The following is an excerpt from a book by John Stackhouse (an award-winning scholar, professor, historian and journalist) which reveals his extensive research and logic on one of the most important moments in history, the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. He and his commentary has been featured in The New York Times and The Washington Post and he has lectured at universities around the world including Harvard, Yale and Stanford.

Legitimacy of Testimony

Our main source of information about the career of Jesus is, of course, the New Testament. Some Christian apologists point also to references to the life and death of Jesus that appear in other ancient sources, such as the Jewish historian Josephus and the Roman writer Suetonius. But precious little can be gleaned from such sources beyond the brute fact of Jesus ‘s life and its termination by the Roman authorities in Judea. Not surprisingly, the only ancient writers who took seriously any details about the life and death of an obscure religious leader in a backwater of the Roman Empire were those writers who believed that he was in truth the Son of God.

We are confined, then, to evidently biased sources: writers who believe the truth of what they describe and, much more worrisome, are committed to the religion that emerged from those events. Isn’t the situation hopeless, therefore, before we even begin?

No, it isn’t. The gospel writer’s adherence to Christianity does not necessarily disqualify them as reliable sources of information. No historian devotes time and energy to a subject that does not interest him or about which he does not form strong opinions.

Philosopher C. A. J. Coady has thought a lot about the reliability of testimony, and in his modern classic on the subject he says this about our present concern—namely, about whether we should trust only the testimony of witnesses who have no interest in the subject about which they speak:

“The disadvantage that may arise from the partiality of an interest may be counterbalanced by the disadvantages that lack of interest may create. After all, a strong interest in some issue makes one pay a lot of attention to what is going on; the attention may be biased by the strength of the interest but the observation will not suffer from the dangers attendant upon casual concern. Lack of a strong interest in the issue or the outcome is liable to produce unfocused attention and lack of detailed observation. Roughly speaking, testimony can fail either through deceit or mistake and if partiality mostly induces deceit, indifference mostly induces mistake or inaccuracy.”

Mainstream Christians have concluded that the Gospels are at least basically reliable in their portrayals of Jesus. The Gospels (and, to the extent that they describe Jesus, the epistles also) vary from each other in details, even important ones, but their individual and composite portraits of the life and times of Jesus of Nazareth seem at least as reliable as any other historical sources we have about the ancient world. For one thing, there are four main accounts, not one or two, as is often the case with classical sources. And these accounts agree with each other far more than they seem to disagree.

Some skeptics have attempted to attribute this agreement to collusion among the four writers, but this seems a rather desperate tact. Some Christians have argued that it seems silly to level a charge of massive deceit against devotees of a religious master whom everyone agrees taught honesty as a supreme virtue.

It would be a poor conspiracy that obviously failed to iron out the many differences among the Gospels. The more sensible, straightforward, explanation for our having four different, but mutually reinforcing, accounts is that they are describing the same reality from four different and variously informed points of view.

Eyewitnesses to Jesus ‘s life were still alive at the time of the writing and circulation of the Gospels, and those eyewitnesses could easily and authoritatively have refuted, and did refute, any phony account. Written within the lifetime of the first generation after Jesus (between AD 50 and 100, with the death of Jesus dated at about 30), the four Gospels of the New Testament were accepted quickly and widely by the generation that had been taught the “Jesus traditions” by the apostles themselves.

So, while scholars argue over whether Luke has a particular historical reference correct or whether John is putting words into the mouth of Jesus that he never said, we might sensibly consider one thing that New Testament scholars rarely dispute. The early Christians themselves adopted these four as their basic community remembrances of the life of their Lord. The early churches prized these four accounts because, in their view, they told the truth about Jesus.

The chain of manuscripts that we now possess, thousands of them, go back to the 2nd century and even possibly the first. Indeed, the biblical text we have today is likely closer to what was circulated among the early Christians than was available until our time.

How Could the Tomb be Empty?

After his death by crucifixion, Jesus was buried in a tomb owned by a secret follower, Joseph of Arimathea. Jesus’s tomb was a cave sealed with a rolling rock of some sort. The four gospels record many, many details of Jesus’s death, burial, and resurrection, but for the present purpose almost all of these details can be set aside as we focus on just one: the empty tomb.

