Peter Kirby

What Really Happened to Jesus pp. 78-80

Results of the analysis of the accounts of Easter

1. All four Gospels of the New Testament report in extended descriptions a visit of women followers...

1. The narratives of the visits to the tomb have been formed around Mary...

2. The date of the resurrection 'on the third day' cannot be substantiated historically. The point in time was conjectured because it fulfilled an Old Testament prophect (Hos. 6.2, see above 49f.).

3. The investigation of the burial of Jesus already suggested that his followers did not even know where their leader had been buried...

4. The actual event of the resurrection of Jesus is not described...

5. Soon after his crucifixion Jesus appeared to some persons. But the earliest appearance did not take place at the tomb, since the tradition of the tomb and the tradition of Jesus' appearance did not originally belong together. Only in the subsequent period were they brought increasingly together, so that the manner of the original appearance became almost unrecognizable.

Here in general we are to assign a relatively late date of origin to those reports which emphasize the corporeality of the risen Christ, although elements in them could be much later. For the emphasis on a reality of the risen Jesus which could be perceived with the senses developed only later, in order to make it possible to maintain the reality of the resurrection over against other assertions that Jesus was not raised at all, but was only a spirit or a phantom.

6. It may be taken as historically certain that Peter and the disciples had experiences after Jesus' death in which Jesus appeared to them as the risen Christ.

7. Both Jerusalem (and its environs) and Galilee are mentioned as scenes of these events. However, had the first appearances taken place in Jerusalem, it would be impossible to explain those in Galilee. For why should the disciples have gone back to Galilee after their resurrection appearance? After all, the earliest community came into being in Jerusalem, the centre of Jewish faith.

For the same reason it is also difficult to imagine who anyone could have invented Galilee as the place in which Jesus appeared. That leaves only the conclusion that the first appearance in fact took place in Galilee and subsequent ones in Jerusalem, but only at a later date. This conjecture is supported by the fact that the appearance in John 21 takes place by Lake Tiberias (i.e. in Galilee), and the mention of this place comes from an early tradition (see above, 71 ff. and especially below, 84ff.).

8. But that makes it impossible for these appearances already to have happened on the third day...

9. The Gospels mention a first appearance to Mary Magdalene...

best,
Peter Kirby

Clutch

Thanks, Peter. Do you know how GL intends the conjunction "Peter and the disciples" to interact with "experienced"? That is, is he this confident that the experiences were group experiences, or just that Peter and the disciples all had such experiences?

Strangely, moreover, this passage does not present any obvious reasoning for (6); it's just asserted. Maybe Ludemann gives the argument elsewhere in the book.

Peter Kirby

Luedemann writes: "The assumption that the appearance to Peter was an individual appearance (i.e. without the twelve) is supported by the wording of 1 Cor. 15.5 and the suppression of the tradition of the first appearance to Peter mentioned above. Accordingly it is quite certain that the appearance to the twelve is not identical with that to Peter." (p. 95)

I don't know; I haven't read the whole book.

best,
Peter Kirby

Clutch

Thanks again, Peter. Your supererogation much appreciated.

Richard Carrier

More info on the debate time, location, etc. at:

http://www.veritas.org/UCLA/

You can also see other debates on subsequent days.

Toto

*bump*

It's now a week away.

Toto

Well, I went, and it was interesting. Unfortunately, the people running the event turned the lights down for the audience, so it was impossible to take notes. (!) This is just some of what I remember, while it is fresh in my mind.

Carrier showed himself to be extremely knowledgable and quick as a debater, but not agressive or overly showy. His presentation was thoughtful and well put together, and he had a quick answer to all questions, often with a power point slide. Licona substituted fluency for actual content. There were a few points that were not resolved, including the proper translation of one Greek word. This debate would have been more informative if it were an online, written debate, but Licona would have not have survived.

Licona followed the typical apologetic argument that Craig uses: Jesus was crucified, the tomb was empty, and his followers thought they saw the risen Jesus. The best explanation, the only explanation, for this is that Jesus rose from the dead.

