How do we know? 4 – Appearances and Transformations

Ok, we’ve finally arrived at what will likely be the most contentious issue (outside of the explanation) – the post-mortem appearances of Jesus after He was crucified. We will also examine the radical transformation in the lives of the disciples and others because that lends support to the resurrection hypothesis.

Let’s begin with the creed in 1 Corinthians 15: 3-8:
"For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Peter, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born."

This creed is important because not just of its content, but its age. Habermas, in Strobel, claims that a case can be made for dating this creed to within two to eight years of the events themselves. Craig says five years. Note: this isn’t the book of Corinthians, but the creed itself. What’s significant about this creed is the falsifiability of its claims. Here we have Paul listing all the people who witnessed the resurrected Jesus included “five hundred of the brothers”, most of whom were still alive at the writing of the letter to the Corinthians. It seems like he is inviting the reader to check things out for themselves, and that’s not what someone who was propagating a lie would do. For example, Joseph Smith’s Twelve Golden Plates were seen only by members of his family and then taken back to heaven, so no one could verify what he claimed.

It also important that he lists James as a witness, because we know from the Gospels that Jesus’ family did not believe in Him during His life (Mark 3:21, 31-35; John 7:1-10), yet after the resurrection James shows up and becomes numbered among the Apostles, both the church historian, Eusebius and Jewish historian, Josephus, in his Antiquities records his death in the very temple - being thrown from the pinnacle and being stoned and clubbed to death under the three month “reign” of Ananus in 62AD for refusing to recant his faith in Christ. The charge is blaspheming the Law. What best explains his radical conversion? I think it best explained by his encountering the risen Lord. Think of it this way (to borrow an analogy from Craig) what would it take to convince you that your brother was the Messiah? Jesus’ death would have just confirmed in James’ mind that He was crazy, and wasn’t the Christ at all. For him to exhibit such a radical about-face and then die for his belief in his brother seems to me best explained by him meeting Jesus face-to-face after He rose.

Finally, Paul includes himself in this list of witnesses. He also goes on to remind us that when he encountered Christ he was incredibly hostile to the church, persecuting it (1 Cor 15:9), by, as Luke records, “breathing out murderous threats against the Lord’s disciples” (Acts 9:1). Now he’s one of Jesus’ most ardent supporters, spending time in and out of prison, being threatened and beaten, and ultimately killed for his belief. Only coming upon a resurrected (and hence justified by God) Jesus could bring about such a change in his life.

It is also important to note that the appearances of Jesus are recorded by multiple people. For instance, the appearance to Peter is reported by both Luke and Paul, John joins those two in recording the appearance to the eleven remaining disciples, and the appearance to the women disciples is reported by Matthew and John, which is an account that enjoys the criterion of embarrassment, lending it some credibility – since women could not even give evidence in court, why would the disciples use them as a source of evidence unless they were reporting what actually happened? These provide multiple, independent attestations of what happened. They may all be in one book we call the Bible, but remember - that book didn’t exist until the fourth century!

And what of the original disciples? The gospels record them demoralised after the crucifixion, Peter even denying ever knowing Him. We see them downtrodden and dismayed on the road to Emmaus, we see Thomas refusing to believe unless he can touch the body, despite what his fellows told him they witnessed. We see them having given up their hope in Jesus and returned to their previous occupations. Then we see simple fishermen (for the most part) transformed into men of wisdom and influence, spreading the Good News across many lands and cultures, ultimately taking their belief in the risen Jesus with them to their deaths. You don’t die for something unless you believe it to be true!

I think this brings us to try and explain these claims. Let’s have a look at two possibilities – legendary development and hallucination.

Some have claimed that the appearances are merely a legend that grew up over time. The problem is, there just wasn’t enough time. Even if we accept a date for the gospels that is in the late first century, that is too soon for legend to creep in. We’d still have people alive who were with those who witnessed the events who could accurately report what was said, for example we have a disciple of John, Polycarp, who didn’t die until the mid 100s. Also, the narratives lack signs of legendary embellishment - they present plain facts with little in the way of exaggeration. Exaggeration and legend tend to spring up three to five generations later, when all of the original witnesses are dead - two to three, at earliest - but this still would require a form of “proto-Christianity” (i.e., a form that is “in the making” so to speak, while people still are forming ideas and solidifying legends.) And though we have several different ideas and theologies about Christianity, and even some embellishments, these all come from either spurious sources that even Jerome threw out or much later documents, a hundred or more years after the death of the disciples. As it is, there is no form of “proto-Christianity” that can be verifiable. It seems to start from a solid and undeniable belief that Jesus of Nazareth was the incarnate God and had risen from the dead. There was simply no time for legend to start (by comparison, all accounts of miracles attributed to Muhammad come almost 500 years after the prophet died. None are contemporary with him). Finally, even if they were legendary, that doesn’t account for how the legend started. As Habermas says, the legend can’t tell you how the story started, just how it got bigger. And since the Jews had no concept of a bodily resurrection before the judgment of the whole world at the end of time, there seems no real place for such a story to have grown from. As Wright says, “there is no evidence for a form of early Christianity in which the resurrection is not a central belief.” Again – why would the disciples go to their deaths for something they invented?

