Vorkosigan

Since Phil has stopped by here and left us this link, I thought I'd go over part of it. Most of these arguments lie in pathetic, strawman understandings of the Bible, early Christian history, comparative religions, and skeptical arguments (all of which come from scholars, in any case). Unfortunately I have been forced to copy quite a bit. Hope Phil doesn't mind. Phil is in red, my response is in black.

Information taken from here:

EVIDENCE FOR THE RESURRECTION OF CHRIST: A Challenge for Skeptics
Refutation of the Conspiracy Theory: Seven Arguments
Why couldn't the disciples have made up the whole story?
(1) Blaise Pascal gives a simple, psychologically sound proof for why this is unthinkable:
"The apostles were either deceived or deceivers. Either supposition is difficult, for it is not possible to imagine that a man has risen from the dead. While Jesus was with them, he could sustain them; but afterwards, if he did not appear to them, who did make them act? The hypothesis that the Apostles were knaves is quite absurd. Follow it out to the end, and imagine these twelve men meeting after Jesus' death and conspiring to say that he has risen from the dead. This means attacking all the powers that be. The human heart is singularly susceptible to fickleness, to change, to promises, to bribery. One of them had only to deny his story under these inducements, or still more because of possible imprisonment, tortures and death, and they would all have been lost. Follow that out." (Pascal, Pensees 322, 310)

The first indicator of problems, of course, is the use of the term either right away, signaling the emerging presence of a false dichotomy. Let's examine it more closely.

First, Pascal assumes the history as presented in the early proto-orthodox writings comports with reality. It is too complex to go into here, but it is likely that the history of early Christian Pascal is relying on is utter nonsense. In which case, his argument is too.

Second, even taking the history as "authentic," there is no reason that the disciples could not have been hoaxed or confused. In our own time the Heaven's Gate cult committed suicide in hope of getting on a UFO that they'd mistakenly thought was riding behind a comet. Similarly, the early Mormon leadership was hoodwinked by Josephy Smith, who had been a con man prior to his realization that there was more money and power to be made in religion.

Third, "the hypothesis that the Apostles were knaves is quite absurd" is simply an argument from incredulity. History affords many examples of knaves postulating visions in groups. During the last days of the Taipings, their leaders all claimed to be in communication with the Almighty. Jim Jones' leadership regularly hoodwinked its followers, and I doubt that Phil believes that the leadership of Scientology are sincere believers in the nonsense that cult promulgates. The Apostles could well have been knaves; considering the portraits we have of them betraying Jesus, committing murder by magic, and fighting and scrapping with each other, it is even likely.

Finally, there is nothing incompatible with the history even as recorded and the disciples as honestly believing they saw visions of the risen Jesus.

The "cruncher" in this argument is the historical fact that no one, weak or strong, saint or sinner, Christian or heretic, ever confessed, freely or under pressure, bribe or even torture, that the whole story of the resurrection was a fake a lie, a deliberate deception. Even when people broke under torture, denied Christ and worshiped Caesar, they never let that cat out of the bag, never revealed that the resurrection was their conspiracy. For that cat was never in that bag. No Christians believed the resurrection was a conspiracy; if they had, they wouldn't have become Christians.

This is rank nonsense. The leadership may have believed anything; we don't know. Although there are traditions that the early leaders were martyred, there is no solid evidence for it. There are no records of any martyrdoms in which their words were preserved. There is thus no historical support for the argument presented here.

(2) If they made up the story, they were the most creative, clever, intelligent fantasists in history, far surpassing Shakespeare, or Dante or Tolkien. Fisherman's "fish stories" are never that elaborate, that convincing, that life-changing, and that enduring.

This is another argument from incredulity. First, they could well have been extremely clever (religious leaders often are) and second, we know that they did make up the stories, as an examination of any of the Gospels against the Old Testament will show. The writer of Mark makes extensive use of Old Testament models to create his story, for example. Thus, not only is this argument fallacious, it is also provably wrong.

(3) The disciples' character argues strongly against such a conspiracy on the part of all of them, with no dissenters. They were simple, honest, common peasants, not cunning, conniving liars.

