By DOUG SHAVER
August
2006
Craig starts with a dig at Fales's "rather maverick views of New Testament studies." This
suggests that Fales's views are far from the scholarly mainstream, but in that case why is he
worth so much of Craig's time and effort? Maybe it's because Craig wants to reassure believers
that only kooks and cranks can question Christian orthodoxy. I myself have no idea what is
Fales's standing in the scholarly community, and nor do I care much. If his arguments are cogent,
I will give them due consideration. If they are not, I will dismiss them.
Craig sets up his target for this article like this:
Fales thinks that the gospel narratives are neither fundamentally historical accounts of the ministry of Jesus nor largely legendary stories of the same. Rather they are of the genre of mythology, akin to contemporaneous pagan myths, which neither their purveyors nor their recipients thought to take literally as history.
The first thing that Craig thinks is wrong with this is that it is behind the academic times.
Now from D. F. Strauss through Rudolf Bultmann the role of myth in the shaping of the gospels was a question of lively debate in New Testament scholarship. But with the advent of the so-called "Third Quest" of the historical Jesus and what one author has called "the Jewish reclamation of Jesus,"{1} that is, the rediscovery of the Jewishness of Jesus, scholars have come to appreciate that the proper context for understanding Jesus and the gospels is first-century Palestinian Judaism, not pagan mythology.
It is true, and a point well taken, that most modern scholars do not ignore, as their predecessors tended to, the fact that Jesus of Nazareth was a Jew living in, and influenced by, a Palestinian Jewish culture. But this perspective is relevant only to a reading of the gospels that presumes their historical reliability. If Fales is advocating a different reading, then his argument for that alternative needs to be critiqued on its own merits, not on its congruence with a modern academic orthodoxy.
As Craig interprets him, Fales advances "what we might call a sociological theory of myths," the major points of which Craig proceeds to summarize. Being unfamiliar with Fales's work, I can offer no comment on Craig's opinion of its particulars. When Craig insists, however, that "the gospels are not of the genre of myth. The gospels are closest in their genre to ancient biography," he is not rebutting Fales but only asserting that Fales is wrong. What's more, if Craig could prove that the gospels are indeed works of biography, the cogency of Fales's mythological theory would be irrelevant. If, on the other hand, the gospels are indeed more myth than biography, then it makes no difference how wrong Fales's particular interpretation of them is.
Craig attempts to establish the gospels' factuality by recycling his appeal to a couple of scholars who happen to agree with him, and by referring to Luke's preface to his gospel. That last is a telling signal of Craig's desperation. One can understand a Christian lay person of limited education reading Luke's introductory comments and concluding that his reporting must be trustworthy. It is not so easy to imagine how someone can earn a Ph.D. while clinging to the notion that any writer who says "Trust me" ought to be trusted. It is not to be presumed that Craig actually thinks this is a sound argument. It is rather more likely that for his purposes, it does not matter whether any argument is sound just so long as lots of Christians think it is and can use it to dispel any doubts about the Bible's inerrancy.
Craig then offers two arguments against there being any ancient myths in the gospels. The first, he says, is that the "supposed parallels were spurious." In short, this argument claims that there is too much dissimilarity between the gospel stories and any previous myth for there to have been any influence. Christians who know little to nothing about the ancient myths will of course just have to take Craig's word for that, and most will. But many scholars who are quite familiar with the myths think that Craig, and the few scholars of relevant expertise who happen to agree with him, are just in denial. I'm not about to argue that Craig must be wrong just because lots of experts say he is, but I am arguing that if lots of experts say he is wrong, then I'm justified in thinking that he could be wrong and hence that the gospels could be rewrites of ancient myths.
Let us look at a particular example that Craig examines. He asks, "With respect specifically to the empty tomb narrative, what putative parallel to such an account will Fales find in ancient mythology?" He then suggests,
The closest would probably be apotheosis stories such as told by Diodurus Siculus. As Hercules climbs up on his funeral pyre, lightning strikes and consumes the pyre. No trace of Hercules is to be found. The conclusion: "he had passed from among men into the company of the gods."{7}
And Craig affirms that "the empty tomb story is essentially different from such a myth" because the punch line is not "He is now a god" but "He is risen."
