By DOUG SHAVER
August
2006
Craig revisits the "four facts" of the previous article in his analysis of
Gerd Lüdemann's theory that Jesus' disciples hallucinated his post-mortem
appearances. This time around, though, he goes through the motions of offering
some supporting evidence for them. I put it in those terms because all he really
does is continue arguing in the believers' circle.
In some introductory remarks, Craig compares himself to a trial lawyer interrogating witnesses "in order to reconstruct the most probable course of events." This, he says, is how historians ought to work. There are several problems with any courtroom analogy to historical inquiries, but the main point to note here is that in a real courtroom, nobody becomes a witness just because one of the lawyers says, "Your Honor, this person is a witness." Prospective witnesses must be identified, and their competence to testify to whatever they have to say must be established. If they are testifying that certain events occurred, they must at least have been present when those events occurred. If the court decides to allow hearsay, the witness must at least be able to identify the source of whatever he or she heard. A statement like "Somebody told me that Jones threatened to kill Smith" will not be admitted into evidence in any real courtroom.
So, Craig has four allegations of fact, and he is arguing that if they are accepted as fact, then there can be no reasonable doubt that Jesus rose from the dead. We can get to the merits of that argument if the four allegations are proved, but until they themselves are proved beyond reasonable doubt, that argument is irrelevant. Before A can prove C, it makes no difference how strongly A implies C as long as A is itself uncertain.
And now the four allegations.
Fact #1: After his crucifixion Jesus was buried by Joseph of Arimathea in the tomb. My statement of this fact represents the core of the burial narrative. I do not include secondary details, such as Joseph's Christian commitments. Such circumstantial details are inessential to the historicity of Jesus's honorable burial. The fact of Jesus's honorable burial is highly significant because it implies that the location of Jesus's tomb was known in Jerusalem. In that case, it is extremely difficult to see how the disciples could have proclaimed Jesus's resurrection in Jerusalem if the tomb had not been empty.
We have already dealt with his claim of how difficult it would have been for Christians to claim a resurrection if Jesus body had been put into Joseph's tomb. But are we compelled to believe that it was in fact put there? Can a reasonable person think otherwise?
Why does Craig even mention "secondary details, such as Joseph's Christian commitments," only to tell us how irrelevant they are? And what does "inessential to the historicity of Jesus's honorable burial" mean? Joseph either did or did not provide the tomb where Jesus was buried. If he did, then he did it no matter what his sympathies were, and if he did not, then he did not, no matter what his sympathies were. So his sympathies are irrelevant in that sense. But the issue is whether we should believe he did, and to that issue, his sympathies are very relevant. If he was not a Christian, then a certain amount of skepticism about this story is justified, but a certain amount of skepticism is also justified about the very claim that he was a Christian.
Now, what is it about Craig's evidence that is supposed to support this allegation? Let's see if he really intends to provide any. He says he does. He says, "We may summarize some of the evidence for Fact #1 as follows." And if this is only some of it, we might reasonably suppose that it is the best of his evidence.
First, he says, we have "the very old tradition quoted by Paul in I Cor. 15.3-5." OK, what does it say there? It says, in reference to the burial of Christ, that "he was buried." That is all. No Joseph, no tomb. Just a burial. For all we get from Paul, the burial could have been anywhere.
Does Craig, as smart as he is, really think a skeptic isn't going to notice that? Maybe, but I think it more likely that he doesn't care. His readership of evangelical Christians are already convinced that in any two places where the Bible refers to the same event, it says the same things about that event. If a gospel author says Jesus was buried in Joseph's tomb and Paul says Jesus was buried, then Paul is saying the Jesus was buried in Joseph's tomb. As long as Craig can dispel doubts from believers' minds, then he has done his job as an apologist.
Then we get a rerun of the appeal to Mark's "very old source material"—of which we actually know nothing with certainty. Craig tries hard to build a case for independent attestation of Joseph, but the most he can do is establish its possibility, not its likelihood.
And even among the Synoptics, the sporadic and uneven nature of Luke and Matthew's verbal agreements with Mark, their omissions from Mark, and their numerous agreements with each other against Mark suggest that Mark's narrative was not their only source, but that they had additional sources for the burial and empty tomb accounts.{11} This multiplicity of independent sources is important because, as Marcus Borg explains, "if a tradition appears in an early source and in another independent source, then not only is it early, but it is also unlikely to have been made up." [Craig's italics, my underlining.]
No matter what we need to assume in order to account for inconsistencies among the gospel narratives, the only point Craig is supposed to be trying to defend here is the factuality of Joseph's providing the tomb in which Jesus was buried, and the gospels are consistent on that point, and so only one source is needed to account for it. All variations thereafter are explainable in terms of authorial differences. This does not rule out independent sources, but Matthew's and Luke's divergences from Mark do not require it, either.
Next, he says, Joseph was "unlikely to be a Christian invention" because he was a member of the Sanhedrin. Is that so? Would it never have occurred to any Christian propagandist that it would have been good for the cause to claim to have a fellow traveler at enemy headquarters? Craig tries to make much of "the hostility in early Christian writings toward the Jewish authorities," as if there were no possibility that any early Christians would have had anything good to say about any Jew. But the very earliest known Christian writings are Paul's, and in the epistles that are known to be his, we see nothing like the anti-Jewish venom that shows up later in the gospels and Acts. In particular, Paul does not blame the Jews for Jesus' death. (Neither does he blame the Romans, just by the way.) It should hardly strain anyone's credulity, then, to suggest that some Christians could have credited at least one important Jew with a willingness to do a good deed.
Still trying to make fabrication seem incredible, Craig notes that Joseph was a member of the Sanhedrin, and that according to Mark the Sanhedrin voted unanimously for Jesus execution. But, Mark does not make both claims. Mark identifies Joseph only as "a councillor of honorable estate," no more, and what could have possessed Mark to call him "honourable" if Mark thought he had voted for Jesus' execution?
The gospels are not entirely clear about Joseph's official capacity. The Greek word rendered "councillor" in the gospels is generally presumed to refer to a Sanhedrin member, but I could find no authority claiming that it never had any other referent. So far as my research informs me at this point, "councillor" could have meant "member of the Arimathea City Council." Matthew does not call him a councillor but a "rich man" and "Jesus' disciple," no more. According to Luke, he was "a councillor, a good and righteous man (he had not consented to their counsel and deed) . . . ."
Then Craig says the story "lacks any traces of legendary development." Such as? He doesn't say what traces are invariably left by legendary developments. He doesnt need to, because his Christian readers aren't asking.
Finally, he says, "No other competing burial story exists." I am not aware of any stories that compete with the Betsy Ross legend, either, but most historians doubt that she really sewed the first American flag. Craig again fails to explain (again because his Christian readers won't ask) how we know that legends always have competing stories. And is it really his argument that wherever any story has no competition, it is invariably a true story? Besides, how do we know there were no competing stories? If there had been, are we pretty certain that some reference to them would have been preserved in the historical record? I see no reason for such a certainty. There can be a good argument from silence, in which it is demonstrated to be unlikely that an event would have occurred without leaving any evidence of its occurrence. But Craig offers no such argument.
Summing up at this point, Craig says that "In response to this evidence, Lüdemann admits that it would be 'going too far' to deny that Joseph of Arimathea is historical." But Lüdemann is a theologian, not a historian. (And neither is Craig a historian; he is a philosopher.) The Sanhedrin in 30 CE might or might not have included a man named Joseph. It is not improbable, but it is not confirmed by any source outside the gospels. If there was a member by that name, he might or might not have been from a place called Arimathea. It is not highly improbable that Arimathea was the name of a real place, but its existence is not confirmed outside the gospels, either. So Joseph of Arimathea, member of the Sanhedrin, could have been a real man. It is not unreasonable to think he was. But neither is it unreasonable to think he might not have been real. And even if he was real, we are not obliged to suppose that he had to have arranged for Jesus' burial in his own tomb just because the gospel writers said he did. We may believe it, but the evidence is not so compelling that we must believe it.