Each of the four Gospels records that it was found to be empty (save for Jesus’s grave clothes). Now, perhaps the Gospels are mistaken or dishonest about this assertion of a vacant grave. If so, then why, when rumors of Jesus’s resurrection began to circulate in ancient Jerusalem, did neither the Jewish nor the Roman authorities (neither group being friends of Jesus or his followers) simply go to the tomb and produce the body?

For that matter, why didn’t any skeptic simply find out where Jesus had been buried and investigate the situation? In fact, given the speed of decomposition, even taking into account ancient Jewish embalming practices, wouldn’t any body have sufficed at least to throw a shadow of doubt over the disciples startling claim? Given the emphasis that early Christian preachers were placing upon the resurrection of Jesus, the public production of his corpse would have smothered Christianity in its cradle. It seems much more likely, therefore, that the Gospel accounts are correct in their assertion that, for whatever reason, the tomb was empty.

Perhaps Jesus’s body was not in the tomb because he had revived and escaped. Modern movies are full of heroines (and villains) who appeared to have died, even brutally, but then reappear, somehow having had the strength to survive. This explanation, however, faces considerable obstacles.

First,

why would the Roman executioners, skilled in their terrible craft, be mistaken about Jesus’s condition and allow him to be taken out of their custody while still alive? It would have cost them dearly to have failed in their simple, if dreadful, task of killing this enemy of the state.

Second,

given the wounds from the flogging Jesus suffered from the Roman soldiers at Pilates behest, and the injuries he then incurred in the crucifixion itself, how likely is it that Jesus would be healthier after a number of hours in the tomb then he was when he was placed there?  How much more likely is it that, even if he had been placed in the tomb alive, he would have died from exposure or loss of blood?

Perhaps, in fact, the soldiers didn’t much care whether Jesus was quite dead when they handed his body over to his followers, but that was because they would have known his beating before the crucifixion plus his agony during it would have sufficed to finish him off before long. These men, who dealt in death all the time, were satisfied that this victim, too, was gone — or would be soon.

Third,

the grave clothes in which Jesus was wrapped, If they were typical of the time (and why would they not be?), would have been made of linen fiber, which is extraordinarily difficult to break. In the custom of the time, Jesus’s body would have been wrapped tightly from neck to foot, with a separate cloth for his head. Even a professional escape artist would find such a predicament daunting, but a victim of crucifixion freeing himself from such encumbrances is a preposterous scenario.

Questioning the Validity of the Resurrection

Resurrection as Myth

Still, is it not possible that a barely alive Jesus could have been expanded into a later myth of triumphant resurrection? Few scholars doubt that Jesus was crucified sometime around AD 30, and most agree that Paul wrote to the Christians in the Greek city of Corinth (hence the New Testament letters known as 1 and 2 Corinthians) about the resurrection fewer than 30 years later. As social scientists and literary scholars recognize, myths that make extraordinary claims, especially supernatural ones, that go on to shape whole communities usually take a lot longer than that to form: centuries, not a couple of decades.

The proposal of myth making, moreover, begs the question as to whether this particular group of disciples were likely candidates for an enterprise of this sort. As Jews, they might have hoped for a general resurrection at the end of time, during which all would stand before God in Final Judgment. But, as scholars of Jewish religion tell us, precisely no one was expecting or even hoping for the resurrection of a single individual while the rest of history moved on. The Gospels make it clear that the disciples were not expecting to see him again.

Were the Disciples Deceitful?

It could be, of course, that something else was going on and the disciples engaged in a different sort of plot entirely. Perhaps they themselves removed the dead body of Jesus precisely in order to create the idea of resurrection. To what plausible end would they have perpetrated this fraud, a fraud that cost many of them their livelihood, freedom, and life itself?

Were the Disciples Hallucinating?

A third alternative is that the disciples somehow all hallucinated —separately in some instances and together in others—such that they came to sincerely believe that their master was alive when in fact he was dead. Now we are really stretching, aren’t we?