We know nothing about the disciples, so this claim is basically historical nonsense. The letters of Paul do not give the idea that the disciples were unlettered, while the Gospel of Mark, where the list of names first appears, gives every indication that their placement in Galilee, as well as their previous occupation of fisherman, was an invention of the writer of Mark, based on the OT, as well as on prominent Markan themes. The scene in Mark 1:16-20 where the disciples are called is based on 1 Kings 19:19-21. Note the parallels, listed in Brodie (2000, p91):

*the action begins with a caller...and with motion toward those to be called;
*those called are working (plowing/fishing);
*the call, whether by gesture (Elijah) or word (Jesus) is brief;
*later, the means of livelihood are variously destroyed or mended, the plow is destroyed, but the nets are mended -- a typical inversion of images...;
*after further movement, there is a leave-taking of home;
*there is also a leave-taking of other workers;
*finally, those who called follow the caller.

The "fishers of men" line is taken from Jeremiah 16:16, which offers a reference to "fishers of men" which, as Donahue and Harrington (2002, p75) and Meier (2001, p194n122) point out, occurs in an eschatological context:

"Lo, I am sending for many fishers, An affirmation of Jehovah, And they have fished them, And after this I send for many hunters, And they have hunted them from off every mountain, And from off every hill, and from holes of the rocks.(YLT)"

They weren't even lawyers! Their sincerity is proved by their words and deeds. They preached a resurrected Christ and they lived a resurrected Christ. They willingly died for their "conspiracy." Nothing proves sincerity like martyrdom.

No credible evidence exists for the martyrdom of any of the disciples. And since there is no record of any martyrdom, there is no record that they were "sincere." Hence any such claim is unsupported apologetic rhetoric.

They change in their lives from fear to faith, despair to confidence, confusion to certitude, runaway cowardice to steadfast boldness under threat and persecution, not only proves their sincerity but testifies to some powerful cause of it. Can a lie cause such a transformation? Are truth and goodness such enemies that the greatest good in history -- sanctity -- has come from the greatest lie?

This is committed believer rhetoric assumptive of what it is trying to prove, and entirely nonsensical.

Use your imagination and sense of perspective here. Imagine twelve poor, fearful, stupid (read the Gospels!) peasants changing the hard-nosed Roman world with a lie. And not an easily digested, attractive lie either. St. Thomas Aquinas says:

Again, assumptive that the story in the Gospels of the apostle's origin is true. All indications are that it is ficition from the hand of Mark.

(4) There could be no possible motive for such a lie. Lies are always told for some selfish advantage. What advantage did the "conspirators" derive from their "lie" ? They were hated, scorned, persecuted, excommunicated, imprisoned, tortured, exiled, crucified, boiled alive, roasted, beheaded, disemboweled and fed to lions -- hardly a catalog of perks!

This simply repeats the previous arguments in slightly different form. One of the problems of using fallacies unsupported by evidence is that one tends to become repetitive. Here is simply the argument from incredulity again.

(5) If the resurrection was a lie, the Jews would have produced the corpse and nipped this feared superstition in the bud. All they had to do was go to the tomb and get it. The Roman soldiers and their leaders were on their side, not the Christians'. And if the Jews couldn't get the body because the disciples stole it, how did they do that? The arguments against the swoon theory hold here too: unarmed peasants could not have overpowered Roman soldiers or rolled away a great stone while they slept on duty.

Once again, we face the basic problem. First, the empty Tomb story is an invention of Mark's; it is not mentioned in Paul. In Mark it is clearly dependent on Old Testament sources, and is most likely a fiction. The argument presented here takes the story at face value, something a serious thinker should never do.

In addition to taking the story at face value, the argument here has absorbed the anti-Semitic glosses of the later gospels, written during a period when Christianity and Judaism were opposed to one another. The idea that "the Jews" exist as a monolithic group opposed to Christianity is fictional; no such monolith existed. Indeed, there would have been many Jews who would welcome the idea of a Resurrected savior as a variant of traditions that had been part of Jewish lore and ideas for centuries, the so-called "Two Powers in Heaven" beliefs, which crop out in the OT, but more explicitly in the Jewish apocrypha. It was condemned by later rabbis as a heresy.

