By DOUG SHAVER
August2006
Craig devotes the eighth essay of this series to an expansion of one of several arguments he presented earlier for the resurrection: the historical factuality of the discovery of Jesus' empty tomb by various of his followers. He begins with the claim that "An examination of both Pauline and gospel material leads to eight lines of evidence in support of the conclusion that Jesus's tomb was discovered empty," (emphasis added) showing once again that his primary aim is to stoke the faith of believers, not convince skeptics. An argument on the lines of "It must have happened because the Bible says it happened" is not going to work with people not yet convinced of the Bible's reliability as a work of history. Of course Craig insists that the gospels and Pauline corpus are reliable history, and his readers who are already believers will be happy to take his word for that. The rest of the world will take a little more convincing.
But really, is it supposed to be a significant discovery, the product of unusually skilled investigatory techniques, that the New Testament can be made to support the claim that Jesus' tomb was found empty? Where does anyone think the idea came from in the first place? Of course the Bible proves that the tomb was found empty. Craig might as well argue for God's own existence by quoting scripture. Let us go ahead and look at Craig's evidence, though, and see whether a reasonable person is compelled to agree that it proves what he says it proves.
Craig begins with I Corinthians 15. These are the opening lines, with highlighting on the phrases most pertinent to Craig's case.
Moreover, brethren, I declare to you the gospel which I preached to you, which also you received and in which you stand, by which also you are saved, if you hold fast that word which I preached to you -- unless you believed in vain.
For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the Scriptures.
And that he was seen by Cephas, then by the twelve. After that he was seen by over five hundred brethren at once, of whom the greater part remain to the present, but some have fallen asleep.
After that he was seen by James, then by all the apostles. Then last of all he was seen by me also, as by one born out of due time.
Craig asks rhetorically, "Does this formula bear witness to the fact of Jesus' empty tomb?" He clearly thinks it does, but to make it so, he is forced to read much into it that the words themselves do not contain. Paul does not say there was a tomb. He says only that Jesus was buried. Now, whether he was buried in a tomb or a common grave, if he rose from the dead, then whatever space his body occupied became empty. Let us stipulate for a moment that Paul believed Jesus was buried in a tomb, never minding whether he had any idea who the tomb's actual owner was. In that case, we can certainly infer that Paul believed the tomb was empty after Jesus returned to life. In that sense, Paul's belief in the resurrection does imply his belief in the empty tomb, as Craig elsewhere argues. Craig's point here, though, is not that Paul or other Christians believed Jesus' tomb was empty. It is that some of Jesus' followers actually saw his tomb empty three days after his body was put there. Paul does not testify to that fact, and it is reading too much between the lines to find such testimony in his words.
As Craig himself acknowledges, "even if it could be proved that Paul believed in a physical resurrection of the body, that does not necessarily imply that he knew the empty tomb for a fact." We know that Paul was not among those who, according to gospel authors, found the tomb empty. If he knew about the empty tomb, then, somebody had to have told him. Nowhere in his writings, though, does Paul affirm that anybody told him anything about Jesus. For all his teachings, he cites only two authorities: the scriptures, and personal revelation. (And for Paul, scriptures meant Jewish scripture—what Christians nowadays call the Old Testament.) What he didn't learn from reading scripture, he got directly from God himself.
Craig mentions some occasions when Peter or others could have told him a few things, but "could have told" does not imply "did tell." We do not have Paul's word for it that Peter or anybody else in the Jerusalem church told him anything. It matters nothing if it seems improbable that there would have been no such conversation. What matters is that we do not have Paul's own testimony to any such conversation, and it is pure question-begging to insist that we do have it. Paul does not say there was a tomb, and if we assume he thought there was, he does not say it was empty, and if we assume he must have thought it was empty, he does not say that anybody saw it empty. He cannot be a witness to the discovery of the empty tomb, though Craig tries his best to makes him one in concluding this section:
But if the tomb was empty, then it is unthinkable that Paul, being in the city for two weeks six years later and after that often in contact with the Christian community there, should never hear a thing about the empty tomb. Indeed, is it too much to imagine that during his two week stay Paul would want to visit the place where the Lord lay? Ordinary human feelings would suggest such a thing.{50} So I think that it is highly probable that Paul not only accepted the empty tomb, but that he also knew that the actual grave of Jesus was empty.