Fact #2: On the Sunday following the crucifixion Jesus's tomb was found empty by a group of his women followers. Among the reasons which have led most scholars to this conclusion are the following:
1. The empty tomb story is part of the very old source material used by Mark.
2. The old tradition cited by Paul in I Corinthians implies the fact of the empty tomb.
3. The story is simple and lacks signs of legendary embellishment.
4. The fact that women's testimony was worthless in first century Palestine counts in favor of the women's role in discovering the empty tomb.
5. The earliest Jewish allegation that the disciples had stolen Jesus's body shows that the body was in fact missing from the tomb.
Concerning the judgment of "most scholars," it does seem to have become intellectually fashionable to say "Yes, Jesus' disciples found his tomb empty." Even Newsweek reported this factoid without qualification (or attribution) in a 2005 cover story for Easter, almost as if "Jesus' tomb was found empty" were common knowledge nowadays. But intellectual fashions can be as ephemeral as clothing fashions, and we can inquire as to whether the scholarly community is following a wealth of evidence or being driven by some other interest.
Fortunately, Craig has done us the favor of providing the evidence on which this scholarly consensus presumably is based. Unfortunately, it is not that good. He does not elaborate on how Mark's reliance on "very old source material" implies the likelihood that his story is true. While old sources are to be preferred over later sources, all else being equal, we are not here weighing the relative credibility of two stories with two sources, one old and one late. We have one story with one unknown source, and that source can only be assumed, because Mark attributes nothing in his gospel to any source. Craig's insistence that the empty tomb story cannot be "a late-developing legend" is vacuous. Assuming the earliest possible date (according to the scholarly consensus) for Mark's gospel, the author was writing almost 40 years after the crucifixion. But legends can and do arise about famous people almost overnight, even before they're dead. Knowing what is incontrovertibly known about human nature and credulity, it is simply preposterous to say that four decades did not provide enough time for a few Christians to start telling and believing stories about Jesus' tomb having been found empty even if nothing of the sort had actually happened.
Craig responds to four objections that Lüdemann raises against Mark's credibility. Most are not relevant to my argument, but one is worth mentioning. Most scholars, including even many conservatives, are convinced that the original version of Mark's gospel ended at 16:8—"And they [the women] went out quickly, and fled from the sepulchre; for they trembled and were amazed: neither said they any thing to any man; for they were afraid." Lüdemann notes that the women, who were the only possible witnesses, could not have been the source for the story if, as Mark alleges, they told nobody what they saw. According to Craig, Mark does not mean to suggest that the women actually never said anything. Instead, the verse conveys "a Markan motif of stunned human reaction to the presence of the divine." Well, it does that, all right, but surely Mark could have told his readers "these women were stunned" without stating an obvious falsehood?
As apologists are fond of doing, Craig mines the material for as much as he can get out of what the author did not say. In this case, here is what Mark did not say: "neither said they any thing to any man, then or at any time thereafter." Since Mark did not say that, Craig says, we may suppose that Mark meant only to say: "neither said they any thing to any man immediately." After all, he points out, if the women had actually kept silent for the rest of their lives, then "Mark would have no story to tell!" Yes, if the story, exactly as Mark told it, had been true, then he would never have known about it. But that does not make the story necessarily true. It could indicate that the story was fabricated. If you're writing fiction, you don't need to explain how you know about the events you narrate.
We have already dealt with Craig's assertion that Paul's letter to the Corinthians attests to the empty tomb, but Craig tries at this point to add a bit of misdirection to his argument. "It is fanciful," he says, "to think that either the ex-Pharisee Paul or the early Jerusalem fellowship from which the formula sprang could have asserted that Christ 'was buried and he was raised' and yet think that his corpse still lay in the tomb." I'm not sure it is any more fanciful than some things believed by some modern Christians, but I am more than happy to stipulate that they did not believe that there was a tomb with Jesus' body in it. The point is whether the letter to the Corinthians informs us that they believed that anybody had seen an empty tomb, and the author does not say that anybody had seen one or that anybody believed they had seen one. Paul says nothing about any tomb, occupied or empty, let alone whether anybody had seen it.
In reprising his it-doesn't-look-like-a-legend argument, Craig notes: "Like the burial account, it is remarkably straightforward and unembellished by theological or apologetic motifs likely to characterize a later legendary account." As before, we can ask what specific "theological or apologetic motifs" are uniquely characteristic of legends. Perhaps by way of an answer, he compares Mark's account with that of a gospel that, although accepted by some early Christians, failed to make the canonical cut.
To appreciate how restrained Mark's narrative is, one has only to read the account in the Gospel of Peter, which describes Jesus's triumphant egress from the tomb, accompanied by angelic visitants, followed by a talking cross, heralded by a voice from heaven, and all witnessed by a Roman guard, the Jewish leaders, and a multitude of spectators!
Now, exactly which parts of this is Craig saying are the usual stuff of legends, the absence of which implies the likely truth of a story? We may grant that legends are likely to get embellished over time, and it is not disputed that Peter's gospel is later than Mark's. Peter obviously has added stuff to Mark's story. But so did Matthew, Luke, and John add stuff to Mark's story, and they, too, are known (partly for that very reason) to be later than Mark. Will Craig agree that their additional material is just so much legendary embellishment? Somehow I doubt that. Craig thinks that only Peter's additions are the stuff of legends. But what makes them so? The angels? The voices from heaven? The multitude of spectators? The canonical gospels have plenty of that stuff. Not even the talking cross should be prima facie incredible to those who can believe that a snake and a donkey have talked to people. And if God can raise the dead, why can't he make a cross talk?
Anyway, Craig is clearly suggesting that it is quite all right to be skeptical of Peter's account of the empty tomb, that it is definitely an embellished legend. But, he says, we must believe Mark's version of the story because it has no such embellishments. Well, except maybe the angel. Mark doesnt say it is an angel. He calls it a "young man." But Craig can't quite say it was not an angel because Matthew said it was one. And so we get this:
Even if we excise the angelic figure as, say, a purely literary figure which provides the interpretation of the vacant tomb, then we have a narrative that is all the more stark and unadorned (cf. John 20.1-2). This suggests that the story is not at its core a legend.
Yes, well, and if I take the ham out of my ham sandwich, then I won't have a ham sandwich any more, but Mark's sandwich still has the ham in it.
What Craig might be trying to say is that, given a story with any legendary element, we can always take the legendary elements out, and then we are obliged to believe whatever is left. But why? Whence the assumption that every legend has a historical core? What is so improbable about the supposition that the historical core (if any) of Mark's gospel ends with Jesus' death?
Craig is ready for that with the argument from ancient misogyny. If anyone had made up the story hoping people would believe it, they would not have said women found the tomb empty because "women's testimony was worthless in first century Palestine." However, an assertion offered as a fact in evidence does not become a fact just because someone says it is a fact, and this assertion is not a fact. It could be a fact that women were regarded as less credible than men, but it was not a fact that they had zero credibility. Besides, the gospels were probably not of Palestinian provenance.
Another problem with this argument is its assumption that the only alternative to the gospels being 100 percent factual is their being some kind of deliberate fraud, that the authors were either conscientious historians or a gang of con artists. If Craig is saying, "Liars would not have written this stuff," I totally agree. Liars intend to deceive people, and I put no credit in any suggestion that Christianity was founded by people intent on deceit. I believe the gospel authors either believed what they wrote, or if they did not believe it to be literally factual, then they did not expect their readers to believe it was literally factual, either. It is not relevant to the present discussion which scenario I think is more likely. My argument here is that, even assuming that the gospel authors believed everything they wrote, it is reasonable to doubt at least some of it because we are in no way obliged to regard them as infallible.