I have read other stories about dead heroes coming back to life that might be reasonably considered closer, but that need not concern us now. The question is how close in detail one story must be to a later one to justify a belief that the later is a borrowing of the earlier.
When I first went to see the movie West Side Story, I knew only two things about the storyline. One was that it had something to do with New York street gangs. The other was that the hero dies at the end. I also liked the music, and I knew that the play had been very successful on Broadway. Beyond that, if anyone had asked me, "What's it about?" I'd have said, "I have no idea."
Quite by coincidence, just a few months earlier I had read Romeo and Juliet. And while watching the movie, I knew by the time the dance scene was over, without needing any professor of English literature to explain it to me, that West Side Story was just a rewrite of Romeo and Juliet. Now, we do have the admission, by Stephen Sondheim and everybody else involved with the show, that that was what they intended. But if Sondheim for some reason had tried to deny that he was rewriting Shakespeare, he could have pointed out as many dissimilarities between Shakespeare and the Broadway show as Craig can point out between Jesus and Hercules. ("What do you mean, they're the same story? Tony doesn't kill himself, he's murdered. And Maria doesn't even die, let alone kill herself.")
Craig's second argument is that there is "no genealogical connection between pagan myths and the origin of the disciples' belief in Jesus' resurrection." That sounds like it would be a killer argument if he had some evidence for it, but it is no argument at all. It is just his conclusion restated in different words. Trying to support it, he quotes a sympathetic scholar denying that Hellenistic mystery religions ever found much support among Palestinian Jews. Since Christianity itself never found much support among Palestinian Jews either, Craig hasn't proved much with this observation.
Of course, Fales is not arguing that Jesus' disciples came to think he had returned to life on account of any stories they had heard about Osiris or other resurrected gods. But his account of Christianity's origins does not suppose that they actually thought so in the first place, for any reason. Rather, the stories about their thinking it and why they thought it were part of the mythology that became the gospel stories, which the writers didn't expect their readers to suppose had actually happened. Craig attempts, by quoting Paul (along with fellow apologist Gregory Boyd), to show that the disciples did in fact believe, rightly or wrongly, that Jesus had risen from the dead. But so long as he and Boyd can do no more than quote scripture, they are just assuming their conclusion. And as we have already noted, Paul's epistles confirm no specific detail of the gospel stories. In particular, they tell us nothing about what any disciple thought he saw on the third day after Jesus' death.
The last part of this article is Craig's comments on Fales's responses to his, Craig's, arguments for gospel historicity. Additional commentary by me here would be mostly repetitious, since I have already addressed these points, but there is one tangent we have not gone off on yet. Fales raises the issue of events mentioned in the gospels for which we ought to have independent evidence and don't, and from this he argues that it is reasonable to question their historical reliability. Craig's remarks on one in particular, the three-hour midday darkness, are especially enlightening about arguments from lack of documentary evidence.
First, he says, "all four of the events mentioned by Fales are circumstantial features of the resurrection story." Meaning what? Meaning that just because the noonday darkness didn't really happen doesn't mean the resurrection didn't really happen. And that is technically correct. But the problem for the apologist is that the dispelling of reasonable doubt about the resurrection requires proof that the gospel authors must be considered dependable beyond question. If we are to believe them when they say Jesus was resurrected, then there can be no reasonable doubt that anything they wrote was untrue.
Craig goes to some trouble to avoid any appeal to inerrancy. Thus we get: "Even if these features of the narrative are judged to be unhistorical features due to legend or redaction, no one takes that to call into question the historicity of the core of the story, namely, that Jesus died by crucifixion." What Craig is trying to suggest is that it should be no harder to believe in the resurrection than it is to believe in the crucifixion because we have essentially the same evidence for both. The darkness at noon, on the other hand, is not mentioned by John and so he can cut the skeptics a little bit of slack on that point, although not much. "The earliness of the tradition counts in favor of the historicity of the event; but the absence of independent attestation counts against it," he says.
