever. Not a very scholarly perspective, to be sure, but I don't think it's that unusual.
I am in absolute and complete agreement with you that the Resurrection cannot be proven/disproven. And yet I can’t resist picking at a detail here and there. (Not sure what that says about me, but it can’t be good. ;))
But what would such a disinterested observer look like? If the accounts of “believers”—those who witnessed the Resurrection and went on to write about it and whose accounts were canonized—are discredited as being too vested to be credible, we’re looking for someone who says, “Well, I witnessed it, but I don’t believe that I witnessed it and I will provide written testimony to that fact.” That seems, well, weird.
Now, perhaps you’re thinking instead of someone who witnessed a hoax perpetrated by the disciples and wrote about it. The presence of such a document would not necessarily dissuade me from believing in the Resurrection; conversely, if we had written accounts of the Resurrection from a hundred witnesses and one lone testimony describing a hoax, you would still be free to discredit the hundred “believing” witnesses as hopelessly unreliable and put your faith in the account of the hoax. History and scholarship will almost certainly continue to grant both you and I the luxury of believing what we believe.
This is a great question, Susan.
Let's take a case that's not entirely parallel but at least not perpendicular.
In the case of Israel and the House of David, we can at least point to archeological evidence that there were people who noticed there was such a thing. Most often they were people who had made war on the Israelites or the House of David. Now and then maybe something like indifference crops up, or even disdain. (A stele in Egypt remarks about Israel that "Its seed is no more.")
In the case of the Resurrection, you might for instance have some evidence that the tribe of Christians left SOME Resurrection-sized shadow or footprint on the local culture. I mean, even a scribble on a first century wall, "Jesus is risen," followed by another scribble in another hand-writing, "... so have HIM make the coffee."
There are no non-Christian contemporaneous accounts that corroborate or even notice the gospel accounts. In the case of the crucifixion that's not surprising, nor alarming: it isn't an extraordinary claim to say that a Jew claiming to be the Messiah, the Son of David, was executed for sedition. The language of Jesus in the gospels IS seditious. And the penalty for sedition was a horrible death out in the provinces.
But in the case of an extraordinary claim like the Resurrection, a total silence of external notice is very loud.
This is complicated by the fact that the Resurrection might not have originally been a physical one at all: the earliest textual reference to it is a little problematic: the Greek word Paul uses to insist that Christ "appeared" to 500 witnesses does not presuppose a physical body. It's ophthe, an aorist passive of horao [to see] and might be rendered "Made himself seen." It's been connected credibly to the way that Christ "appears" in Eucharist, for instance, which on the one hand strengthens Eucharist, but you can appreciate how on the other how it calls into question the nature of the apparitions of Jesus.
But then, 1 Corinthians 15 is very "body conscious." I'm still thinking through the degree to which that important chapter is continuing the book-long metaphor of the Church as Body, which would render it almost useless for arguing a strong physical resurrection. Not that I'm trying to get there, just trying to see if that makes more sense of the book: I've long been a little curious about how Paul ties the physical body of the individual in that chapter (as I have always assumed he means the word "body" there) to the rest of the book in which the "body" is metaphorical, or at least looped around its metaphorical meaning of "the Church."
Sorry, just reflecting.
And then Mark's early account of the resurrection is incredibly weak. Right where I'd most want to see a strong resurrection appearance, we do not get it.
My point is not precisely that they didn't believe in a physical resurrection: it's that I'm no longer sure that was their point. In the absence of anybody else in the first century chattering about such a resurrection... well... what does one have?
I'd argue that the fact that you and I are discussing this 2,000 years later is evidence that local culture was influenced to very large degree, indeed!
Re:
and
I’d say that what we have is the relatively small number of folks--say, no more than 500--who claimed to have seen Jesus alive and walking after his death, including a couple who wrote about it, and who went on to "change the world" (an ambitious phrase, but defensible, I think, when looking at the impact of Christianity on culture and history) on the strength of it. And then you have the vast numbers of their contemporaries who saw no such thing and wrote off the believers as band of religious crackpots (and who can blame them?—we are all in agreement that it’s unlikely, to say the least).
Unfortunately, this is the sort of thing where I have only my poor wits to guide me, whereas you, O Great Professor Otter, presumably have a greater familiarity with the "industry standards" regarding these things. The above situation seems quite reasonable to me: it does not involve any conspiracy theory, or indeed any psychological or political actions that strike me as out-of-the-ordinary. But since I am not A Scholar, I am in a somewhat dependent position: I must either take your word for it that the absence of non-canonical corroboration is highly significant, or become more of a scholar myself and revisit the issue.