For a moment, though, let us stipulate Craig's false dichotomy and assume the worst about whoever invented the story. Let's say it was Mark, and let's say he was a bald-faced liar. He wanted his readers to think Jesus was buried in a tomb that was later found empty, knowing that no such thing ever really happened. But, he is writing 40 years after the alleged fact. It might have occurred to him that a few of his readers would wonder: "How come we haven't heard about this before now?" Well, no problem. He says, "Some women found the tomb empty, so of course nobody paid them any attention." Even if, as Craig insists, the empty tomb story predates Mark, we cannot know how far back it goes, but it doesn't matter much. If there was any significant lag at all, the story's fabricator could have realized a need to account for its not having been previously circulated. Indeed, the earlier it gets, the more plausible the excuse becomes. A 40-year silence is not easily explained by "the women were ignored." Ten or 20 years would work better. It would also explain why Paul either hadn't heard it or didn't think it credible enough to mention to the Corinthians.
Finally, Craig's appeal to "Jewish polemic" is another vacuity. There is no first-century Jewish account of any polemic against Christianity. The earliest alleged Jewish polemics are recorded in Christian literature, the gospels, and that is where Craig goes for his last bit of evidence. Matthew's account of the bribing of the guards, he says, is proof that Jewish leaders were compelled to invent a story about the disciples stealing Jesus body. They would have felt no such compulsion unless the tomb had in fact been found empty, and that despite the presence of the guards.
Well, I'm sorry, but we have only the word of one Christian writer, probably writing at least 50 years later, that the Jews invented that story. I'm not saying Matthew lied. He might have believed the what he wrote because he heard it from someone he thought was reliable, but that doesn't make us fools for doubting it. The story is prima facie improbable, anyway, so we really need more than one man's word for it, even if we knew enough about him to assess his presumptive reliability, which we do not. We know nothing about him and nothing for certain about his sources. He asks us to believe that the Jews knew the resurrection to be a fact but cared for nothing except that it should be kept secret. Human nature is not like that. We must also wonder about the likelihood that anybody could have paid the Roman guards enough to get them to confess to sleeping on duty—a capital offense in those days, last I heard.
This story could possibly be evidence that the tomb was really found empty, but there are other possibilities at least as believable. It could be evidence that when Matthew's gospel was written, some Christians were eager to believe anything that made Jews look evil. In the worldview of some early Christians (not to mention quite a few modern ones), there is nothing more evil than disbelief, especially intransigent disbelief. It was bad enough that the Jews killed Jesus, but it was far worse, from a Christian perspective, that they did not come to believe in him despite knowing that he had risen from the dead.
And maybe it wasn't just that Matthew wanted to demonize Jews. He certainly did want to do that, but he also could have been making a point that has found much favor among modern apologists—that no skeptic really disbelieves for lack of evidence. They disbelieve because they are on the wrong side of the war between good and evil, and no evidence can make them believe. Matthew's portrayal of the Jewish priests conveys exactly this message. If anybody in his right mind should have come to believe in Jesus, it was the Jewish priests who arranged his execution. That they did not believe despite their awareness of his resurrection is inexplicable except by assuming the evangelical dogma of skeptical depravity.
Craig next proceeds to a critique of four assumptions that he attributes to Lüdemann and that, by apparent implication, are widely held among skeptics generally. They are actually not so much assumptions as hypotheses proposed to explain how the gospel stories came to exist in their canonical form, taking account not only of the documents themselves but also everything else that is apparently known about Christianity's origins. Whether they are credible proposals is up for debate, but it is certainly not the case that they are the only possible alternatives to supposing that the resurrection really happened.
First, Craig criticizes Lüdemann's assumption "that the only primary source we have for the empty tomb is Mark's gospel." I do not remember whether Lüdemann considers Mark a primary source, but few scholars agree with him if he does. But the real issue is whether any other sources are dependent on Mark. Craig claims that the story comes from "multiple, independent" sources. But the gospels are our only sources, and there is no relevant sense in which they are independent. No one that I know of thinks there was actual collaboration—none of the four authors ever met any of the others. It is all but certain, though, that Matthew and Luke are rewrites of Mark. Matthew and Luke did add stuff of their own, apparently using one or more sources unknown to Mark, but whatever they have that is in common with Mark, they got from Mark. John's dependence on Mark or the other two is not so clear, but few scholars have any doubt that his gospel was written after the others were, and there is no convincing case to be made that he was unaware of what was in them. There is at least a possibility, then, that he used their material.
"At least Matthew and John have independent sources about the empty tomb," Craig affirms, but without offering any supporting evidence. Even if there is some evidence in their texts that Mark, Matthew, and John got their tomb stories from three separate sources, there is no way to know whether those three were independent of each other or whether they themselves were using a common source. Unknown sources cannot be checked for such things. If they could, they would not be unknown. Craig says the empty tomb is "also mentioned in the sermons in the Acts of the Apostles," but those sermons are not sources. Our source of everything in Acts is the same man who wrote Luke's gospel. Craig says once more that the empty tomb is "implied by Paul," but once more there is no such implication unless one assumes Craig's conclusion. His Christian readers will do that. The rest of us don't have to.
Craig then berates Lüdemann for assuming "that when Jesus was arrested, the disciples fled back to Galilee." This, according to Craig, is Lüdemann's explanation for why there were no men around to discover the empty tomb. Craig calls such a flight "inherently implausible" but doesn't say why, and I can't guess. Picture the situation. The leader of your cult has just been executed and you have good reason to think the authorities are now looking for anybody associated with him. Are you not going to think that it would be a good time to leave town? Craig refers to one writer who agrees with him that the disciples' flight is a "scholarly fiction" but he doesn't say a word about the writer's argument. But for Craig it doesn't matter. All that matters is that the writer agrees with him and is considered an authority.
Craig tries to find an inconsistency in Lüdemann's hypothesis, in that "it is crucial for his theory that at least Peter remained in Jerusalem, where he denied Jesus." Very well, but Peter denied Jesus before the crucifixion. Lüdemann's scenario supposes only that the disciples were all gone by Easter morning.
Next, according to Craig, Lüdemann "assumes that the Jewish authorities, who he takes to have disposed of Jesus's corpse, suffered a sort of collective amnesia about what they did with the body of Jesus." If Lüdemann in fact proposes such a hypothesis, then I agree with Craig that he is getting ridiculous. Craig quotes Lüdemann as admitting that "Jews showed an interest in where Jesus's corpse had been put" and that once the resurrection was being preached, "questions about his body from opponents or unbelievers" would have been raised. Well, maybe, but what if they had? According to the story, the disciples did not go public with their "He is risen" message until seven weeks after the crucifixion. What if somebody at that point had produced a corpse and said, "No, he is not risen. Here is his body"? How were they supposed to prove it was his body?
And then, "Finally, Lüdemann assumes that belief in the empty tomb arose as an inference from the belief that Jesus was risen from the dead." That might or might not accurately represent Lüdemann's actual thinking, but I have not yet read the relevant part of his writings to know for sure. He does think that Christian belief in an empty tomb came later than belief in the resurrection, but this does not entail anybody having thought, "He rose from the dead, therefore there must have been an empty tomb, and therefore somebody had to have found it." This would have been a non sequitur, as Craig quite correctly notes, but Craig is not correct to insist that the empty tomb story is therefore inexplicable except on the assumption that it was true. Craig says Lüdemann's explanation for the story is not credible, and he could be right, but Lüdemann's explanation and Craig's explanation are not the only possible explanations. There are others.