Probable or not, we do not have Paul's own word for it. Christians can assume all they want about what he must have known. The rest of us have our doubts, and they are reasonable.
Craig next tries to argue that the story must be true because Mark told it. It is not quite obvious how this argument is supposed to work, though, because he never explicates his logic. It seems to have something to do with the facts that Mark's was the first gospel written, that the empty tomb story appears in all four gospels, and that John's gospel seems to have been written independently of the others. None of this, though, implies in any way that if Mark said it happened, then it must have really happened.
There are skeptics who think Mark could have just made the story up. Craig nowhere addresses this claim directly (perhaps to convey a hint that it's too absurd to deserve any response), but he refers to a "pre-Markan passion story" of which it was, in his opinion, likely to have been a part. What he is mainly trying to get at, so far as I can tell, is that the story is actually older than Mark's gospel. Since Craig has previously claimed that legends need a lot of time to develop, this is supposed to suggest that it is not a legend at all but rather a narrative of fact.
Craig also makes much of what Mark leaves out of his story.
Nauck observes that many theological motifs that might be expected are lacking in the story: (1) the proof from prophecy, (2) the in-breaking of the new eon, (3) the ascension of Jesus' Spirit or his descent into hell, (4) the nature of the risen body, and (5) the use of Christological titles.{56} Although kerygmatic speech appears in the mouth of the angel, the fact of the discovery of the empty tomb is not kerygmatically colored. All these factors point to a very old tradition concerning the discovery of the empty tomb.
What Craig does not tell us, or quote Nauck as telling us, is why those motifs "might be expected," at least by anyone lacking evangelical presuppositions. Whatever the story's origin, it was unlikely to have originated together with a package of commentaries on what it was supposed to mean. What might have been expected was what did in fact happen. As the story got retold over time, a package of theological motifs got added to it. The only thing Nauck's observation tells us is that even if we had no other reason to think so, Mark's version of the empty tomb story is probably the oldest version that we know about. That tells us nothing about the likelihood that it is a true version, though, but only that if there ever was a true version, Mark's is likely to be closest to it.
Craig devotes the next several paragraphs to details of the narrative, trying to resolve what look like mistakes or errors to everyone except inerrantists. In the normal world, no one would suggest that if witnesses to an automobile accident could not agree on the colors of the vehicles involved, then the accident must not really have happened. What Craig is trying to do here, though, is typical of evangelical apologetics. He is arguing that the accident must have happened because (a) the witnesses are in perfect agreement notwithstanding that (b) one witness says a red car hit a blue one and the other says two green cars hit a black one.
That is bad enough, but making it worse is that we don't even have the witnesses' actual reports. We have a document by a non-witness claiming to tell us what the witnesses saw. Actually, we have four such documents, and they not only disagree on what the witnesses saw, they don't even agree on the number or the identities of the witnesses. Of course, Craig disputes that, too. While he concedes that the gospel authors do not all say the same thing (he could hardly claim otherwise), he insists that they do not actually disagree on any detail. The problem, of course, is that we have only the authors' assurances that anything at all really happened. Therefore, they must be proven trustworthy. And therefore, from Craig's perspective, they cannot have made any mistakes.
We do not ordinarily demand perfection of witnesses. We figure most people can be generally trusted even if they are not infallible. But when someone says a dead man came back to life, they need to work a little harder to earn our trust. When four people say a dead man came back to life but they disagree on how many were there to see it happen and on just what was seen by whoever was there, then they create a major problem for their credibility.
So, let's see Craig try to establish Mark's credibility.
Mark begins the story by relating that when the Sabbath was past (Saturday night), the women bought spices to anoint the body. The next morning they went to the tomb. The women's intention to anoint the body has caused no end of controversy.
Why is their intention to anoint the body a problem? For these reasons, according to Craig.