The fact is that in the 20s and 30s there was no monolithic Judaism, but a Judaism of many disparate groups, all of which fought with each other, and hardly likely to notice anything carried on by a few hundred people in a city the size of Jerusalem, even assuming that the Christian portrait of this history as beginning in Jerusalem is true (although the evidence indicates that Christianity is more likely a product of the Jewish diaspora).

(6) The disciples could not have gotten away with proclaiming the resurrection in Jerusalem -- same time, same place, full of eyewitnesses -- if it had been a lie. William Lane Craig says,

Craig is not exactly renowned for being a particularly deep thinker. Needless to say, this argument is yet another version of the Argument from Incredulity that assumes again, a monolithic Judaism that is a back-projection of the later Gospel writers into the era of Jesus. There is no reason that anyone would have put any effort into suppressing nascent Christianity.

Further, as Paula Fredriksen (among many scholars) points out, if the Romans executed Jesus, why didn't they whack the disciples? The answer is obvious: the portrait of the beginnings of Christianity as the Big Bang from Christ's death is radically flawed. The entire trial and execution scene, which stems from Mark, is an obvious fiction dependent on the Old Testament, other Jewish writings, and perhaps on Josephus.

(7) If there had been a conspiracy, it would certainly have been unearthed by the disciples' adversaries, who had both the interest and the power to expose any fraud. Common experience shows that such intrigues are inevitably exposed (Craig, ibid).

This is a variant of the previous argument(s), and thus, already refuted. There were no enemies (that too is a fantasy of the later gospels from a period of persecution) so this whole argument collapses due to its lack of knowledge of the actual state of affairs, as well as its overly credulous reading of the gospel history.

In conclusion, if the resurrection was a concocted, conspired lie, it violates all known historical and psychological laws of lying. It is, then, as unscientific, as unrepeatable, unique and untestable as the resurrection itself. But unlike the resurrection, it is also contradicted by things we do know (the above points).

As we have seen, there are numerous instances of concocted religions in history, it violates no account of human nature, relies on too-credulous a reading of the texts in question, is ignorant of the realities of Jewish religion in the first century, is unsupported by evidence, and is based entirely on variants of the same argument from incredulity. This argument is pathetic indeed.

Vorkosigan

PhilVaz

I see you want to pick a fight huh? Calling my bluff huh? I enjoy the argument and boards here, but don't check in that often, except creation/evolution. Have read many of the articles on this site over the years, and may be the only Catholic apologetics site on the Internet that links to the Infidels. :notworthy

Not sure if I want to spend the time arguing here. My "specialty" is the whole Protestant-Catholic thing, I'm not very good with the atheist-skeptic-Catholic debate.

So I take it you go with the "conspiracy theory" as the best of the alternatives (as opposed to the resurrection, hallucination, swoon, or myth options) mentioned by Kreeft? So you believe the best explanation of the evidence is that Christianity and the resurrection story is a "concocted, conspired lie" (quoting Kreeft) and has no more basis in history than the cult of Jim Jones, Joseph Smith's visions, UFO's, and Scientology?

Hey, what happened to the radical "Jesus didn't exist" option and the apostles didn't either? Ah ha, maybe Jesus and some of his apostles did exist. I guess I have something to build on there....

True, Paul doesn't mention the "empty tomb" explicitly, but he says "Jesus died, was buried, and after three days rose again," and lists some supposed eyewitnesses (1 Corinthians 15:1-7). So Paul assumes the empty tomb.

As for credible evidence of martydoms, there is Stephen mentioned in Acts 7, and traditions of the early Fathers e.g. "Peter and Paul" being "martyred in Rome" as probably the most mentioned (documentation here Was Peter Ever in Rome?) and the Martyrdom of Polycarp, a disciple of John, and the Martyrdom of Ignatius of Antioch (c. 107 AD), which are all very early Christian disciples or followers of Jesus. But I guess you consider none of these writings very reliable?

