Ok then, enough skirting round the issue. So dead men don't rise, right? Men who have been physically and psychological tortured and then killed by expert Roman executioners, laid in a tomb for two days with a Roman guard and a heavy stone across the entrance, and whose followers are a disheartened bunch of Galilean fishermen scared and pretty much ready to pack it in because their hopes for a political Messiah who would get shot of the Romans don't seem to have gone so well, do not generally leave the tomb, appear to their followers and spawn the world's largest religion. Except when they do. Thus (or words to that effect) goes the commonly given and reasonably compelling argument for what one of my classicist friends described today as "the best attested historical event in ancient history".
That account takes details from the gospel narratives (burial in Joseph of Arimathea's tomb, the Roman guard, the stone, the mood of the disciples) as coming from reliable contemporary historical sources. Now I'm no NT scholar, but it seems to me that the scholarly approach to the gospels is often dictated by preconceptions about whether Jesus is God. The one that's jumped out at me is the dating of Mark's gospel - often put by liberal scholars after AD 70 because it predicts the destruction of the temple. Fair enough, if Jesus wasn't God and didn't rise. However when you're trying to find out whether Jesus rose this is plain irritating. Talking to the above-mentioned classicist friend he was expressing frustration that the texts are treated differently by historians, theologians, classicists and NT scholars. All of which makes it very very difficult as a lay-person to wade through and figure out what the evidence really is. The best solution seems to be "assume very little, work on the basis that the gospels aren't reliable, and see where you end up".
So the next questions on the resurrection go along these lines:
1) What are the bits of evidence that no one can dispute
2) What are the possible explanations for those events
Now assuming one fights through that bit (not yet achieved on my part), this brings us to the next problem which is given different explanations, how do you assess them to arrive at your conclusion. I've spent a lot of time over the last few days reading different viewpoints on the resurrection, and there seem to be a couple of more rambling methodological questions
3) Does it matter which perspective you start from? Can you have a null hypothesis? If so, what is it? What happens if you can't reject either hypothesis? Mark W suggested starting by assuming the resurrection, since all other theories are a reaction to that original theory, which seems reasonable. Most arguments between Christians and atheists on the resurrection seem to get to an impasse because the atheist can't prove the non-existence of God and complains that this is attempting to prove a negative result and therefore impossible - a similar thing might happen with trying to prove that a historical event didn't occur. I'm not sure.... The problem is that people don't write historical documents entitled "a long list of things that didn't happen today, just so as we're quite clear 2000 years from now" and even if they did it would not be likely to be comprehensive!
4) How do you go about assessing the plausibility of a supernatural explanation? At least one liberal scholar suggests that Jesus had a long-lost identical twin brother who appeared after his death and fooled the disciples that he was the Risen Christ, in an effort to avoid a supernatural explanation for the resurrection appearances (though not the empty tomb). It certainly seems farfetched, but so does an infinite creator God who cares about tiny rebellious humans, to be perfectly frank. The muslims go to the opposite extreme - they prefer the idea of Allah mystically changing the appearance of someone else to look like Jesus being crucified so as to avoid the conclusion of a resurrected Son of God. Makes perfect sense, if Allah is One God and has no Son. Of course it's more plausible.... This is that irritating "working from your conclusions backwards" thing again. I really hope I've missed something in the above two points or the whole-Christian-faith-hinging-on-the-resurrection is going to get very frustrating very fast.
I'm still thinking about this stuff and have appointments to grill people who know about these things... more stuff on the resurrection soon... For tonight, I admit that I don't know, that my puny little nearly-second-year-medic knowledge and experience is not up to ploughing through all this stuff. For now I rejoice to confess with generations of Christians since the earliest church: "Christ is Risen. He is risen indeed. Hallelujah!" and to trust that God saved me by his own power and will keep me by his own power and for his own name's sake.
[For those who have boundless time and energy, a lot of these ideas are garnered from a debate between William Lane Craig (prominent Christian scholar and apologist) and Bart D. Erhman (interesting if wading through heated debates is your thing). I also came across interesting comments on the debate in this blog, where some conservative Catholics discuss the issues.]
A little blogging break
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You may or may not have noticed how little I’ve been posting this year –
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2 comments:
Yeah, I know I commented on your last post as well - just wondered whether you'd come across a concept that's been mentioned by CS Lewis, and perhaps more famously by Douglas Adams, he whose name almost always has to be prefixed with "the Late Great". It's the idea that Sherlock Holmes' maxim, "Whenever you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth," is actually inaccurate.
Adams argued (well, his character Dirk Gently did, anyway) that the impossible has a ring of authenticity to it which the merely improbable lacks. The example in this particular novel is of a girl who is somehow able to constantly recite yesterday's stock market prices. Obviously, it's possible that she could be picking up the information from papers or the TV and carefully constructing this elaborate facade, but the alternative - that she is somehow pulling them out of thin air - is considerably more likely, simply because we know that people just don't do things like that.
Lewis and Adams were in agreement on this point particularly as it applied to human behaviour. It's considerably easier to accept that something strange is going on, about which we know nothing (there's enough of those in the universe) than it is to accept that someone is acting in ways entirely contrary to their human nature, something about which we do know an awful lot.
And how does that apply to things like the Resurrection? Well, it is technically possible that the disciples, I don't know, tunnelled into the tomb, stole Jesus' body, then constructed a massive hoax in order to avoid having to accept his death. This goes entirely against who they were and what they were doing at the time, however. Far easier is to accept that in some way, a way we can't understand, Jesus actually did rise from the dead, and it was in response to this that the word of God spread throughout the world.
Not exactly brilliantly or coherently put, I know. I think it's a really interesting idea, though, and one which, although it annoys those with a purely mechanistic and materialistic viewpoint intensely, actually has a lot more in common with science and logic than it does with obstinacy and dogma.
--PB
Now, it would seem that a Christian law student is a good ally in this sort of thing... A good Ally... ho ho. Ally Henderson explained the right approach really well to me as follows:
"The assumption thing is one of the most fundamental problems with any argument. In some ways, what you have to do is a two-fold analysis. First, question those assumptions (whether a) God exists (or at least I'm willing to contemplate His existence) or b) God doesn't exist, to put it very simply). The problem really is that neither of those assumptions is challengeable. They're so fundamental. Second, look at the basic deductions that flow from those assumptions, in the context of the historical facts. So... if we assume b) then we have to find explanations within the continued assumption b) that explain things like the disappearance of Jesus' body, the witness of the apostles in the face of huge persecution, the apparent miracles and strange occurrences when Jesus died and after, the eyewitness testimony of those who saw him after his resurrection etc.
Concrete example: the eyewitness testimony of the apostles and others. Assuming b) God doesn't exist, we have to take out of consideration the vast majority of supernatural explanations (I say vast majority, as there could potentially be supernatural things without God. That's another argument) therefore the apostles etc. must have i) been mistaken, ii) had some collective hallucination, iii) lied or iv) been subsequently misquoted. None of these fits very well with other facts we know. So, there's one example of using the deductions to point out potential problems with the initial assumption."
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