It is often assumed that the women were coming to finish the rushed job done by Joseph on Friday evening; John, who has a thorough burial, mentions no intention of anointing. It is often said that the 'Eastern climate' would make it impossible to anoint a corpse after three days. And it would not have violated Sabbath law to anoint a body on the Sabbath, instead of waiting until Sunday (Mishnah Shabbat 23. 5). Besides, the body had been already anointed in advance (Mk 14. 8). And why do the women think of the stone over the entrance only after they are underway? They should have realized the venture was futile.
Craig proceeds to explain how all these discrepancies either don't really exist or can be plausibly resolved, but whatever the merits of his case here, the most he can establish is that the women could have done what Mark says they did. Nothing he presents establishes any logical link between "Mark says the women went to the tomb to anoint the body" and "The women went to the tomb to anoint the body."
A serious problem for inerrancy is the four gospel authors' disagreement over who was in that group. Craig presents it himself.
The gospels all agree that around dawn the women visited the tomb. Which women? Mark says the two Maries and Salome; Matthew mentions only the two Maries; Luke says the two Maries, Joanna, and other women; John mentions only Mary Magdalene.
And he then remarks, "There seems to be no difficulty in imagining a handful of women going to the tomb." Well, no, there is no difficulty at all in imagining it. The difficulty lies in whether we should think it happened except in someone's imagination. Craig tries to argue from "independent traditions" but has failed to establish their existence. Why would John mention only Mary Magdalene? "John has perhaps focused on her for dramatic effect," Craig suggests. Yes, perhaps he did. Or perhaps none of it really happened. For believers no less than for skeptics, "perhaps" does not entail "certainly."
Craig could have argued that, since all four authors agree that Mary Magdalene was there, then at least she went to the tomb. Maybe the others accompanied her and maybe they didn't, but at least she was there. But that argument cannot work for Craig. Since Mark's version is the oldest, it has to be the most reliable, and Mark says two other women were with Mary Magdalene. Craig cannot allow that Mark might have been wrong about that. But he cannot let John make any mistakes, either. No evangelical can, because John's gospel presents a Jesus who most explicitly declares that there is no way to avoid hell except by believing in him. The synoptic authors allow skeptics a hint of wiggle room, but John cuts them no slack at all. Evangelicals must therefore deny any possibility that John could have made a mistake, since they agree with John that no one can have any reasonable doubt about the truth of Christianity.
Anyway, the women—however many of them, and whatever was on their minds—get to the tomb. Then comes another discrepancy, noted thus by Craig: "According to the Synoptics the women actually enter the tomb and see an angelic vision. John, however, says Mary Magdalene runs to find Peter and the Beloved Disciple, and only after they come and go from the tomb does she see the angels." And how does he explain it? He doesn't. Having pointed it out, he returns to the Markan narrative as if the contradiction merited no further attention.
But there are inconsistencies not only in sequence but also in details. Mark says the women saw "a young man." Matthew says they saw "the angel of the Lord." According to Luke, it was "two men." According to Craig, "Mark's young man is clearly intended to be an angel, as is evident from his white robe and the women's reaction." Just what makes Mark's intention so clear, though? And if he intended to report an angel, why did he not say it was an angel? There is no reason but one for suspecting that Mark intended anything but what he wrote, and that is inerrantist dogma. Matthew and John said it was an angel, and Mark has to agree with them, therefore he meant "angel" notwithstanding that he wrote "man." And, I intend no argument that he could not have meant something besides what he wrote. But skeptics are not being pigheaded if they see here at least a possibility that Mark and Matthew do not agree about what the women saw when they got to the tomb. They do not say the same thing, and Craig has presented no compelling argument that they had to have meant the same thing.
Craig then observes that "some critics want to regard the angel as a Markan redaction," something he added to a story he was passing on that did not originally include it. Now, why does he say they "want" to do that? Could he be trying to suggest that they have nothing but their desires to go on? That they don't have even a scrap of evidence on which to base such a proposition? Could he be trying to remind his Christian readers, "There really is no need for you to pay those skeptics any attention at all. I have to because I'm a scholar, but you can ignore them." In other words: "Trust me."