Fales, according to Craig, argues that if the darkness did not occur, then we may suppose that at first nobody thought the gospels were intended as factual history, because otherwise Jews would have used the error to disparage the gospels, but we have no record of such polemics, and so the gospels must have been generally recognized as myth and only later construed as history. Craig's response to this is that not enough Jewish writing survives from the first century for us to infer anything one way or the other about what Jews were saying about the gospels at that time. As he notes, all we know of their immediate response to the resurrection itself is Matthew's story about the priests bribing the guards. But, he says, "the same paucity of evidence" also counts against an argument from silence regarding the three-hour darkness.
I happen to think Fales has a pretty weak argument if Craig is reporting it fairly. Even assuming the synoptic gospels were written in the late first century, there is no unambiguous evidence that even Christians were generally familiar with them until the middle of the second century. By that time there would have been no one around with firsthand knowledge that the darkness did not happen. Of course any educated Jew could still have presented a cogent argument, but Fales seems to be assuming that people tend to pay attention to cogent arguments when they're evaluating religious claims. If any Jew had written a document presenting solid evidence that there was no three-hour darkness in Jerusalem during any Passover around 30 CE, it is at least as likely as not that the document would have disappeared into historical oblivion.
On the other hand, and contrary to Craig's assumption, it is not so improbable that we would know about it from secular sources if the darkness had occurred. People in that place and time knew about eclipses and knew they didn't happen during a full moon, which the Passover always coincided with. And so the darkening of the sun while Jesus was on the cross would have been preternatural. There would not have been just a handful of people writing about it. Everybody who experienced it would have talked about it for the rest of their lives, and their talk would itself have been written about.
And that is even if it had happened only in Jerusalem. The gospel authors say it was over "all the land" or "the whole land," and the original Greek suggests that they meant the entire world. But it is essentially certain that the entire world did not go dark for three hours anytime during the first century, and so inerrantists insist that the authors did not mean to say it did. But if an entire province, or even just an entire city, went dark for three hours for no known reason, surely people throughout the empire would have heard stories about it, and at least a few of the literate people would have mentioned those stories in their letters, diaries, or journals?
(Some apologists try to say they actually did mention it, but Craig is not quite desperate enough to join them. He addresses their arguments in a footnote, to which I refer any reader who is sufficiently interested.)
Our only source for the story is Mark. Even Craig concedes that Matthew and Luke cannot be considered independent sources for this particular tale. We don't know who Mark was or who his sources were. We have only his assertion that it happened. Whether or not he believed it or expected his readers to believe it matters little. This is a case where the silence of the historical record suffices to create reasonable doubt that the event actually occurred. If it had, it is at least very likely that we would also have heard about it from someone besides Mark.
Craig makes one more point at the end of this article that bears examination. He often argues that "Jewish polemic" against the resurrection during the early years of Christianity is strong evidence that it must have happened. Fales, as I do elsewhere, counterargues that Craig is assuming facts not actually in evidence, since the alleged polemic is recorded only in Matthew's gospel. Craig attempts to deny that he is arguing in a circle.
My point, however, in no way assumes the historicity of Matthew's guard story. Rather what is important is that Matthew is so exercised by an allegation which was "widely spread among the Jews to this day" (Mt. 28. 15) that he includes a lengthy addition to the Markan empty tomb narrative in order to refute it.
But Craig is still assuming his conclusion. How do we know that Matthew is "so exercised" by a Jewish allegation? Matthew is blaming the Jews for Jesus' death. He alleges that they are not only responsible for the crucifixion but willingly accepted responsibility for it. Is it not to be at least suspected that he would accuse them also of lying about the resurrection whether or not they really had lied? And would he not also find it useful, in that case, to accuse them of continuing to lie about it in his own time? Would not both of those accusations have suited his agenda just fine?
Matthew could have been telling the truth. I'm not saying he could not have been. I'm just saying it is reasonable to doubt that he was telling the truth, even if we assume that he thought it was the truth.
Next: traditions and trajectories.