From my "Was Peter in Rome?" article:

HARNACK: "...to deny the Roman stay of Peter is an error which today is clear to every scholar who is not blind. The martyr death of Peter at Rome was once contested by reason of Protestant prejudice." -- Adolph Harnack cited in THE SEARCH FOR THE TWELVE APOSTLES by William Stuart McBirnie (Tyndale House, 1988), p. 63

BRUCE: "That Peter as well as Paul was put to death at Rome under Nero is the UNANIMOUS testimony of Christian tradition so far as it touches this subject.....That Peter and Paul were the most eminent of many Christians who suffered martyrdom in Rome under Nero is CERTAIN; that they were claimed as co-founders of the Roman church and that this, together with their martyrdom there, conferred great religious (as distinct from political) prestige on that church, is likewise CERTAIN...." -- F.F. Bruce, NEW TESTAMENT HISTORY (Doubleday and Co, 1971), p. 403,410

CULLMANN: "It is sufficient to let us include the martyrdom of Peter in Rome in our final historical picture of the early Church, as a FACT which is relatively though not absolutely assured. We accept it, however, with the self-evident caution that we have to use concerning many other facts of antiquity that are universally accepted as historical. Were we to demand for all facts of ancient history a greater degree of probability, we should have to strike from our history books a large proportion of their contents." -- Oscar Cullmann, PETER : Disciple, Apostle, Martyr (1962), p. 114

LIETZMANN: "ALL the early sources...clearly suggest to us, namely, that Peter sojourned in Rome and died a martyr there. Any other hypothesis regarding Peter's death piles difficulty upon difficulty, and cannot be supported by a single document." -- Hans Lietzmann, from PETER AND PAUL IN ROME cited in Bruce, p. 404

PELIKAN: "The martyrdom of both Peter and Paul in Rome....belongs to [Christian] tradition. It has often been questioned by Protestant critics, some of whom have even contended that Peter was NEVER in Rome. But the archaeological researches of the Protestant historian Hans Lietzmann, supplemented by the library study of the Protestant exegete Oscar Cullmann, have made it extremely difficult to deny the tradition of Peter's death in Rome under the emperor Nero....The account of Paul's martyrdom in Rome, which is supported by much of the same evidence, has not called forth similar skepticism." -- Jaroslav Pelikan, THE RIDDLE OF ROMAN CATHOLICISM (Abingdon Press, 1959), p. 36-37

Do you have any contrary scholar or contrary primary evidence that says Peter and Paul were not martyred in Rome? All the evidence we have from the early Church says they were.

Phil P

rlogan

Shucks Vork - the varsity squad ought to let the second string get some action when the water is so shallow.


Say, Phil - I noted that you mentioned having accepted evolution. So I think there is some real hope for you to take on a study of these texts independent of the organized church agenda.

Once you've broken free of the strawmen I saw on your site there, it is a fascinating detective story to trace the origins and development of the Christian myth to its 3rd Century ossification.

You've been in the clutches of people who are telling you what the "opposing arguments" are instead of actually reading them. Since you've been through the evolution/creation drill that ought to be something you can appreciate. As you saw there, the creationists make absurd characterizations of evolution and do not contend with the actual arguments and data.


Doherty's Jesus puzzle is a quick read and should get you thinking in the right direction.

Vorkosigan

If you persist in understanding everything simplistically, there is no way that discussion can take place.

But let me lay out what I think. First, it is clear that the stories as presented in the Gospels and Acts are second century fictions, in dialogue with the letters of Paul real and forged. None of their history is real, except perhaps for the Crucifixion of their leader. Most likely James, John, and Peter were real people who ran a wing of the Church in Jerusalem, although they did not come from Galilee. The rest, however, are inventions of Mark, or perhaps, as Schmithals argued, back-interpolated into Mark from later texts.

Hence, for me, the history of early Christianity begins out in the diaspora, among Hellenized Jews who incorporated much Hellenistic philosophy and religious thought into their religion, as the Gospels, shot through with Hellenistic philosophy and Hellenistic literary conventions show. Recent scholarship on Paul has shown his close links to Stoic thought, and Downing's work has also show how Paul would have looked like a Cynic to his opponents. Thus, I think the origin of the cult does not lie in Jerusalem. Beyond that it gets murkier, and into those waters I will not venture.