The other main alternative offered is that of hallucination. Since it seems clear that they were sincere in their belief of a resurrected Jesus, perhaps they hallucinated Him? Psychologist Gary Collins has this to say:
"Hallucinations are individual occurrences. By their very nature only one person can see a given hallucination at a time. They certainly aren’t something which can be seen by a group of people [like the 500]. Neither is it possible that one person could somehow induce an hallucination in somebody else. Since an hallucination exists only in the subjective, personal sense, it is obvious that others cannot witness it."

Yet we have multiple people claiming to have seen that same thing at different times, and with different company. And let’s not forget Paul and James – hostile witnesses to the resurrection. We might claim that His disciples wanted to believe in Him so much that they caused themselves to hallucinate, but what would cause James and Paul to do the same? They had no such desire. Finally, how many of you can say that you know someone who has had an hallucination that was not brought on by either some form of substance or drug or some type of mental illness? Are we to believe that all of these witnesses were using hallucinogenic drugs, or were all mentally deranged? I think that stretches the explanatory power of this hypothesis too far.

I think that, given the alternatives, the hypothesis that Jesus really was raised from the dead, that He really appeared to those who claim to have seen Him is the explanation that best fits. It explains more of the facts in question than any rival hypothesis, and that is why I believe it to be the most reasonable explanation.

Render to Caesar

Note: If you pick up the post from here, you may be left wondering what we are talking about. I suggest reading previous commentary prior to this (link provided below), otherwise, this post may not be for you.

I want to thank both Vinny and DaveE for excellent commentary and keeping this discussion alive. I agree with DaveE though, it has the potential to digress forever and I want to see what ol' DaveE Jones has to say next.
Our newest commentator, Vinny, has responded to something I said about Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon (see comments in How Do We Know? Part 3). I think it maybe worth the post to say that I was not arguing for historical evidence of Caesar's existence, rather his crossing of the Rubicon - though on that subject, I would like to make a few points and then defer to Dave.

I may have read too much into what Vinny said concerning coins that were minted, thereby providing evidence of Caesar's exploits, but I would propose a similarity between said coins and the Church.
First, noting that the coins were minted does not show that Caesar actually crossed the river. Yet it is good secondary evidence of the fact, though circumstantial. Subsequently, "The point of no return"* is not usually a thing questioned within historical narrative, even though we aren't sure where the Rubicon flowed at the time of the crossing! It should be noted, as well, that the written evidence in said case is not first hand but fourth!!

DaveE is right though in that we are blurring the lines between evidence and explanation. My point is this: that we take the written evidence of Caesar's crossing, combined with these coins (which in themselves provide no other evidence save that they were minted in Caesar's name) as a true account because there is substantial secondary physical evidence (coins) and the narrative itself doesn't conflict with our own metaphysical world view.

But how then is the evidence (not the explanation) for Christ's burial different? There is nothing in McCullagh's "known laws of nature" that disagrees with a man dying and being buried! And the secondary (which I may argue is primary) physical evidence that is produced is a full blown, Jesus Christ-is-the-Died-and-was-buried,-now-Risen-Lord-Christianity from 1 Corinthians 15 within, at the very least, two decades all over the Roman Empire. Even Mormons don't grow that fast! It is the explanation (sorry Dave!!) of the Church's birth that we must consider next.
I want to wait and see what DaveE has to say, because I know he will cover all of these topics in the upcoming posts.

As a last note, 1 Corinthians 15 1-7 is just as much a reliably historical account of the burial as anything else we have, whether Joseph of Arimathea is mentioned or not. The Roman practice of throwing people in mass graves was not a rule of Roman military practice, and they were certainly known to release bodies to those who asked - they didn't care one way or the other. Besides, the accounts available record this as the case. Again, direct evidence. Circumstantial evidence and explanatory theory can work in both directions - but at the present point of DaveE's argument, we are dealing with direct evidence. Once we have all the direct evidence established, we can continue with whatever fancy happens across our paths.

Lets get all the cards on the table first.

How do we know? Part 3 – Burial and Empty Tomb

Now that we’ve established that there is no reasonable way that Jesus could have survived the crucifixion, let’s move on to the next two points: His burial by Joseph of Arimathea and the discovery of the empty tomb on Sunday morning.

