Doherty here quotes 1 Corinthians 15:12-16:
12But if it is preached that Christ has been raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? 13If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. 14And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is vain, your faith also is vain. 15Moreover, we are even found to be false witnesses of God, because we witnessed against God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise if in fact the dead are not raised. 16For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised. [NASB/NIV]
Among Doherty's comments:
Paul is saying that knowledge about Jesus' raising has come from God, and that his own preaching testimony, true or false, is something which relates to information which has come from God—in other words, through revelation. Not history, not apostolic tradition about recent events on earth. In all this discussion about the trueness of Christ's resurrection, Paul's standard is one of faith, faith based on God's testimony—meaning, in scripture. (Cf. Romans 8:25, 10:9, 1 Thess. 4:14.) Historical human witness plays no part.
Ted responds: "The Corinthians didn't see a risen Jesus, so there is nothing unusual about the need for Paul to appeal to their faith." Oh, yes, there is. I did not see the assassination of President Kennedy, but my believing that he was assassinated requires no faith and is not any act of faith. I have good logical reasons for believing that he was assassinated. Similarly, if in Paul's day there were men still living who thought they had witnessed Jesus' resurrection, then belief in his resurrection would not have been an act of faith. It would have been a matter simply of accepting what they would have considered credible testimony. Whether I or any other modern skeptic would have considered it credible is beside the point. Two thousand years later, millions of Christians consider a handful of ancient documents to be as credible as any testimony needs to be. How much more readily would the first Christians have believed men whom they knew to have been Jesus' companions? Maybe the Corinthians could not themselves confront Peter, James, and the others in Jerusalem, but Paul could and did, and he could have reported their testimony to the Corinthians. His failure to report any such testimony is evidence that no such testimony existed.
I know how President Kennedy died, not because I have talked to any witnesses, but because I have heard about the witnesses' testimony from sources who seem reliable and who say that they did talk to witnesses. Paul was in a better position than I am. If there were witnesses, then Cephas and James were certainly among them, and Paul did talk to them.
According to Ted, Paul does indeed name witnesses in "the early part of the chapter," obviously referring to 1 Corinthians 15:3-8. Doherty addresses this, and Ted responds, but his response is too incoherent for me to try to critique it. Readers will have to make their own judgment on whether Doherty or Ted makes better sense. All I will note at this point is that it is ludicrous to suggest that because Paul had mentioned witnesses once, he would have thought it otiose to mention them again.
Doherty mentions several times throughout his Web site that Paul claims to have gotten his gospel from two and only two sources: scripture and personal revelation. Ted tries to suggest otherwise:
Paul says in verse 3 that he received the following information, which was clearly not all scriptural "revelation" since it included then-alive individuals. We cannot therefore conclude that Paul is saying that his gospel is derived from scripture.
OK, but what is "the following information" that Paul attributes to human sources? Ted does not tell us. So, let us look at verse 3 and some that follow in I Corinthians 15 to see if we can figure it out ourselves.
For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that He appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. After that He appeared to more than five hundred brethren at one time, most of whom remain until now, but some have fallen asleep.
Now, it is not likely that Paul learned about Christ's appearance to Cephas, or to the tweive, or to the 500, by reading scripture. We may suppose that he heard about those appearances from Cephas himself, and from some of the twelve, and perhaps some of the 500. But does that imply that he learned nothing from scripture or revelation? If so, then Paul contradicts himself, because we see in Galatians 1:11-12:
For I would have you know, brethren, that the gospel which was preached by me is not according to man. For I neither received it from man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.
And what is "the gospel which was preached by me"? It is that the death and resurrection of the Christ effected the world's salvation, not that certain individuals had had visions of the risen Christ. Paul did not tell the Corinthians that Christ had appeared to Cephas or anyone else "according to scripture," but he did tell them that Christ had died and been raised from the dead "according to scripture." The death and resurrection, not the appearances, were the gospel, and the death and resurrection didn't come to him by anyone's testimony.
So says Paul, and so he says quite plainly, but historicists must insist that he means something other than what he plainly says. Thus, we get from Ted:
We cannot therefore conclude that Paul is saying that his gospel is derived from scripture. Rather, we can conclude that the information Paul received from others is "according to the scriptures". What was that information that was "according to the scriptures"? 2 things: 1. Christ died for our sins and 2. He was raised on the third day. Since these claims preceded Paul (how could they not if it was part of information he received that had been corroborated prior to his receipt?) we can rule out scriptural revelation to Paul.
First: Paul says nothing about anybody's story being corroborated, and to argue that he implies corroboration is to assume the historicist conclusion. Next: Of course the claims preceded Paul. No one but a few conspiracy theorists think Paul himself invented Christianity. For one thing, he could hardly have claimed to have persecuted Christians if there were none before he became one. Finally, just because some people believed those things before Paul believed them does not mean Paul could not have become a believer himself as a result of a revelation. There is no rule that all ideas imparted by revelation must be original or unique.
Ted then tries to get some mileage out of Paul's failure to be specific about the scriptural sources of his gospel: "He doesn't quote passages that say the Messiah or Son of God must die . . . [or] must be buried . . . [or] must be raised . . . [or] must be raised on the third day. What an interesting silence by Paul!" Yes, interesting—for what it reveals about the minds of men who think, when they read scriptures, that God is talking to them and telling them what the scriptures mean.
There are no real messianic prophecies in Jewish scripture. There are only passages that some people have interpreted as messianic. Anybody who finds them has to be imagining them, and Paul was no exception. But, being savvier than the average modern evangelical apologist, he might have realized that if he broadcast his proof texts, he would accomplish nothing but to start an endless debate about whether he was interpreting them correctly. Since his only argument was that he got his interpretation from God, there was no point in haggling over hermeneutics. He knew the Christ had been crucified because God had told him so. Whatever he happened to be reading when he got the word from God was almost beside the point. Likewise for his knowledge that the Christ was buried and then rose on the third day.