As for your comments that you're not much good at the atheist-believer debate, your site clearly states:

A Challenge for Skeptics

Not "a challenge for people who already believe most of what I believe anyway." So here's a member of your target audience, ready and willing to debate.

Guess what! That means that the Empty Tomb story isn't mentioned in Paul. It receives its first mention in Mark, where it is clearly derived from Daniel 6 and perhaps several other passages, as Randel Helms and other scholars have pointed out. The Empty Tomb story is a later fiction.

No, none are reliable. Stephen is a fictional creation of the author of Acts. The martyrdom of Paul in Rome and these other tales you mention do not appear until the second century or even later.

Hmm....conservative scholars, every one. Do you have someone more modern and mainstream?

The stories we have from the Church are second-century inventions. The real end of the apostle Peter has been lost to history. I prefer not to go beyond the evidence, or to take second century apologetic forgery at face value.

But you have been called out, now, by a "skeptic" your site has aimed at.

Vorkosigan

Vorkosigan

LOL. I'm getting out of practice. Anyway, what are you talking about? Your post is great:

• You've been in the clutches of people who are telling you what the "opposing arguments" are instead of actually reading them. Since you've been through the evolution/creation drill that ought to be something you can appreciate. As you saw there, the creationists make absurd characterizations of evolution and do not contend with the actual arguments and data.

That connection is dead-on. Phil, you know how conservatives mis-represent the evidence in the Creation debate. Why would you think that they present it fairly in this one?

And further, before you say it, you shouldn't trust us, either. You should get out there and read the modern scholarship. Your sources are old and highly credulous.

Besides, rlogan, there are three other arguments left. Have at 'em!

Vorkosigan

Diogenes the Cynic

What is not historical about any of the things I've bolded?

Myth is not synonomous with "lie," and your list of explanations for the "evidence" presumes evidence which does not exist.

To put it bluntly, there is no evidence that anyone who knew Jesus ever claimed to have witnessed a physical resurrection (if he indeed existed and was crucified, something which it is not necessary to grant in the first place). We know nothing of what any of his immediate followers thought or said or whether they believed in a physical resurrection. The resurrection narratives do not come from apostles or from anyone who ever knew Jesus. The story is fiction created long after the fact so all of your strawman "explanations" are completely invalidated by the fact that they ALL presume facts not in evidence.

Can you prove that a single person ever claimed to have witnessed a physical resurrection of Jesus before the Gospel of Matthew written at least 50 years after the crucifixion by a non-witness quoting secondary sources and adding such patently fictional details as dead saints crawling out of their graves and shambling around like zombies in Dawn of the Dead?

Let's start there. Prove that a single person ever claimed to have witnessed a physical resurrection. Take as much time as you need.

PhilVaz

RLogan << Since you've been through the evolution/creation drill that ought to be something you can appreciate. As you saw there, the creationists make absurd characterizations of evolution and do not contend with the actual arguments and data. >>

Oh I'm certainly open-minded. The question is whether the likes of Gish, Morris, or Phillip E. Johnson (who I did buy into over a decade ago, I got over it eventually) will turn out to be equivalent to the likes of Kreeft, Craig, Habermas and company. I haven't seen that yet, but I'll admit I don't have a lot of non-theist books. Jeffrey Jay Lowder in the "old days" of the Infidels called Craig "Christian theism's hired gun." I do have the Lowder-Fernandez, and the Tabash-Craig debates. I collect this stuff. Gonna get the Carrier-Licona from EvolveFish soon. I'll figure out who got it right one of these days, whether the Pope, or Craig, or Doherty, or possibly Dan Brown (Mr. Da Vinci Code). :Cheeky:

Phil P

Amaleq13

Why couldn't the disciples have made up the whole story?