Carrier took a novel approach, probably a very good one for that audience. He said that Jesus was probably crucified (although in other contexts he has described himself as agnostic on Jesus' existence) and Jesus' followers had visions of him after his death, which they interpreted as his reappearance. But there was no empty tomb - Mark created the empty tomb as a literary device. Carrier had some very good arguments on this.

Then Carrier argued affirmatively that the early Christian movement started as a social movement in reaction to an oppressive social structure, that Jesus' followers had visions of him which led them to create the new movement. But the earliest Christians, such as Paul, only believed in a spiritual Jesus, and believed that the "resurrection" was the substitution of a new body made of a new ethereal substance for the old corrupt earthly body. (There was some discussion and disagreement as to the difference between a "transformed" body and the new replacement body.) But then the church split into gnostics and "Sarcisists" [I don't know if he invented that word] and the Sarcisists eventually won out and wrote the gospel passages that made a point of Jesus' bodily functions, his eating fish and showing his wounds to his followers after his resurrection, all totally inconsistent with a new spiritual perfected body that would not have wounds or need to eat.

This theory will be detailed in the upcoming Jesus is Dead, to be published sometime soon.

Licona claimed that he had majored in New Testament Greek, and then went through a period of searching, in which he wondered if he had any rational basis for his faith, although he knew that Jesus was real for him. He claimed to have found the answers. However, in response to Carrier's conclusions on the mythic nature of the empty tomb, he kept repeating that 75% of all scholars agree that there was an empty tomb. (It was never clear where this figure came from, or, since it apparently included Christians who dominate the field, why it would be significant.) His major sources seemed to be CS Lewis and NT Wright. (Carrier quoted a point from Wright, and he disputed it - this was never cleared up.) Licona has just written a book with Habermas as a co-author.

The format of the debate was: each debater gave an opening statement of 20 minutes, followed by a 10 minute rebuttal from each, followed by another round. Carrier and Licona had exchanged their opening statements, so their first rebuttals were prepared ahead of time. Licona really fell apart on his second rebuttal, where he could not prepare, and started getting incoherent; Carrier continued to speak fluently. Licona also tried to bring up Dennis MacDonald's work on the Homeric Epics, although Carrier did not refer to MacDonald or base his arguments on MacDonald. Licona also seemed to taunt Carrier on occasion, claiming that he had "no evidence" for things such as the assertion that Matthew made up the story of the guards at the tomb. But there were too many issues to deal with all of them.

The only thing that left me wondering was that Carrier's presentation would really fit well in a liberal post-modern Christian church. His Jesus is the humanist Jesus that a lot of liberal Christians (such at the moderator, Professor S. Scott Bartchy, believe in, and would probably work well with Elaine Pagels.

Richard Carrier

Yes, one of my self-criticisms is that I didn't resolve that particular dispute as completely as I would have liked. I did assail him with several verses in my last rebuttal that he never rebutted in turn, which established that Paul imagined the body of flesh as being destroyed, and I also showed that both Paul and Mark imagined us getting entirely new bodies, and the body-swap theory was a live option among Jews of the day, etc.

Of course, transformation still would not explain why Luke & John have a Jesus still of flesh. It was only intended to "entail" an empty tomb, which is why Mike had to go there.



Sarcicism, not Sarcisism. As far as I know, the word is my invention, though only to fix a name to a concept already found advocated by several scholars today. The word takes a natural etymology from sarx, sarcis (flesh) via the known Greek adjective sarcicus to produce sarcicism, sarcicist.



I did have a slide prepared to challenge him on this claim in various ways, but the opportunity never arose. The only rebuttal I was able to get out was that 75% agreement isn't enough to establish a historical fact. But I could have said a lot more. His source is a rather famous article by Habermas, who surveyed some thousand or so articles written in the past thirty or twenty years or something. Your concerns are correct, and one could add many more: it was not a poll of scholars, but a survey only of statements on the record--hence all bona fide scholars who never had occasion to mention their doubts about the empty tomb in the surveyed period were not counted, and for all we know they could number in the thousands.