Lüdemann, says Craig, "still has not explained belief in the empty tomb," but Christian belief in the empty tomb is trivially easy to explain without any help from Lüdemann. Somebody started telling a story about the empty tomb. The story supported Christian teachings, and therefore Christians believed it. It still happens today, as manifest by uncounted urban legends of Christian origin. We may never know exactly how, when, where, or by whom the story was first told, but it cannot be cogently argued that it could not possibly ever have been told if it had not been true.
This brings us to Craig's third alleged fact.
Fact #3: On multiple occasions and under various circumstances, different individuals and groups of people experienced appearances of Jesus alive from the dead. This is a fact which is almost universally acknowledged among New Testament scholars, for the following reasons:
1. The list of eyewitnesses to Jesus's resurrection appearances which is quoted by Paul in I Cor. 15. 5-7 guarantees that such appearances occurred.
2. The appearance traditions in the gospels provide multiple, independent attestation of such appearances.
Let's get reason #2 out of the way first. The gospels are not independent sources, and practically nobody in the scholarly community thinks they are except for those committed to a defense of evangelical dogma.
Now, exactly how does Paul's "list of eyewitnesses" create a guarantee that the appearances actually occurred? What do we know about Paul that tells us we have to believe whatever he wrote? Nothing. Somebody told him that the risen Christ had appeared to certain people, and he believed it. Did he investigate what he was told? He doesn't say so. Was he initially even skeptical? Well, the risen Christ had appeared to him, too, and this seems to have been before anybody told him about all the appearances, so we may suppose that he was predisposed to take their word for it that others had had a similar experience.
Craig says it is "universally accepted on the basis of the early date of Paul's tradition as well as the apostle's personal acquaintance with many of the people listed that the disciples did experience post-mortem appearances of Christ." Well, actually, it is not quite universally accepted outside the community of Christian believers. It is true that many, though not all, nonbelieving scholars take it for granted that Jesus' disciples—of some of them, at any rate—thought they had seen Jesus after his death, and that this accounts for the stories that Paul heard and subsequently passed on to the Corinthians. Craig assumes that the appearances reported by Paul were the same events reported by the gospel authors, but this is assuming the truth of early Christian traditions about how the gospels got written and about the particulars of Paul's own conversion experience. We cannot prove the truth of Christian writings by assuming the truth of Christian dogma, no matter how habituated Christians themselves are to such circular reasoning.
The gospels were written at least a generation after Paul's time, and there is no logically compelling reason to interpolate anything from them back into anything Paul wrote. Whatever Paul knew or believed about Jesus, we know nothing beyond what Paul himself tells us that he knew or believed. Neither may we go beyond Paul's own words to infer anything about the sources of his knowledge and beliefs.
It is obvious, if one does not try to read between the lines, that Christ's appearance to Paul (as reported by Paul himself, not the author of Acts) was of the same nature as all the other appearances he mentions. Paul therefore believed that whatever they experienced was what he had experienced. Paul gives us no specifics anywhere in his writings about his own encounter with the risen Christ, but it seems to have been a vision of some kind. Paul does not tell us even that much, but we can note that according to the author of Acts, it was a vision. Whether it was a real vision, or a hallucination or some other delusion, need not concern us here. What concerns us is the reasonable inference from Paul's own testimony that it was the same thing as what happened to Cephas, and to James, and to all the others on his list.
If that inference is valid, then even if we assume (which we dont have to) that all of the post-mortem appearances reported by Paul actually occurred, then they were not the same events as those reported in the gospels. Of course evangelical dogma says that Paul cannot contradict the gospels, but that is only dogma, and if dogma contradicts logic, then that is just too bad for dogma. Of course it is possible that Paul did not intend to suggest that Christ's appearance to him was the same kind of appearance as that experienced by the others. But possibilities are not evidence. We cannot justifiably assume that he meant anything beyond what his words seem to suggest to a person of ordinary intelligence not committed to reaching any apologetic conclusion. It might be reasonable to think he did, but it cannot be unreasonable to think he did not.
And so we do not know the exact nature of the post-mortem appearances to Jesus' disciples. We may, for the sake of discussion, take Paul's report that there were appearances of some kind, but not necessarily to as many people as he says. He does not tell us how, when, or from whom he heard about any of them. It is not implausible that only two or three of the disciples, or maybe only one, had visions of Jesus after his death and the stories grew over the years until they reached Paul. Such things are not unprecedented in human experience.
But Craig would have us think that the first Christians, all of whom were Jews by the customary telling of the story, would have been too unreceptive to such stories to believe them unless they knew them to be factually true. This brings us to his fourth alleged fact.
Fact #4: The original disciples believed that Jesus was risen from the dead despite almost every predisposition to the contrary. Three aspects of the disciples' disposition following Jesus's crucifixion put a question mark behind the faith and hope they had placed in Jesus:
1. Jesus was dead, and Jews had no anticipation of a dying, much less rising, Messiah.
2. According to Jewish law, Jesus's execution as a criminal showed him out to be a heretic, a man literally under the curse of God.
3. Jewish beliefs about the afterlife precLüded anyones rising from the dead before the general, eschatological resurrection of the dead.
Craig does not cite any Jewish historians in support of any of these claims, but I have done some checking myself and found no confirmation. He assumes a monolithicity in ancient Jewish thinking that is nowhere in evidence outside of evangelical Christian dogma. Cultural diversity was alive and well in the first-century Middle East, and Jews were not immune to it. Whatever might have been the consensus thinking about the messiah, some Jews could have had other ideas or at least been receptive to them.
According to Craig, "Jesus's ignominious execution at the hands of Rome was as decisive a disproof as anything could be to a first century Jew that Jesus was not Israel's awaited Messiah, but another failed pretender." Perhaps it was, to the typical Jew, but Christians were saying, "Your expectations about the Messiah were wrong. Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah, and we can prove it by quoting Moses and the prophets, and from the fact that God raised him the dead." Granted, few Jews would have believed such a message. And in fact, few of them did. As far as the secular historical record indicates, Christianity made no significant headway until it caught on among gentiles. When Craig says, "Jews wouldnt have believed it," he is right but irrelevant.
As for the implications of the way Jesus was executed, this is not the proof of resurrection that Craig wishes it were. Death by crucifixion, he says, "meant that far from being God's Anointed, Jesus of Nazareth had actually been accursed by God. The disciples had been following a man whom God had rejected in the most unequivocal terms." OK, but maybe the disciples were too thickheaded to realize that. According to several gospel anecdotes, they were a remarkably clueless bunch. On the other hand, the shamefulness of crucifixion makes the story of Jesus' honorable burial commensurately implausible and thus is a good reason to be skeptical about the empty tomb.
Craig then notes that the resurrection as described in the gospels was contrary to all Jewish notions about the afterlife. But we do not know, from any Jewish Christian source, that early Jewish Christians had even heard of the gospel versions, let alone believed them. The gospels represent a gentile development in Christian thinking. Paul and other NT epistolary authors give us our only clear insight into pre-gospel thinking, and none of them attests unambiguously to a bodily resurrection. They do say he was raised from the dead, but how, exactly? In what form or manner? They don't say.
Anyhow, we may note again that if Craig says "Jews wouldn't have believed it," the record shows that for the most part they didn't. Christianity didn't really go anywhere until gentiles started believing it. If there is even a core of truth in the gospels and Acts, all we need to account for is just a dozen or so idiosyncratic Jews capable of believing in a physical resurrection and managing to convince a handful of other Jews, just enough to barely survive as an oddball sect, maybe despised by other Jews, until Paul came along and said you didn't have to be Jewish to be a Christian. I don't think that is how it did happen, but it is how it could have happened, and it is a more plausible scenario than dead people coming back to life.