But, back to his argument. Says he, "the earliest Christians certainly believed in the reality of angels." Yes, they did, but no critic to my knowledge thinks the reason Mark had to invent the story was that no Christian before his time could have believed it. Craig's challenge is not to prove that Mark could not have invented the story but that nobody could have, that the story would never have been told in the first place unless some women did in fact go to the tomb and did in fact see an angel there. The most he can claim, though, is that "there was a tradition of the women's seeing angels at the tomb" and that we have good reason to think the tradition predates Mark's gospel. But how does he support the claim? By noting that John's version of the story also has angels. Since John's gospel came at least 20 years after Mark's, it is not the least bit obvious how it is evidence that the story has to be older than Mark's gospel.
Craig then responds to another claimed redaction, Mark 16:7, where the angel instructs the women: "But go your way, tell his disciples and Peter that he goeth before you into Galilee: there shall ye see him, as he said unto you." According to Craig, the argument goes that there is a clear reference here to Mark 14:28 ("after that I am risen, I will go before you into Galilee"), but 14:28 is an interpolation, and therefore this verse must also have been interpolated. But of course, he does not agree that 14:28 is an interpolation, either.
"Many scholars wish [again] to see v. 7 as a Markan interpolation into the pre-Markan tradition," Craig informs the reader, but without saying who those scholars are or what they are actually saying in defense of their thesis. Craig does not present their actual arguments, but paraphrases one argument with an implication that it is the only one they have. "But what is the evidence that 14.28 is an interpolation? The basic argument is that vs. 27 and 29 read smoothly without it," he says. It is technically true, as he says, that this is a weak argument, but only if there is no other argument. If we have other reasons, though, to suspect that Jesus didn't really speak those words, then those reasons add strength to the argument. Craig insists that "there are positive reasons for believing 14.28 is not an insertion," but he doesn't give us any of them. Instead he goes directly to critiquing another pro-interpolation argument based on Peter's response to Jesus' statement.
Aside from general credibility issues, what difference does that particular verse make? Well, assuming the resurrection really happened, it's supposed to make a difference in how we interpret the event if we can establish that Jesus told his disciples, as Mark claims he did, that it was going to happen. One also suspects, though, that from the evangelical perspective, any story about a man rising from the dead is more believable if the man himself said he was going to do it.
As already noted, Craig implies that there is no reason to suspect the angels' instruction to the women to be an interpolation except that it references another statement suspected of being an interpolation. But there is another reason. In the very next verse, Mark clearly implies that the women never complied with any such instruction. The scholarly community is almost unanimous in agreeing that Mark's original gospel ended at 16:8 with these words: "And they 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." Craig acknowledges, understatedly, that this "has caused a great deal of consternation," not least because it contradicts what the other gospels say. "The silence of the women was surely meant just to be temporary," Craig pleads, but this is true only under an assumption of inerrancy. He says the account of the women's silence "could not be part of the pre-Markan passion story" unless only temporary silence were implied, but he does not say why, and even were it so, he also has not said up to this point why we are compelled to assume that it was part of any pre-Markan story. If the story of the women's tomb visit was Mark's creation, we should hardly be surprised if the believers who passed it on after reading it thought it needed some revisions and put some in, until the story evolved into the versions recorded by Matthew, Luke, and John. I'm not saying that's what happened. I'm just saying it is not so implausible as to preclude one basis for reasonable doubt about an actual resurrection.
Craig goes next to the disciples' initial response to the women's report: "Luke and John agree that Peter and at least one other disciple rise and run to the tomb to check it out." Luke, in fact, does not agree that anybody accompanied Peter on his visit. He states: "Then arose Peter, and ran unto the sepulchre; and stooping down, he beheld the linen clothes laid by themselves, and departed, wondering in himself at that which was come to pass." (Luke 24:12) It can be argued that he does not explicitly say nobody went with him, but that is all. There is an apparent reference to the tomb visit in verse 24 with the speaker saying "they" went there, but the speaker is not Luke. In any case, the reference proves, if anything, not that Luke is consistent with John but that Luke is inconsistent himself.
This might be a good point at which to remind ourselves of Craig's ostensible objective here. He is arguing that we should believe the tomb was found empty because the gospels say it was found empty, and the gospels' say-so is reason enough because we can trust the men who wrote them. Those men said some women found the tomb empty, and their word is supposed to be all we need, but Craig is having to spend all this time and ink explaining why half of what they say doesn't mean what it seems to mean.