Now we get to the appearances of the risen Christ, listed at the beginning of I Corinthians 15. Among them, Paul includes his own, without a hint that it was in any way different from the others. Scholars are practically unanimous that, notwithstanding whether the Damascus Road story in Acts has any historical basis, Paul's encounter with the risen Jesus was, at most, some kind of vision. Therefore, in the judgment of most who are not committed to inerrancy, the other appearances that Paul listed were visions as well, not face-to-face encounters with a reanimated corpse as described in the gospels. This does not preclude historicity, of course. Paul and all the others could have had visions of a recently executed charismatic preacher, and they could then have come to believe that he had returned to life. But not necessarily. Some people report having visions of angels, but angels (if real) are not of this world.
Now, according to Ted, "Paul doesn't say the appearances to the others were visions, and the Greek word doesn't require it." But it doesn't have to require it. It suffices if the Greek word allows it. I don't know Greek, but Doherty does, and he says the Greek word allows it. If he is wrong, it will take an expert in ancient Greek to prove it, and I am not aware that any such expert has ever challenged him on this point.
Paul suggests, without saying outright, that he was the last person to have seen the risen Christ. It also seems probable, from various lines of evidence, that this occurred some 20 years before he wrote to the Corinthians. Ted, for some reason, thinks this is strange: "Paul gives no indication of others having seen Christ after himself over the 20 years or so since his own conversion, as might be expected if all of the appearances were visions." I have no idea why it "might be expected" that the visions would continue happening to others after Paul had his. Granted, there was surely no reason at the time to assume his would be the last—but somebody's had to be. Experiences of this sort never continue indefinitely.
"He also gives no explanation for why there was a time delay between all of the initial appearances and to himself," Ted says, but there is no delay in Paul's account. There is a sequence of appearances, and his is last, but nothing in the text indicates that all the others happened within the space of a few hours, days, or weeks while his occurred several years later. For all we can tell from what Paul actually wrote, the risen Christ might have appeared to Cephas on one day, to the twelve on the following day, to the 500 on the third day, to James on the fourth day, to "all of the apostles" on the fifth day, and finally to Paul on the sixth day.
His offhand remark about "out of due time" is too cryptic to force any particular interpretation. Whatever his intended meaning, he relates it somehow to his having persecuted the church and thus being unworthy of apostleship: "For I am the least of the apostles, and not fit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God" (I Cor. 15:9).
Moving on, Ted says,
All we know from Paul is that some of the Corinthians were saying that there is no resurrection of the dead. Paul clearly sees and tells them that they were in effect denying that Christ wasn't raised from the dead (a clear implication that Christ had been a human being).
First, notwithstanding the current fad for this double-negative formulation, it is sloppy. According to Paul, the Corinthians were in effect either denying that Christ was raised from the dead or affirming that Christ was not raised from the dead.
Second, Ted's parenthetical is blatant question-begging. The very issue being debated is whether the first Christians did in fact think of resurrection only in terms of reanimated corpses. Paul is assuring the Corinthians that they will in fact be resurrected, but he is offering them no assurance that this means their bodies will come back to life post mortem, and no self-respecting Platonist would welcome any such assurance.
Ted then notes: "Paul begins the chapter then with reminding them of the tradition of Christ's own resurrection they were taught in the form of the creed of prime importance."
Right. A creed. Not an argument, but a creed. A statement of faith, not a presentation of evidence. A creed says: To be one of us, you must believe this. It is not an appeal to reason, but to authority. A creed is a rule: You will comply, resistance is futile.
To do so he appeals to the authority of the scriptures and to the testimony of well-known leaders in the Christian community including Cephas--whom Paul implies they knew (3:21-22) and admired(1:12), as well as the testimony of a large number of people.
Why appeal to any scripture if there was all that testimony? Because there was one and only one thing that Cephas or anyone else could possibly testify to. They had all had visions of a risen Christ. They knew that their redeemer lived, but they did not know that he had once lived among men. In particular, they did not know that he had once lived in Galilee, preached to large crowds, healed the sick, raised the dead, and been crucified by Pontius Pilate.
"From there," says Ted, "he appeals to the example of his own hard work (15:10) and suffering that they might have faith in Paul's own word and example." But how was Paul's "own word and example" supposed to convince anyone that Jesus of Nazareth had returned to life three days after being crucified? Paul's personal assurances about the resurrection were worthless except to people who would accept his claim to have gotten a revelation from God that there had been a resurrection. But revelation would have been irrelevant if there had been credible eyewitness testimony, except possibly in one instance.
Conceivably, when Paul heard Cephas and the others claim to have seen Jesus of Nazareth three days after his execution, he was skeptical until he received his own personal revelation, in which God told him effect: "You can trust these people." But if that was what happened, why didn't he say so? He never says that his revelation confirmed anything he had heard from Jesus' disciples. What he says is to the contrary, that he learned nothing from "any man" but learned all of it only by revelation and scripture.
Ted then asks and answers a rhetorical question:
Did Paul miss an opportunity to provide evidence from Jesus' own life and teachings for the resurrection? Perhaps, but clearly Paul saw a need first to provide evidence for Christ's OWN resurrection.
Well, obviously, Jesus' own resurrection was of first importance. That was Paul's very point. Doherty's point is that his means of proving that point are not what we should expect if Paul had believed (a) that Jesus had recently lived in this world and (b) that certain men of his, Paul's, acquaintance had known Jesus both before and after his death and resurrection.
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This page last updated on June 15, 2015.