Craig thinks an actual resurrection is not only more plausible but more reasonable on several grounds, which he sums up an argument to best explanation.
In his book Justifying Historical Descriptions, historian C. B. McCullagh lists six criteria which historians use in testing historical descriptions: explanatory scope, explanatory power, plausibility, ad hoc-ness, accord with accepted beliefs, and superiority to rival hypotheses.{44} Now we have before us two competing hypotheses, which I shall call the Resurrection Hypothesis and the Hallucination Hypothesis respectively.
It would be useful to review what historians ordinarily are talking about when they refer to these criteria, since Craig does not touch on this. A thorough explanation would be too great a digression, so we will have to slightly oversimplify a few points, but even at that we'll be saying more than Craig does. Explanatory scope is the amount of data that a hypothesis explains directly. It may be thought of as the number of facts for which it is immediately presented as an explanation. Explanatory power is the ability of the hypothesis to explain things other than that for which it was originally proposed as an explanation. Plausibility here means what it usually does, but the appeal is to the apocryphal "average person," not to the partisans in the instant debate. An ad hoc hypothesis is an auxiliary assumption necessary to justify the main hypothesis. Any hypothesis should be in accord with accepted beliefs simply because if it does not, then anyone who accepts it must believe a contradiction.
That is five of Craig's six criteria. Given two hypotheses, each may be assigned a kind of composite score on these five, and the one with the higher score is by definition the superior hypothesis. Craig's sixth criterion, superiority to rival hypotheses, is then purely dependent on the other five.
Lüdemann's suggestion that one or more disciples hallucinated the risen Jesus is scarcely the only alternative to an actual resurrection that has ever been proposed to explain Christianity's origin. It is far even from being the most widely accepted alternative, so far as I am aware. But its ranking among all alternatives is beside the immediate point. Craig says that if they go head to head, his is superior to Lüdemann's according to historians' criteria. Let us see about that.
Explanatory scope. According to Craig, the scope of the hallucination hypothesis "is too narrow because it offers nothing by way of explanation of the empty tomb." But this is begging the question. Craig has not proved that anybody found an empty tomb, and until he does, it does not have to be explained. "Now of course," Craig does note, "Lüdemann denies the fact of the empty tomb." Craig also notes that "Lüdemann's handling of the evidence for the burial and empty tomb were less than convincing." Well, obviously they did not convince Craig, but Craig's personal tendency to believe a hypothesis is in no way a measure of its explanatory scope.
Explanatory power. Craig objects here that Lüdemann's hypothesis fails to account for the number and diversity of appearances of the risen Jesus that are reported by Paul and the gospel authors. However, a mere report of an event does not make the event a fact, and Craig has not established beyond reasonable doubt that we have, except in Paul's case, anything but mere reports. It is not an uncontested fact that Peter or any other disciple of Jesus had any experience that they thought was Jesus appearing to them after his death. We do not have Peter's word for it that he saw any risen Christ. We have Paul's word for it that he, Paul, saw the risen Christ, and that is the only firsthand account we have. Paul does say that others saw the risen Christ, too, but he does not say how he knows they did. He does not tell us that Peter or anybody else said to him, "I saw the risen Christ."
Paul also gives us zero information about the particular nature of all those appearances. All he says is that after his death, Christ "was seen" by certain people, but what exactly was that supposed to mean? What if anything did they see Jesus doing? What if anything did they hear Jesus saying? Where did these appearances happen and when did they happen? Paul tells us none of this. He does not corroborate a single detail in any of the gospels beyond there having been a crucifixion, a burial, a resurrection, and some subsequent appearances.
While Craig concedes that mass hallucinations have occurred ("as at Lourdes," he remarks), "there is no single instance in the casebooks exhibiting the diversity involved in the post-mortem appearances of Jesus." But there is no hint of any diversity in the earliest reports, which are Paul's. The diversity and other specifics show up only in the gospel stories, which are many years later than Paul's skeletal rendering, allowing more than ample time for embellishments to accrue.
Craig goes on to offer "three specific cases which are not well-explained by the Hallucination Hypothesis." He begins with James, an early leader of the Jerusalem church. This James is generally supposed to have been a brother of Jesus of Nazareth, and for the sake of discussion we will assume the supposition correct. According to Craig, James "did not believe that his elder sibling was the Messiah or even anybody special during his lifetime." He cites Mark's and John's gospels in support of this. But Mark is silent on James's personal opinion of Jesus, as are Matthew and Luke in their accounts of a similar incident. (Matthew does not even identify him by name, and neither does John.) John is the only one to affirm that Jesus' brothers did not believe in him, but John's gospel was last to be written, and it is the one that most seems driven more by a doctrinal agenda than by devotion to accurate history.
Furthermore, John is describing the brothers' reactions to Jesus at a particular moment in the midst of his ministry, perhaps very early, in Chapter 7 of a 21-chapter book. James is not mentioned again in John's gospel, nor does he appear in Mark, Matthew, or Luke after his noncommital cameo there. For all that any of the gospel authors tell us, James could as well have become a believer long before his brother's death as at any time afterward. But surely they would have said so if he had? One would think so, but hold that thought.
Granted that if we go only by the gospels, we would suppose that James never joined his brother's movement. But in the first chapter of Acts, as Craig notes, "unexpectedly we find Jesus's brothers among those in the upper room in Christian worship . . . (Acts 1:14)." While it is true we had no particular reason to expect them to be there, neither did we have any particular reason to expect otherwise. The author of Acts, probably also the author of Luke's gospel, nowhere prior to Acts 1:14 and nowhere afterward says a word about what any of Jesus' brothers thought about him at any time before they joined the gathering in the upper room. For all that he (or Matthew or Mark) tells us, they were believers from the beginning. Only John offers any hint to the contrary—and John says not a word about any of them ever converting.
Craig says James "in time . . . emerges as a leader in the Jerusalem church," and he cites Acts 12:17 and Gal. 1:19. But James is not identified in Acts 12 as a leader, only as one of "the brethren," although two other mentions later in Acts do suggest that whatever his official capacity might or might not have been, he was a man of some influence in the church. But nowhere in Acts is he identified as the brother of any particular man. In Acts 15:13 he is quoted as saying, "Men and brethren, hearken unto me," where the parallel with "Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears" could hardly be more obvious. All we get in the third reference is "Paul went with us unto James; and all the elders were present."
So there are two references in Acts to a group of "brethren" of which James is one. Who are they? The writer does not say specifically, but so far as I know, Christians have considered themselves part of a brotherhood from Day One. Paul, at any rate, often uses "brethren" with such a meaning obviously intended, and the author of Acts provides no contextual hints that he means it any other way.
And here is the Galatians reference, in context:
But when it pleased God, who separated me from my mother's womb, and called me by his grace, to reveal his Son in me, that I might preach him among the heathen; immediately I conferred not with flesh and blood: neither went I up to Jerusalem to them which were apostles before me; but I went into Arabia, and returned again unto Damascus.
Then after three years I went up to Jerusalem to see Peter, and abode with him fifteen days. But other of the apostles saw I none, save James the Lord's brother. (Gal. 1:15-19)
It is easy to assume, and nearly everyone does assume, that this is a reference by Paul to James's sibling relationship to Jesus. Whether it is in fact what it seems to be need not concern us now. The point here is that this is the only place in the New Testament where there is even a clear hint of such a relationship. The author of Acts and one of the gospels mentions Jesus' brothers but does not name them and never identifies any of them with a church leader named James. This is surpassingly odd. While it should be no great surprise if James himself was too modest to capitalize on his relationship, to think that other Christians would not have lionized him is to deny human nature. But instead, the man is barely a cipher in Christian history.