This is relatively uncontroversial and seems accepted by most scholars. However, given that Joseph of Arimathea was a member of the Sanhedrin, some have claimed that it is implausible that one of those who voted to condemn Jesus would have buried Him honourably in his own tomb, and this sounds reasonable on the surface. But the Apostle Luke foresaw this difficulty and his report of the burial records that Joseph did not “consented to their decision and action” (Luke 23: 50-53). Indeed, William Lane Craig claims that, according to John A. T. Robinson, late Cambridge University New Testament Scholar, the honourable burial of Jesus is one of the earliest (hence not open to legendary embellishment due to the passage of time) and best-attested facts about the historical Jesus (in Strobel, 1998, p283).

That leads us to the empty tomb. Craig goes on to list a series of arguments in favour of the empty tomb. In the interests of brevity I’ll only mention a couple, but all can be found in Strobel’s The Case for Christ. One of the most interesting to me is the discovery of the tomb by women. In the ancient world, women were poorly thought of, and it would have been embarrassing for the disciples to admit that it was women, not the disciples, who discovered the tomb, and this seems like one of those things that would have been altered or covered up if the account was legendary (in fact, this and other embarrassing details are often used to establish the authenticity of the Gospels). Also, the earliest Jewish writings confirm the historicity of the empty tomb. Nobody at the time was claiming that the tomb was not empty – what they did was posit different ideas about why. The guards fell asleep and the disciples stole the body is the answer given at the time (Matt 28:12-15). Another, more modern objection to the empty tomb that surfaced in 1907 is that the women went to the wrong tomb. However, if this was the case, don’t you think the Jewish authorities, who certainly knew where He was buried, would have simply pointed that out when the disciples began announcing His resurrection? The dialogue would have gone something like this: “Jesus is risen!”, “No he’s not. There’s his tomb!” Doesn’t seem to hold much explanatory power, does it?

More could be said on this topic, and the interested reader is again referred to Strobel’s book, as well as The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus by Gary Habermas and Michael Licona for an extremely thorough review of these issues. Stay tuned for Part 4 of How Do We Know – the Post-Mortem Appearances!

How do we know? Part 1 - the Question

Why do all religions claim that they are the only way? How do we know which, if any, is right?

This is a very common question, one that is asked all the time. It’s also the one that gets a lot of Christians charged with bigotry and intolerance because we believe that Christ is the only way. But is it true that all religions claim to be the one true way? Not all, but certainly most. Why do they do it? I can’t speak for any other faith, but we Christians believe it because Christ said it. And why do we trust Christ? To borrow from Hollywood, “That, detective, is the right question.”*

But what is the answer? To answer this question, we must turn to history. You see, the Bible has stood the test of history, and it contains a huge number of verifiable (and verified, on many occasions) historical facts. The New Testament has never (to my knowledge) been proven wrong in any historical event it records. It is true that some of what it records has yet to be verified, but I believe it will, in time. Compare this to other holy books, like the Book of Mormon, that contain verified historical errors, and you find that what we have, in fact, are reliable primary source documents about, amongst other things, the life of Jesus. Four of them. They’re called by Christians “the Gospels”. Now, many tend to dismiss them or think of them as one document because they are bound together in one volume called the Bible, but that would be a mistake. Just because we collected the documents and published them together does nothing to undermine their historic reliability. Entire volumes have been written on whether what we have today is what was actually written, and a very strong case can be made in favour of their reliability, so I won’t attempt to do so here (the interested reader is referred The Evidence That Demands a Verdict, by Josh McDowell, for a very thorough examination or here for a thumbnail sketch).

What it boils down to are a series of historical facts that are, according to Dr William Lane Craig, almost universally accepted by Biblical scholars, religious and secular alike. These are: Christ’s crucifixion, His honourable burial by Joseph of Arimathea, the empty tomb three days later, and the post-mortem appearances to His disciples. Now, it should be noted, that although most scholars agree on these facts, they differ in their interpretation. For example, with regards to the empty tomb, some say the disciples stole the body, or they went to the wrong tomb, etc. These four events will take some time to thoroughly discuss, so what I intend to do over the next week or so is post on each of these in turn. I’ll leave it a couple of days between each for comments and for me to prepare the next post. But, in case you can’t wait that long, let me fill you in on how it ends – the hypothesis that Jesus was who He claimed to be (the Son of God) emerges as the most probable explanation for these events. And if He was who He claimed to be, then we have good reason to believe him when He said “I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6).

P.S. For an extremely easy to read, cheap book on this topic ($6US), I recommend The Case For Christ by Lee Strobel. I will be drawing heavinly on this book for the subsequent posts.

Part 2: The Crucifixion
Part 3: The Empty Tomb
Part 4: Appearances and Transformations

* I, Robot, (2004)