There are problems with the New Testament's resurrection stories that Craig never addresses in this series, and because he does not address them, I am ignoring them in this critique. Of all the points addressed so far, I will stipulate that we have dealt with no irreconcilable contradictions. From a purely logical standpoint, every assertion by every New Testament writer that we have so far talked about could possibly be true. But Craig has not begun to come up with a good reason for declaring it unreasonable to think otherwise.
According to John, Peter went to the tomb accompanied by "the other disciple, whom Jesus loved." And, "This would suggest," Craig tells us, "that John intends this disciple to be a historical person, and his identification could be correct." OK. And this proves what?
The authority of the Beloved Disciple stands behind the gospel as the witness to the accuracy of what is written therein (Jn 21. 24; the verse certainly applies to the gospel as a whole, not just the epilogue, for the whole gospel enjoys the authentication of this revered disciple, not merely a single chapter{75} ), and the identification of his role in the disciples' visit to the empty tomb could be the reminiscence of an eyewitness.
Authority, indeed. There is nothing quite like it when believers discuss among themselves what they're supposed to think about anything. An unknown author mentions an authority when describing an event that "could be" something remembered by eyewitnesses, and the author need say no more. Whatever he says happened must have happened exactly the way he said it happened, just because at some point in his telling of the event, he refers to an authority.
Credit where due, Craig concedes as much as he can to modern scholarship. He does not insist, as most evangelicals try to, that the "beloved disciple" himself wrote the fourth gospel. He does seem convinced that the author knew John and used him as a source, and this is supposed to be sufficient to warrant believing that whatever the author says happened did in fact happen. For Craig's Christian readers, it will of course be more than sufficient. The rest of us need first to be convinced that the author John was acquainted with the disciple John or any other eyewitness, and Craig does not even attempt to justify his conviction on that point. Only after an eyewitness connection is established to some significant probability can we discuss its implications for the author's credibility.
Craig then tries the truth-or-fraud routine again. If the beloved disciple is just the author's invention, he says, then "21.24 becomes a deliberate falsehood." That verse is where the author says, "This is the disciple which testifieth of these things, and wrote these things: and we know that his testimony is true." But the person who "wrote these things"—presumably the author himself—seems to be claiming here to be the beloved disciple, and Craig has said just a few sentences earlier that the author was only using the beloved disciple as a source. If Craig was right about that, then if the author lied, it was about his own identity, not about the existence of the beloved disciple. Verse 21:24, though, seems to have been worded cryptically enough to allow various interpretations that don't imply deceitful intent, which has to be established to justify a charge of lying. There are plenty of ways to fail to tell the truth without committing a lie. Many evangelicals have trouble applying this concept to any early Christian writing, canonical or otherwise, but it remains a fact nonetheless.
Craig also says that if the beloved disciple is a fabrication, "it becomes difficult to explain how then the person of the Beloved Disciple should come to exist and why he is inserted in the narratives, and the widespread concern over his death becomes unintelligible." Well, Craig may find it difficult to believe any explanation but his own, but many other explanations have been suggested, so they can't be all that hard to come up with. Of course their credibility is up for debate, but some of them are believed by a lot of people whose scholarly credentials are every bit as good as Craig's. If at least some experts have their doubts, then it gets hard to argue that there can be no reasonable doubt.
Craig concludes this essay with an eight-point recap of his evidence.
1. Paul's testimony implies the historicity of the empty tomb. Few facts could be more certain than that Paul at least believed in the empty tomb.
This is pure question-begging. There can be nothing certain about Paul's beliefs except whatever he wrote, and he wrote nothing about an empty tomb. If he thought Jesus was buried in a tomb, then perhaps we could reasonably infer that he believed the tomb was empty after Jesus rose from the dead, but Paul does not tell us where (or how) he thought Jesus was buried.
2. The presence of the empty tomb pericope in the pre-Markan passion story supports its historicity.
Craig has yet to present a shred of evidence that it was in the pre-Markan story. There could be such evidence for all I know, but he hasn't shown it to us. Neither has he established any high probability of the story's historical reliability based solely on such a pre-Markan existence. Mark is not the only person who could have invented it if it was invented.