And what kind of respect does Paul give "the lord's brother"? Well, Paul mentions him four times, once to the Corinthians and three times to the Galatians. In Corinthians he was one of the people by whom Jesus "was seen" after the resurrection. We have already quoted the first Galatians reference. In the next, Paul says that James is among a group, also including Cephas and John, who "seemed to be pillars" in the Jerusalem church. Only "seemed to be"? This was Jesus Christ's own brother, and Paul could only guess about his status in the church? Or maybe, just maybe, when Paul referred to him as "the lord's brother," he meant something other than "sibling of Jesus of Nazareth"? When he mentions James the next time, just three verses after the "pillars" remark, Paul disparages him as a bad influence on Cephas. Of course Paul was famously independent in his thinking, but even so, surely he would have shown more deference to Jesus' actual brother?
And so the evidence that this James was Jesus' sibling is weak. If Paul attests to it, it is not again mentioned in any Christian writing until the third century. But let's assume that when Paul wrote "the lord's brother," he in fact meant "Jesus' sibling." How is this evidence that a real resurrection is more credible than hallucinations? Craig assumes that James was still an unbeliever when Jesus died and therefore, unlike Peter, would not have been susceptible to a hallucination. On this assumption, the only thing that could have made a believer out of James was a real encounter with his brother after a real resurrection. But there is no evidence behind this assumption. There is no account of James's conversion. Nobody tells us when it happened or what brought it about. Nobody tells us that James actually saw Jesus after his death. Craig is engaged in a massive reading-between-the-lines. He even tries to enlist Josephus in his effort, claiming "We learn from Josephus that James was eventually martyred for his faith in Jesus Christ during a lapse in the civil government in the mid-60s." That is blatant question-begging. Josephus definitely does not say that James was "martyred for his faith in Jesus Christ."
Here is what Josephus says about James's death:
Festus was now dead, and Albinus was but upon the road; so he [Ananus, the high priest] assembled the sanhedrim of judges, and brought before them the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James, and some others; and when he had formed an accusation against them as breakers of the law, he delivered them to be stoned: but as for those who seemed the most equitable of the citizens, and such as were the most uneasy at the breach of the laws, they disliked what was done; they also sent to the king, desiring him to send to Ananus that he should act so no more, for that what he had already done was not to be justified.
There is not a word here about what motivated Ananus's hostility against James. There is in particular no reference to what James believed about his brother, or to what he believed about anything or anybody else. It is possible that Ananus was indeed driven to a homicidal rage by James's faith that his brother Jesus was the Christ—but Josephus does not say so. Craig might suppose that no Christian is ever murdered for any other reason but his faith in Jesus, but the rest of the world is not obliged to share that supposition.
Craig next says the hallucination hypothesis cannot explain the appearance to the "500 brethren." Lüdemann says it doesn't have to because that appearance didn't happen, or at least is not known to have happened. He suggests that it was a legendized account of the Pentecost event. According to Craig, "such an explanation is weak, not only because the eyewitnesses were still around, but because the event at Pentecost was fundamentally different from a resurrection appearance." Well of course the story as recorded in Acts is obviously not a resurrection appearance to anybody, but Christians during the 40s and 50s didn't have the book of Acts to remind them of what really happened on a certain Day of Pentecost several years earlier. As stories about that day's events got passed along from generation to generation, there was no documentary anchor keeping the details from drifting ever farther from those in the original version. Craig's implied claim that eyewitnesses would have kept this from happening assumes a great deal that is not at all in evidence.
I happen to think that Lüdemann sees more real history in the book of Acts than is really there. I think the Pentecost event never actually happened. If something like it did happen, though, I see nothing implausible about its evolving over a few years into a story about the risen Jesus appearing to 500 believers, while in another lineage of oral tradition it evolved into the more complex and detailed version that somebody told the author of Acts, many years after Paul had told the Corinthians what somebody had told him. Craig says the Pentecost event "is presumably supposed to have been more or less accurately preserved in Christian tradition as found in Acts 2," but that depends entirely on who is doing the presuming and supposing. Plenty of people whose scholarly credentials are in good order think Acts is mostly or entirely a work of fiction, but we don't need to accept their judgment in order to see how the story of the appearance to the 500 could have had the same origin as the story of the Pentecost event. On this point, whatever the prima facie plausibility of Lüdemann's scenario, it is hardly more improbable than a man really rising from the dead and really appearing to 500 people.
Finally on this point, Craig says the hallucination hypotheses cannot explain why the women were first to experience the risen Christ. According to Lüdemann, Peter and the other disciples who thought they saw Jesus after his death were hallucinating because of extreme guilt over their having abandoned him after his arrest. However, Craig says the women never abandoned him, and so they had nothing to feel guilty about, but they were the first to see the risen Jesus, and the hallucination hypothesis cannot explain this.
Lüdemann addresses this by positing that the first appearance was not to the women but (consistently with Paul's account) to Peter. Craig will have none of this, but all he does is repeat his claims about multiple attestation and the criterion of embarrassment. We have already addressed those, and his repetition does not add any cogency to his argument. Craig says the New Testament does not say anywhere that Peter was first to see the risen Christ, "not even in I Cor. 15.5." No, but read in context, the passage clearly implies that Paul knew of no previous appearances. Let us look at that context. (Emphasis has been added.)
For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins . . . and that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day . . . and that he was seen of Cephas, then of the twelve: after that, he was above five hundred brethren, at once . . . . After that, he was seen of James; then of all the apostles. And last of all he was seen of me also . . . .
Keeping in mind that Paul was writing a generation before any gospel author, would any person of ordinary intelligence read that and ask himself, "I wonder who saw him before Cephas did?" Can anybody seriously doubt that Paul was implying that Cephas was the first to see the risen Christ? The women, says Craig, were "doubtless omitted from the list . . . because naming them as witnesses would have been worse than worthless in a patriarchal culture." Nothing makes it doubtless, though, except Craig's dogma. Absent any assumption of that dogma's infallibility, doubt could hardly be more reasonable.
Craig then moves on to argue in effect that hallucinations don't happen the way the gospel stories describe the post-mortem appearances. Had the disciples been hallucinating, he says, they would have had visions of Jesus in Paradise, not walking around on this earth. But, for all we know, that is what they saw. We don't have their accounts of what happened. We have stories that were making the rounds in Christian circles many decades later purporting to describe their experiences. Craig cannot presume the accuracy of the stories in order to prove their accuracy. "But," he objects, "such exalted visions of Christ leave unexplained their belief in his resurrection. The inference, 'He is risen from the dead,' would have been wholly unnatural to a first-century Jew." We have already dealt with Craig's apparent supposition that all Jews thought exactly alike in those days.
Next up is the plausibility issue. Craig devotes many paragraphs to an attempt to undermine the plausibility of Lüdemann's hypothesis. I will stipulate that it is not very believable. I don't believe it myself. But the relevant question is whether it is more believable than Craig's hypothesis. It is common knowledge that people sometimes have hallucinations. It is not common knowledge that dead people sometimes become alive again. The conviction of many Christians that it did happen to at least one man has no relevance to what other people may reasonably believe. The certainty with which people believe something is not evidence of its truth.