It is also a rather moot point since the only statistic relevant to the debate would have been: how many say there definitely was an empty tomb after seeing all the relevant evidence (that, for example, I presented only a small fraction of) and after they honestly set aside their own theological need for an empty tomb? But most of those surveyed almost certainly have not seen, much less carefully considered, all that evidence, much less been asked what they would think if they didn't have to believe anything, and even less having answered that question honestly and truly. And so on.

But even beyond this issue, there were a lot of things I felt I should have gotten out but didn't find time or opportunity for. Oh well. Live and learn. Likewise, I think my clarity and articulation could have been better. There were points where I tripped over my own tongue, or couldn't grab the right word at the right time. I'll be working on improving that in future debates.



He didn't exactly dispute the quote (that was genuine, and pretty damning to Licona's case, considering that, as you point out, he was leaning on Wright for his own case). His objection was more muddled and wasn't clear to me. I'll have to review the tape when I get it. It seemed like he was trying to say that Wright was referring to some other scholar, though that wasn't quite right--Wright's quote is direct and point blank, and he himself proposes on a later page that our new bodies might already be waiting for us in heaven, like some freakish android farm. To be fair, Wright's own book is a bit confused (it does not really present a completely coherent argument), and, as my quote indicated, Wright did not commit to either belief, but he clearly acknowledged mine as equally credible. But since Mike's objection didn't make much sense to me, and I think we got distracted with some other question, I never got around to clarifying the issue. Another ball dropped. But I guess I couldn't carry them all.



Indeed! Though in fact I did mention some of the evidence for this particular assertion (four whole facts, actually), so he was basically not telling the truth. But he made some strange verbal mistakes (like for an entire series of sentences talking about me claiming Paul didn't believe in resurrection, when it was surely obvious to everyone that I, and he, meant the empty tomb, not resurrection--a strange gaffe, especially to repeat it several times in a row), so I can only suppose he didn't notice my list of reasons for believing the guards story a fiction. Perhaps he got distracted scribbling down notes when I cruised over them. There were other questionable things (like a rather sad ad hominem that involved quoting an unrelated essay of mine terribly out of context) that I didn't find time to respond to.



Bartchy clearly enjoyed my position. He said to me afterward that he had never been to so interesting a debate that was conducted at such a high intellectual level. I can't say whether or how much he agreed with my position, but he clearly was in a much better position to appreciate my arguments than Licona. Bartchy has published heavily on the topic of the Corinthian letters, for example, both of which figured heavily in my argument. He also asked some really good questions of both of us (many of the questions were his own), revealing that he really understood the important issues. It was the best Q & A I'd ever seen after a debate (and I've seen many). Every single question was good.

Toto

What is the article? I think you should have used that slide in your first rebuttal. It got a little tiresome listening to Licona harp on those 75% of scholars.

I thought that your articulation and clarity were good, although I think it was a mistake to introduce a new word that you had invented in an oral debate before an audience of mixed levels. I could guess that it related to sarx, but I think a lot of the hearers would have just been confused and lost.

I think that if anything, you came across as maybe too academic, (although that is what you are) and could have showed a little more emotion. But perhaps if you felt more confident in your clarity and articulation, you could relax a little.

It seems to be the opinion of this forum that NT Wright is a bit confused.

Will this tape be available?

I recently heard Bartchy on another panel of scholars. I think he might be agnostic as to the existence of a deity, but he believes in Jesus and the humanistic message that he thinks is in the gospel. He likes the early Christians and thinks that Christianity went wrong when it became the state sponsored religion of the Roman Empire, and has never gotten back on track. (He is also a strong environmentalist and has remarked on the paradox of Christians driving big SUVs to church on Sunday.) He seems to get upset at the very idea that people challenge the existence of Jesus, because he doesn't understand their motivation.