By DOUG SHAVER
August
2006
Some evangelical apologists say that anyone who rejects scriptural inerrancy
must default to total errancy, that if we don't accept everything in the Bible
as true, we must reject all of it as false. Fortunately, Craig knows better. He
accepts the fact that many skeptics think there is much historical truth in the
New Testament even while dismissing some of it as untrue. What he is attempting
to argue in this series of articles is that, whatever else in the gospels a
skeptic may reasonably doubt, there can be no reasonable doubt about the Jesus'
bodily resurrection.
There is no consensus among skeptics about the true origins of Christianity. Orthodox Christianity has only one theory with a few trivial sectarian variations. The alternatives to orthodoxy are legion, depending among many other things on which parts of the NT narratives each theorist rejects as unhistorical. In a scenario espoused with numerous variations by several scholars, people who knew or heard about Jesus of Nazareth had diverse reactions to his message and martyrdom, interpreting it so as to make it compatible with assorted notions they were holding before they encountered him. In the years after his death, these different interpretations evolved into a variety of Christianities, called trajectories, that competed for a while in a sort of doctrinal warfare until one trajectory triumphed. The winner was what we now call orthodox Christianity, and all the losers came to be called heresies.
According to Craig, James Robinson posits "three related sets of parallel trajectories stretching from a common origin in primitive Christianity to their termini in second-century Gnosticism and in credally orthodox Christianity, both of these later viewpoints being divergent (mis)interpretations of the beliefs and experiences of the earliest Christians." Craig devotes this essay to rebutting one of them, which he explains thus.
According to Robinson, the primitive resurrection appearances were visualizations of the resurrected Christ as a luminous, heavenly body. But due to their aversion to bodily existence, Gnostics disembodied Christ's appearances so as to retain the original luminous visualization while abandoning any corporeality associated with that radiance. In reaction, the emerging orthodoxy emphasized the corporeality of the resurrection appearances by construing them in terms of the resurrection of the flesh, so that in the canonical Gospels Christ's appearances are not only corporeal, but material as well.
In support of this hypothesis, according to Craig,
Robinson adduces four lines of evidence: (1) the only two NT eyewitnesses of a resurrection appearance both authenticate visualizations of luminous appearances; (2) vestiges of luminous appearances remain in the non-luminous resurrection appearance stories and in the misplaced appearance stories; (3) the only two eyewitnesses of a resurrection appearance both identify the resurrected Christ with the Spirit; and (4) the outcome of these trajectories may be seen in second-century Gnosticism.
The two eyewitnesses in Robinson's scenario are Paul and the author of Revelation, John of Patmos. What Paul saw is inferred from the accounts in Acts of his conversion and a statement in Philippians (3:20-21): "For our conversation is in heaven; from whence also we look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ: Who shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body . . . ." John describes his vision in Rev. 1:13-16. Craig says these are representative of the original resurrection appearances according to Robinson, who sees "vestiges" of them in the gospel accounts. Among the vestiges are the angels at the empty tomb, Jesus' ability to enter a room through locked doors, and the failure of some disciples to recognize the risen Jesus when they first saw him. The contexts of Paul's and John's reports, Robinson notes, make clear the spiritual as opposed to material nature of what they saw, and the spiritual, disembodied nature of the risen Christ is apparent in second-century Gnostic texts, demonstrating that at least that sect of Christianity did not think Jesus had returned bodily from the dead.
Craig begins his counterargument by attacking what he thinks is a presupposition, that none of the gospels is an eyewitness report. Though he wisely elects not to defend the eyewitness authorship of the synoptic gospels, he asserts it for John. But on what grounds? Well, on the grounds that whoever wrote it, or least whoever wrote the ending of it, said he was a witness, at least "to some of the events recorded in the latter part." Craig does not even begin to explain, though, why reason compels us to take the writer's word for it that he actually saw what he claims to have seen. Of course there are a few scholars who think we should, and he names a couple of them, but there are many others who disagree, and they do not disagree because they presuppose anything. They disagree because they think the evidence is against eyewitness authorship of any portion of John's gospel. It is evangelicals who are doing the presupposing, in particular presupposing that no one who wrote anything that got canonized could have written anything but the truth.