That is all that need be said about plausibility, but Craig brings up a related issue in this section that merits comment. We observed earlier that in his enumeration of the appearances of the risen Christ, Paul implied there was no difference between his experience and that of those who had seen the risen Christ before he did. Lüdemann makes the same observation, and Craig challenges him on it. According to Craig, this is an "implausible presupposition," but Craig does not say what makes it implausible. He quotes Crossan's apparent agreement with him that "Paul's own entranced revelation should not be presumed to be the model for all the others,"{65} but Crossan's opinion is not necessarily worth any more than Craig's. The text at face value clearly suggests that Paul and the others all had similar experiences, and there is nothing in the text to warrant taking it at anything but face value. According to the Crossan quote, the only thing Paul was equating was "its validity and legitimacy, but not necessarily its mode or manner." But what would have made it equal in validity and legitimacy? How about: It was equally valid and legitimate because it happened exactly the same way?
If Paul is here trying to defend his apostolic credentials, he must be affirming either that there is no difference between his experience and the others' or else that the differences are irrelevant or insignificant. But Craig tries to deny both.
The New Testament consistently differentiates between a vision of Christ and a resurrection appearance of Christ. Paul was familiar with "visions and revelations of the Lord" (I Cor. 12.1 [Apparently a typo by Craig. The phrase actually appears in II Cor. 12:1.]). Yet Paul, like the rest of the New Testament, did not equate such visions of Christ with resurrection appearances.
So, there was a significant difference, and Paul knew it. But what was that difference? "The answer of the New Testament seems clear: a resurrection appearance was an extra-mental event, whereas a vision was merely in the mind of the recipient." So, when Peter saw the risen Christ, the risen Christ was actually there, not just in Peter's mind, and because of that, it was an appearance, not a vision. Had it been a vision, Christ himself would not actually have been in Peter's presence. So, is Craig saying that Christ actually came back down from heaven to confront Paul on the road to Damascus? Actually, it's hard to tell what Craig tries to say next.
First he distinguishes, as he must, between real visions and fake visions.
To say that some phenomenon was visionary is not to say that it was illusory. Biblical scholars have found it necessary to distinguish between what are sometimes called "objective visions" and "subjective visions." An objective, or, less misleadingly, veridical vision is a vision caused by God. A subjective or non-veridical vision is a product of the percipient's imagination. A veridical version involves the seeing of an objective reality without the normal processes of sense perception. A non-veridical vision has no extra-mental correlate and is therefore hallucinatory.
OK, for the believers among Craig's readers, it won't matter whether they can make any logical sense out of this. If a nonbeliever is going to make any sense of it, though, we have to suppose that Craig is saying something like the following. A thing seen in a vision is not actually where the perceiver sees it, somewhere right in front of him. It is somewhere else in space or time, often both. But it is (or was, or will be) something objectively real. Because of the space-time discontinuity, though, the perceiver cannot be detecting it with his ordinary senses. Therefore, the perception occurs by divine intervention. A hallucination, by contrast, has no connection with anything real. It is caused not by God but by a mental malfunction.
Now, for taxonomical purposes, I can accept that visions are of divine origin while hallucinations are not, but Craig is losing it if he wants to claim that hallucinations are never about real things that just happen to be elsewhere in space or time. And is he going to claim also that every single thing seen by the author of Revelation was, or is going to be, objectively real? I dont think so. I think he will insist that many of the things John saw were only symbols of things that will be objectively real.
He gives no examples of anything he will admit to being a hallucination, but he does offer three instances of veridical visions, all of them involving "the exalted Christ." One is Stephen's, reported in Acts Chapter 7.
But he, being full of the Holy Ghost, looked up stedfastly into heaven, and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing on the right hand of God, And said, Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of man standing on the right hand of God.
Another is John's, reported in the opening chapter of Revelation.
I was in the Spirit on the Lord's day, and heard behind me a great voice, as of a trumpet, Saying, I am Alpha and Omega, the first and the last: and, What thou seest, write in a book, and send it unto the seven churches which are in Asia; unto Ephesus, and unto Smyrna, and unto Pergamos, and unto Thyatira, and unto Sardis, and unto Philadelphia, and unto Laodicea. And I turned to see the voice that spake with me. And being turned, I saw seven golden candlesticks; And in the midst of the seven candlesticks one like unto the Son of man, clothed with a garment down to the foot, and girt about the paps with a golden girdle.
Craig's third example of a veridical vision is one that Paul himself had, as reported by the author of Acts (22:17-21). This is sometime after Paul's trip to Damascus and his conversion en route there.
And it came to pass, that, when I was come again to Jerusalem, even while I prayed in the temple, I was in a trance; And saw him saying unto me, Make haste, and get thee quickly out of Jerusalem: for they will not receive thy testimony concerning me. And I said, Lord, they know that I imprisoned and beat in every synagogue them that believed on thee: And when the blood of thy martyr Stephen was shed, I also was standing by, and consenting unto his death, and kept the raiment of them that slew him. And he said unto me, Depart: for I will send thee far hence unto the Gentiles.
How, according to Craig, do these three experiences differ from what happened to Paul on the road to Damascus? Well, "appearances of Jesus, in contrast to veridical visions of Jesus, involved an extra-mental reality which anyone present could experience." OK, but we have only the storytellers' word for it whether anybody else could have seen, or did see, the same thing, and for some reason "veridical visions" tend to happen to people only when nobody else is around. (Stephen's vision seems to be a rare exception to the only-when-alone rule, but maybe not. Luke does not say that nobody else saw what Stephen saw, and we might remember at this point Craig's argument that Paul does not say that Peter was the first to see the risen Christ.)
So at this point, if we are to believe Craig, if a person sees Jesus and there is nobody else around, there is no way to know whether it is a vision or a post-resurrection appearance, but we can be sure it is not a hallucination because Jesus is real and hallucinations are never about real things. John's experience on Patmos was a vision and not an appearance because, even though he was alone, we can sure that nobody else would have seen what he saw if they had been there. Stephen's experience was a vision and not an appearance because even though he was not alone, we are not told that anybody else saw what he saw and therefore we can be sure that nobody did. Paul's experience in Jerusalem was a vision and not an appearance because, although we have no idea whether or not he was alone in the temple, he does not say that anybody else saw what he saw.
And now, what about the Damascus road thing? Vision or appearance? Paul was not alone when it happened. Well, Craig says it "could count as a real appearance." Oh, is that because Paul's traveling companions also saw and heard Jesus? Well, sort of. Craig says that "the light and the voice were experienced by Paul's traveling companions." That apparently is close enough for government work or for Christian apologetics, although this light-and-sound show was "not experienced by them as a revelation of Christ." Paul's companions did not know what they were hearing or seeing, but we know it was Jesus because Paul said it was Jesus, and we know it was not just a vision because others with him saw something and heard something.
This, according to Craig, "seems to be the consistent answer throughout the New Testament to the question of what the difference was between a vision and an appearance of Jesus." But Craig is just blowing smoke here. He needs there to be a difference and he is reading one between the lines. No New Testament writer affirms that there is any such difference. In particular and most relevantly, Paul himself nowhere says that there is a difference. In Revelation, John says he saw Jesus. In Acts, Luke says Stephen saw Jesus. In Corinthians, Paul says he saw Jesus, and he says that lots of other people saw Jesus.
And in Acts, Luke reports that Paul says he saw Jesus. But not on the road to Damascus. That was in Jerusalem sometime later. On the road to Damascus, Paul did not see Jesus, according to all accounts in the book of Acts. The story of the Damascus Road conversion is told three times in Acts. The first is a third-person narrative. Twice later, the author records Paul's first-person narrative to other people. Here are the relevant excerpts.