There are two stories and neither can be reliably identified as having been told by disciples of Jesus. The first story is the one repeated in Paul's gospel and that is "Christ crucified and resurrected" but that was only told by "apostles" according to Paul. We can't actually be sure they told the first part since he only attributes the resurrection claim to them and some scholars think Paul may have added crucifixion references to the allegedly pre-Pauline hymns. Could they have made up their experiences of the risen Christ? Sure. Paul indicates that the group in Jerusalem was gathering money from converts so a cynical fellow might wonder if they were in it for the cash. I tend to be willing to accept that the claimants, even Paul, were honest in their belief that they had experienced the risen Christ.

The second story is the one attributed to Mark and, yes, it appears entirely possible that the author made that story up.

The "cruncher" in this argument is the historical fact that no one, weak or strong, saint or sinner, Christian or heretic, ever confessed, freely or under pressure, bribe or even torture, that the whole story of the resurrection was a fake a lie, a deliberate deception.

This is not a "historical fact" but an assumption based on an absence of evidence. That we have no reliable evidence that any of the original claimants (ie the only ones who could know they were lying) were ever tortured or even tempted to tell a different story, the assertion is without merit.

(2) If they made up the story, they were the most creative, clever, intelligent fantasists in history, far surpassing Shakespeare, or Dante or Tolkien. Fisherman's "fish stories" are never that elaborate, that convincing, that life-changing, and that enduring.

I agree that, within the context of a non-historical Jesus, both the original apostle (Cephas?) and the author of Mark deserve to be recognized for their creative intelligence in uniquely reinterpreting Jewish Scripture but not to the exaggerated extent suggested above.

(3) The disciples' character argues strongly against such a conspiracy on the part of all of them, with no dissenters. They were simple, honest, common peasants, not cunning, conniving liars.

The existence of a "conspiracy" relies on assumptions that have already been dismissed above.

They weren't even lawyers! Their sincerity is proved by their words and deeds. They preached a resurrected Christ and they lived a resurrected Christ. They willingly died for their "conspiracy." Nothing proves sincerity like martyrdom.

I accept that the original apostles, as well as Paul, were sincere in their belief in a resurrected Christ. Unfortunately for the argument, that doesn't appear to require a historical Jesus.

(4) There could be no possible motive for such a lie. Lies are always told for some selfish advantage. What advantage did the "conspirators" derive from their "lie" ?

As I noted above, Paul mentions that his efforts were accepted, at least in part, because he continued to send cash to the boys in Jerusalem. Monetary gain is one of the oldest motivations in the history of mankind.

(5) If the resurrection was a lie, the Jews would have produced the corpse and nipped this feared superstition in the bud.

According to Acts, the claim wasn't made publicly until over a month later but even an immediate (ie three days after death) claim would have resulted in an unidentifiable corpse. That ignores, of course, the fact that this argument also assumes the truth of the story in question.

...unarmed peasants could not have overpowered Roman soldiers or rolled away a great stone while they slept on duty.

Only one version of the story claims Roman soldiers were present and there is no good reason to assume this claim is true. Archeological evidence indicates that round tomb door stones were only common after 70CE. Prior to that, they were quite rare and restricted to large, elaborate family tombs belonging to the rich.

In conclusion, if the resurrection was a concocted, conspired lie, it violates all known historical and psychological laws of lying.

I'm not sure this statement is true but, since it isn't a position I hold in doubting a historical Jesus, it isn't relevant.

rlogan

Keeft is not in charge of what the alternatives are, and I strongly suggest dropping all of the authors you cite as authoritative in any way regarding Bible Criticism and History.


I would like to pose this question to you. Do you have an understanding of the degree to which the "Jesus Story" was cribbed together from Hebrew Bible passages lifted out of context? Christians tend to take this as evidence that Jesus answered all of these prophesies.

To me it explains exactly where the source material lies for a "Jesus Story". The motive for doing so is obvious. Couple that with the Christian doctoring of Josephus and Tacitus you have the complete picture of a post-first century invention of Christian "history".

Amaleq13

No, the most you can say is that Paul assumes an empty grave but even that isn't certain since it is entirely possible he believed that the resurrected body was a completely new sort of body rather than the original body transformed or replaced.