Craig then tries feebly to suggest that it sort of doesn't really matter. The question of whether the gospels are firsthand reports, he says, is "less relevant" than whether they are "historically credible." And he almost has a point. If I read a book by someone who claims to have witnessed the Kennedy assassination and then discover good reason to believe that the author was nowhere around Dallas in November 1963, I'm not going to start doubting that Kennedy was assassinated. But, just what does it take to make a story "historically credible" when it alleges that a dead man came back to life? At the very least, we need the actual firsthand accounts of identifiable people who are known to have been present when the event allegedly happened. Documents of uncertain authorship written in reliance on unknown sources will not do to eliminate reasonable doubt about any resurrection.
Craig next disputes Robinson's inference that Jesus was "luminous" when Paul saw him on the road to Damascus, but such particulars need not concern us here. Craig is quite correct to note that "Paul himself gives no indication of the nature of Christ's appearance to him." A bit more relevantly, Craig asks, "On what basis are we to assume that Paul's experience on the Damascus Road was normative for the experiences of the disciples, so that its form can be imposed on them and used as a yardstick for assessing historicity?" Well, we do not assume it. We infer it, as noted earlier, from I Cor. 15:3-8. "But surely," Craig argues, "Paul's concern here is with who appeared, not with how he appeared." Well, Paul obviously is manifesting zero concern with how he appeared, but there is no indication either that there was any question about who it was. What Paul is driving home to his readers is that many appearances by the risen Christ did actually happen. His point was not that it was Jesus—rather than, say, Elijah or Moses—who appeared to him and all the others, but rather that Jesus did in fact appear to them. "Paul is not trying to put the others' experiences on a plane with his own," Craig says, but nothing that Paul ever wrote suggests that he had to try. There is no hint in any of his writings that there was any difference for him to try to ignore. If we read his words at their face value, without any presupposition that they must agree with the gospels, they say that the others' experiences were already "on a plane with his own" without his having to put them there.
As for John's vision, Craig finds it "rather surprising that Robinson should categorize this as a resurrection appearance." Well, it is a novel interpretation as far as I know, and it certainly is contrary to almost 2,000 years of orthodox dogma, but neither its novelty nor its heterodoxy makes it wrong. Craig argues, as he did against Fales, that "it is quite clearly a vision rather than a resurrection appearance," but as before he is just begging the question. He tries again to read into the New Testament a distinction between extra-mental and intra-mental phenomena, but cannot support it with anything but his personal conviction that it has to be there.
Moving on to the "vestiges," Craig throws up "a very difficult methodological problem: how does one prove that elements of luminosity in the narratives are truly a vestige rather than simply a feature of the stories?" But the question is not whether they are a feature of the story. They obviously are just that. The question is where the feature came from. Is it an account of an actual event or a product of someone's imagination? If the latter, who imagined it? Was it the gospel author, or someone else living many years earlier, who told someone else, who told someone else, who told the gospel author? Nobody needs to prove beyond any possible doubt that the luminous angel who greeted the women outside the tomb started out as a luminous disembodied Jesus who greeted Paul on the road to Damascus. If it could have happened that way, then it is not unreasonable to believe it did happen that way. If Craig is saying it could not have happened that way, then the burden of proof is on him, not on Robinson.
Among the apparent vestiges of an incorporeal risen Jesus is his ability to enter a room through closed doors. By Robinson's reasoning, since material bodies cannot go through doors, he must not have had a material body after rising from the dead—not in the original resurrection stories, at any rate. Craig thinks it significant that the gospels do not say outright that Jesus went through any doors. "Contrary to what Robinson states, Jesus is never said to pass through locked doors in the appearance narratives," Craig asserts. OK, technically he's right. He just suddenly appears in a room with no open doors. Similarly but in reverse, after chatting with the two disciples at Emmaus, he just vanishes from that room. So how did he appear and vanish without going through any doors? Craig explains in one word: miraculously.
OK, so Robinson thinks the gospel authors were talking about a phantom who could walk through solid objects, while Craig says no, they were talking about a flesh-and-blood revivified corpse who could teleport at will. So far as I know, people of that day and age could as easily have believed one as believed the other. But Robinson is not asking anyone to believe that anyone actually saw any phantom. All he asks anyone to believe is that the gospel authors believed some people saw a phantom. Craig is saying that we have to believe, not only that the gospels authors believed some people saw a dead man return to life, but that the reason they believed it was that it really happened, and he furthermore seems to say that no reasonable person can think it did not really happen.