And as he [Saul] journeyed, he came near Damascus: and suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven: And he fell to the earth, and heard a voice saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? (Acts 9:3-4)
And it came to pass, that, as I made my journey, and was come nigh unto Damascus about noon, suddenly there shone from heaven a great light round about me. And I fell unto the ground, and heard a voice saying unto me, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? (Acts 22:6-7)
At midday, O king, I saw in the way a light from heaven, above the brightness of the sun, shining round about me and them which journeyed with me. And when we were all fallen to the earth, I heard a voice speaking unto me, and saying in the Hebrew tongue, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? (Acts 26:13-14)
According to Craig, the Jerusalem vision was not an appearance of the risen Christ, even though Paul saw Christ, who long before had risen and ascended to heaven. But Craig says Paul's encounter with the risen Christ on the road to Damascus was an appearance, even though Paul did not see the risen Christ on that occasion but only heard his voice. If this is not special pleading, then there is no such thing. Craig has failed utterly to establish reasonable doubt about the supposition that in Paul's mind, all who had seen the risen Christ before him had experienced a vision of the risen Christ, not an encounter with a reanimated corpse as described in the gospels.
Granted, according to Acts there was no vision on the road to Damascus, but a discrepancy between Acts and Corinthians is no problem except for inerrantists. We have no firsthand account, beyond the bare words in Corinthians, of whatever Paul might have told anybody about what he saw when he saw the risen Christ. Whatever else he said about it, if anything, we can reasonably suppose that by the time the story reached the author of Acts, it might have borne little resemblance to Paul's original accounts.
This brings us to:
Ad hoc-ness. A theory becomes increasingly ad hoc, or contrived, in proportion to the number of additional assumptions it requires us to adopt. Lüdemann's Hallucination Hypothesis involves several such additional assumptions:
In the first place, no one who defends the Bible as a work of reliable history has any room to talk about ad hoc hypotheses. Evangelical apologists toss them out in abundance. In the second place, what seems ad hoc to some people will seem like a reasonable inference to others. Craig is talking in a way here about Occam's razor. To the question of how Christianity originated, the only answer that entails no assumptions is "I dont know." Every proposed scenario comes with a pack of assumptions, and it is nearly impossible to count them precisely enough to get a meaningful measurement of any theory's parsimony. Each of us can but try as best he can to check his assumptions against those that he sees others making. And while it is good to keep their number to a minimum, some consideration must also be given to prima facie plausibility. It can in some cases be better to make several plausible assumptions than one assumption that is implausible on its face.
Craig attacks four assumptions on which Lüdemann's theory depends. Let us examine his objections to them.
1. The disciples fled back to Galilee on the night of Jesus' arrest. Craig says there is "not a shred of evidence" that they did so, but it would not be an assumption if there were evidence. It would instead be an inference. The question is whether the lack of evidence is a problem. It is not, unless there is some compelling reason why we should expect there to have been evidence if it had happened, and I cannot think of any such reason. Craig then claims that "on the face of it" their fleeing Jerusalem right after the arrest is "implausible in the extreme." Nothing makes it implausible, though, except an assumption that Christian dogma cannot be wrong. Absent that assumption, few things would have been more credible than the disciples leaving Jerusalem after Jesus' arrest.
2. Peter was so obsessed with guilt . . . . But, "The records tell us nothing about the state of Peter's mind following his denial of Jesus," Craig says. Really? Nothing at all? Here is Matthew: "And Peter remembered the word of Jesus, which said unto him, Before the cock crow, thou shalt deny me thrice. And he went out, and wept bitterly." Mark: "And Peter called to mind the word that Jesus said unto him, Before the cock crow twice, thou shalt deny me thrice. And when he thought thereon, he wept." Luke: "And Peter went out, and wept bitterly." Only John fails to offer any hints about Peter's state of mind. It is arguably a stretch to get from "wept bitterly" to "was driven to hallucinations," but it is manifestly not true that the authors offer no reason to think that Peter was suffering from a really nasty guilt trip.
3. The remaining disciples became so carried away . . . . Craig again pleads lack of evidence, and this time he has a point, or part of one. The authors indeed don't say anything explicit (with the irrelevant exception of Judas's suicide) from which we can infer anything in particular about the other disciples' feelings. But must we then suppose that they felt nothing? Is it so unreasonable to suppose that they experienced an emotional trauma of some kind? "We are simply asked to assume this," says Craig. But it is surely reasonable to assume that they were normal human beings, and from that assumption, certain inferences about their state of mind become at least plausible.
4. Paul had an unconscious struggle with Jewish law and a secret attraction to Christianity. Craig pounces on "unconscious" and "secret" and observes, "this assumption defies support by evidence." Yes, and this might be the weakest of these four assumptions. But it is also the most dispensable. Notwithstanding Lüdemann's personal compulsion to read Paul's mind, we don't really need to psychoanalyze Paul to account for what he wrote. What he wrote was that he saw the risen Christ. We don't know what really happened. Maybe he had a vision. Maybe he just heard voices. Maybe he had some other experience that he decided to interpret as Jesus appearing to him even though he didn't really see or hear anything. We don't have the facts of his experience, whatever it was. All we have is his interpretation of the facts, and his similar interpretation of things told to him by or about Cephas and a few other leaders of the Christian movement. It would be very nice to know how and why he reached that particular interpretation, but a desire for knowledge does not itself engender knowledge. We are stuck with hypotheses that might or might not be true and that we can only judge to be more or less plausible.
One hypothesis is that Jesus of Nazareth actually did return to life and actually did appear to Cephas and everybody else listed by Paul in his letter to the Corinthians, and that this explains why Paul wrote what he did. Craig finds it believable, and I will not impugn his intellect just for that reason. But he is attempting to argue that no other hypothesis is reasonably believable, and he has failed in that attempt.
To return to our critique of his effort, we see Craig try to prove the inferiority of the hallucination hypothesis by noting its age. He says it is "old hat in German theology, having been expounded notably by Emmanuel Hirsch back in the 1920s." So, if old hypotheses are bad, then only new ones are good. But then, what does this imply about a hypothesis that is almost 2,000 years old?
Craig's next move is to assess how well his own hypothesis meets the historians' criteria. My responses will be largely repetitious, and I will keep them as brief as I can.
1. The resurrection hypothesis "explains why the tomb was found empty, why the disciples saw post-mortem appearances of Jesus, and why the Christian faith came into being." Craig has not established the empty tomb or the appearances as facts. He has alleged them to be facts but failed to prove them, and in so doing has assumed his conclusion and thus argued in a circle.
2. It "explains why the body of Jesus was gone, why people repeatedly saw Jesus alive despite his earlier public execution, and so forth." More of the same question-begging.
3. It is plausible because "given the historical context of Jesus's own unparalleled life and claims, the resurrection serves as divine confirmation of those radical claims." In other words, if you presuppose that the New Testament is true, then it is easy to believe what the New Testament says.
4. Against the hallucination hypothesis, it assumes nothing but God's existence. That just isn't so, as I have attempted to demonstrate. Craig's argument is rife with additional assumptions.
5. According to Craig, there is no conflict between the resurrection and "accepted beliefs" because believers don't deny that dead people naturally stay dead. Since the resurrection was a miracle, it was not natural, and so there is no contradiction. But Craig is confusing "accepted" with "popular." A majority of the world's people believe that miracles sometimes happen, and for them the only question is whether this particular miracle was one of them. But a substantial minority are convinced that natural law is never violated. Craig needs something better than an argumentum ad populum to prove that skepticism about miracles is unreasonable. Knowing that we could be wrong is not reason enough for us to concLüde that we certainly are wrong.
6. "No naturalistic hypothesis has attracted a great number of scholars." It would not matter if this were true, and Craig has not proved that it is true. I judge from my own research that no particular naturalistic hypothesis is endorsed by a majority of scholars, but it does not follow that most scholars reject any naturalistic hypothesis, and even if they do, it is not unreasonable per se to disagree with a scholarly majority.
Craig then adds a few paragraphs disparaging philosophical naturalism, which need not distract us at this point.