3. The use of 'the first day of the week' instead of 'on the third day' points to the primitiveness of the tradition. . . . If the empty tomb narrative were a late and legendary account, then it could hardly have avoided being cast in the prominent, ancient, and accepted third day motif.
Says who? Craig is assuming much about early Christian thinking. In particular, he assumes the conclusion that Christianity originated the way evangelical dogma says it originated, with a real resurrection that happened just the way the gospels say it happened, proclaimed to the world by the 12 disciples just the way the author of Acts says they proclaimed it.
He further assumes that Christians, everywhere and always, have all talked the same way about their beliefs. Are we really supposed to think that once a few of them started saying Jesus rose on the third day, none of them ever again would have said that he rose on the first day of the week? We skeptics do have some sport on occasion with the tendency of Christians to parrot their authorities, but few of us are about to believe that all Christians have always been like that. We think it not at all unreasonable to suspect that a Christian writer of the late first century could have said Jesus rose on the first day of the week even if most Christians of that time preferred to say he rose on the third day.
4. The nature of the narrative itself is theologically unadorned and nonapologetic.
According to Craig, the author was obviously not trying to prove anything, and "that is precisely why the empty tomb story is today so credible: because it was not an apologetic device of early Christians." Let's take this slowly. Mark reported that the tomb was found empty, but not because he wanted to prove that the resurrection really happened? We're supposed to think that Mark had no interest in promoting his version of Christianity, that he didn't care whether anyone, after reading his book, would reach the conclusion that Jesus was the son of God and savior of the world? That is ridiculous. The notion that any canonical religious book ever contained so much as one sentence written without a theological or other apologetic purpose is fatuous beyond belief.
5. The discovery of the tomb by women is highly probable.
We've been over this one already, but on this occasion Craig adds an argument that the story has to be true because the women are named "and so could not be associated with a false account." His reasoning here is not apparent, since he cannot be thinking that fictional characters never have names. He might be trying to suggest that the identity of every disciple Jesus ever had while on this earth would have been common knowledge among Christians everywhere. Had that been the case, Mark would have known that his readers would have known whether Mary Magdalene was a real person. I can think of no reason to suppose, however, that such minute details about Jesus' entourage would have been so widely known a few decades after his death.
6. The investigation of the empty tomb by the disciples is historically probable.
This is still more question-begging. If anyone had told the disciples that the tomb was empty, we should not be surprised if they had gone to the tomb to verify the report. But the gospels are the only source we have for either part of that scenario. To show that B is probable given A proves nothing about the probability of B until the probability of A has been established.
In fairness to Craig, he does try to demonstrate an independent probability for B.
Behind the fourth gospel stands the Beloved Disciple, whose reminiscences fill out the traditions employed. The visit of the disciples to the empty tomb is therefore attested not only in tradition but by this disciple. His testimony has therefore the same first hand character as Paul's and ought to be accepted as equally reliable.
But he is still begging the question of the gospels' prima facie reliability. Craig has given us no reason but his personal conviction that the author of John's gospel used the beloved disciple as a source, and Craig has made no attempt to prove the historical accuracy of any tradition on which any gospel author relied. Furthermore, Craig's implication that anything Paul tells us about the resurrection is firsthand testimony is disingenuous bordering on dishonest. Paul could conceivably have been passing on firsthand testimony, but that does not make his report a firsthand report. No report is firsthand unless it comes directly from the witness himself. Even if Paul had a firsthand source, he does not say he did, and if we assume he did, we do not know who it was and therefore cannot judge his reliability. Firsthand sources can be wrong about what they saw, and any police investigator will tell you that they often are.
7. It would have been impossible for the disciples to proclaim the resurrection in Jerusalem had the tomb not been empty.
As we have already shown, this just is not true. By the time the proclaiming began, no one could have produced a body and proved it was Jesus' corpse even if it really was.
8. The Jewish polemic presupposes the empty tomb.
The same people claiming the tomb was empty are claiming that there was a Jewish polemic. If we can reasonably doubt the one claim, we can reasonably doubt the other as well. No surviving Jewish document from that time has a word to say about any Jesus of Nazareth, dead or alive.
Next: contemporary scholarship.