How the Disciples Responded after Jesus’s Resurrection

Whichever of the three options one might select, one must deal with the second main datum to be explained: the extraordinary attitude and actions of the disciples after Jesus’s reported resurrection.

The Gospels portrays almost all the disciples as cowards during Jesus’s arrest, trial, and execution. Given the widespread Jewish belief of the time that the Messiah would return in divine power to destroy precisely the Gentile oppressors who were now crushing Jesus, it is entirely understandable that the disciples were thrown into a confusion of terror and despair. The Gospels tell us only what we would expect to hear about such followers at such a time.

What needs to be explained is the subsequent confidence of these followers in such a terrifically unlikely story; that the leader of their little band had in fact been raised to new life by God and had empowered them to bring the good news of his victory over evil to the entire world. Resurrection was the hope of some, yes, but as a general reality to be enjoyed by all of God’s people only after the Last Judgment and in the Messianic Kingdom to follow. One lone resurrection as the divine vindication of a crucified Messiah was considered a gross misunderstanding of Jewish religion.

The Christian Jews, however, persisted in their assertion that Jesus was indeed raised from the dead and that God had raised him so as to vindicate his status and his message as Messiah.

Were the Disciples Lying?

Let’s be blunt. Perhaps the disciples were liars and made-up the whole. They would have had to persisted in a large and sustained conspiracy lasting decades, without a single one of them admitting the truth of what actually happened. Furthermore, since it is likely that at least some of the ancient traditions about their deaths are true, then some of the apostles died, and died violently, for what they must have known to be untrue. How likely is that? At some point, surely at least one of them would have blown the whistle to save himself or his family.

Even if all the traditions about their martyrdoms are untrue, however, what motive would the earliest Christians have for teaching such a thing?

• They did not attempt to seize political power by exploiting this story.
• There was no commercial angle to be played, no money to be made.
• They certainly did not enjoy greater esteem from their fellows, Jewish or Gentile, but quite the contrary: they were suspect at best and persecuted at worst. Indeed, they quite directly risked suffering the same terrible fate as Jesus at the hands of the very same powers.

They gained only a few thousand converts for the first several decades, to no discernible profit. Why would they lie?

Did the Disciples Imagine the Resurrection?

Did they simply make up the reports of appearances of Jesus or did they all possess such powerful imaginations that they believed that they had seen Jesus, talked with Jesus, touched Jesus, and been commissioned by Jesus to convert the entire world before his ascended to heaven. Furthermore, did they do so with apparently no dispute about these matters among the central core of followers, even as the historical records show that the early church disagreed about many other, much less critical and dangerous matters?

Again, to be as careful as possible here, we can allow that it remains at least logically possible that the whole thing was a massive exercise in group fabrication of an intentional or unintentional sort. Airtight proof is never obtainable in matters of history. Each person who considers this historical question, however, must fair-mindedly assess the various explanatory options and select the one that fits the data best.

The Scope of Believers

Christians believe that God really did raise Jesus from the dead, and that this event is the once-for-all historical guarantee of the authenticity of Jesus’s life work.  Strange and unexpected as the resurrection was, it made sense of what Jesus said and did while he had been with his disciples. It wasn’t just an absurd event or meaningless wonder, but, to them, a credible, divine vindication.

Why have millions of people, across dozens of cultural lines—including highly trusted historians and archaeologists and psychologists and psychiatrists around the world—come to believe the same doctrines as those first century Jews, including this assertion of the resurrection of Jesus? Can they all be simply naive? All taking refuge in wish fulfillment? All setting aside their critical faculties for one wild, desperate hope?

Of course, one must fairly ask the same question about any other religion or philosophy. But it wouldn’t be, in fact, quite the same question as no other religion or philosophy asks people to believe such a strange assertion about what actually happened in history. This thought is expanded in the article entitled

The Extraordinary Claims of Christianity

So, one last historical question about Christianity in particular remains interesting: why have there been so many converts, of such different stripes, to such an apparently unbelievable story?

Could it be that people believe it only for the irreducible reason that it, somehow, is true?

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Reference

Can I Believe? Christianity for the Hesitant by John G. Stackhouse, Jr