Craig's response to Robinson's nonrecognition motif argument is just so much muddled misdirection. Most famously in the Emmaus pericope, two of Jesus' disciples talk with him for a long while without recognizing him. According to Robinson, this suggests that the story is a holdover from an original in which the risen Jesus was an incorporeal radiance rather than a revivified corpse. Also according to Robinson, the transfiguration is an early resurrection story backdated, so to speak, to a time before the crucifixion. Craig tries to find a contradiction there, since the disciples had no problem recognizing Jesus throughout the transfiguration. But a consistent theory about Christianity's origins need not imply any consistency in the stories that got told and believed about Christianity's origins. The orthodox tolerance for contradictions is hardly better exemplified than in the canonization of both Matthew's and Luke's genealogies. The point of Robinson's hypothesis is that the earliest accounts of the resurrection evolved over time, for a period probably of many decades, before they were reduced to writing. Whatever else might be wrong with that hypothesis, it is not refuted by inconsistencies among the various resulting traditions. And, it is Robinson's point that the stories did evolve. The disciples recognize Jesus in the transfiguration story as we now have it, but that does not mean they must have recognized him in the story as it was originally told.
Craig then briefly addresses Robinson's argument from the two eyewitness testimonies, by Paul and by John of Patmos, that they identify the risen Jesus with the Holy Spirit. While I don't go along in every detail with Craig's reasoning, I agree with his conclusion that this is unlikely to be a correct interpretation of what Paul and John wrote. In John's case in particular, I see no need to suppose that he actually experienced all those visions recorded in Revelation.
To Robinson's fourth argument, Craig raises two questions:
(a) Are the second-century Gnostic beliefs the issue of a process of reinterpretation of primitive traditions of visualizations of a luminous bodily form? And (b) did the second-century Gnostics hold that the resurrection appearances of Christ were visions of pure, unembodied radiance?
Craig says Robinson has failed to demonstrate an evolutionary connection between second-century Gnosticism and primitive first-century Christianity, but instead "only shows us what second-century Gnostics believed." And, Craig is probably right about that, because so far as I am aware, nobody has managed to pin down Gnosticism's exact relationship to the other sects of early Christianity. But that is because not enough documentary evidence has survived, not because there could have been no relationship, adversarial or whatever. According to Craig, "There is simply no evidence that the New Testament writers were opposed by persons who espoused luminous resurrection appearances lacking a bodily shape." That might be so, but as he would undoubtedly insist in other contexts, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. For roughly a thousand years, orthodox Christians were the sole guardians of Europe's intellectual heritage. During that time, with extremely rare exceptions, no ancient document recording anybody's opinions about Jesus of Nazareth got preserved unless the church thought it worth preserving. It is possible that when the gospels were written, there were no opposing viewpoints, but Craig cannot argue that we know there were none. It is just as possible that there was numerous opposing viewpoints, for which no evidence survives just because no one saw any good reason to preserve the evidence.
Concerning the second question, as to what the Gnostics actually did believe, Craig and Robinson both seem to be making the same mistake of supposing that whatever it was, they all believed exactly the same thing. Much remains unknown about Gnostic Christianity, partly because of the aforementioned paucity of evidence, but the few indicators we do have don't support any expectation of doctrinal uniformity.
According to Craig, Robinson developed his theory from "an enormous amount of time and industry in the study of the Nag Hammadi documents," but despite that effort, "none of Robinson's four points supplies sufficient evidence for the existence of twin trajectories taking as their common point of departure primitive first-century visualizations of the resurrected Christ as a luminous bodily form." From everything I have read about the Nag Hammadi documents, it is quite true that they don't conclusively prove anything about Christianity's origins. They nevertheless are another bit of evidence that is hard to square with evangelical dogma about those origins. They attest to an early diversity of Christian thinking that is difficult to reconcile with a supposition that it all began the way the gospel authors say it began. It is therefore not the case, as Craig claims, that "their value is not to be found in their relevance to the post-resurrection appearances of the Gospel tradition."