By DOUG SHAVER
August
2006
To judge from his opening remarks, Craig would have us think that we should
believe in the resurrection because, well, life would be, you know, like, such a
total bummer if it were not true.
"Man," writes Loren Eisley, "is the Cosmic Orphan." He is the only creature in the universe who asks, Why? Other animals have instincts to guide them, but man has learned to ask questions. "Who am I?" he asks. "Why am I here? Where am I going?"
Ever since the Enlightenment, when modern man threw off the shackles of religion, he has tried to answer these questions without reference to God. But the answers that came back were not exhilarating, but dark and terrible. "You are an accidental by-product of nature, the result of matter plus time plus chance. There is no reason for your existence. All you face is death. Your life is but a spark in the infinite darkness, a spark that appears, flickers, and dies forever."
I don't dispute anything in that last quotation, but I do dispute its characterization as "dark and terrible." Granted that it doesn't do for my ego what Christianity would do if I could believe in it, but I'm fine with my life the way it is. I am aware of no scientifically valid studies showing that the average atheist finds life any less satisfying than the average Christian. Even if it were quite obviously true, though, it would prove only that Christians were happier than atheists, not that Christians were more right than atheists. And if it had happened to be the case that atheists were happier, I somehow doubt that Craig would construe that as evidence that he was wrong about the resurrection. Of course, Craig is not going to say that he is claiming a belief must be true if it makes you feel good. The argument is patently absurd. But then, what is the point of even alleging the misery of a worldview without a god? He claims to be offering reasons to believe in the resurrection. Of what relevance could it be, even if it were so, that you can't be happy if you don't believe in it?
It is of no relevance at all, and Craig knows that. But he also knows that lots of Christians want to hear it anyway. Lots and lots of Christians less educated than Craig actually do think that it must be so if it makes them feel good to believe it, and if that's what it takes to keep them believing, then Craig will provide it. From the evangelical viewpoint, fallacious thinking can't be all that bad if it sustains your Christian faith when nothing else will.
Craig does toss a rationalist bone to his smarter readers. "But, of course," he admits, "hope that is not founded in fact is not hope, but mere illusion." And so he asks:
Why should the Christian hope of eschatological resurrection appear to modern man as anything more than mere wishful thinking? The answer lies in the Christian conviction that a man has been proleptically raised by God from the dead as the forerunner and exemplar of our own eschatological resurrection. That man was Jesus of Nazareth, and his historical resurrection from the dead constitutes the factual foundation upon which the Christian hope is based.
Let's pause a moment. Christians believe that, as a matter of historical fact, God raised Jesus from the dead. Let's assume for a second that it is a fact. Does that fact, by itself, have any implications for us who doubt it? No, it does not. Christianity has historically claimed that it does, but that claim is not based on the simple datum that Jesus rose from the dead. That claim is based on interpretations of documents written by early Christians who believed in the resurrection. The bare fact of the resurrection itself, if it is a fact, implies nothing about the fate in the afterlife of people who don't think it happened.
Of course, if we must accept the resurrection as a fact, then other facts do have a bearing on what it might imply, and the beliefs of the first Christians could be relevant. But its factuality has to be established first. In most of this article, Craig summarizes the evidence he has discussed in the other installments, and we don't have to rehash all of them now. But there is one point he focuses on here more than elsewhere, and that is where the first Christians might have gotten the idea for a resurrection, other than its having actually occurred.
If one denies that Jesus really did rise from the dead, then he must explain the disciples' belief that he did rise either in terms of Jewish influences or in terms of Christian influences. Now clearly, it can't be the result of Christian influences, for at that time there wasn't any Christianity yet!
So, that leaves Jewish influence. But, according to Craig,
Jewish belief was always that at the end of history, God would raise the righteous dead and receive them into His Kingdom. There are, to be sure, examples in the Old Testament of resuscitations of the dead; but these persons would die again. The resurrection to eternal life and glory occurred after the end of the world. . . . The idea that a true resurrection could occur prior to God's bringing the Kingdom of Heaven at the end of the world was utterly foreign to them.
Was this actually the prevailing belief among Jews in first-century Palestine? It seems like there should be a Jewish authority somewhere who would know, but Craig apparently couldn't find one. To support his position, he quotes the "greatly renowned German New Testament scholar Joachim Jeremias." Now for all I know, Jeremias actually is Jewish. I happen to know online at least one Jew who is a New Testament scholar. But absent Craig's saying otherwise, we expect a New Testament scholar to be a Christian, especially if in Craig's opinion he is a "greatly renowned" scholar. In evangelical circles, you don't get to be renowned for your scholarship unless you are a Christian, and you can't be greatly renowned unless you are not just any Christian but an evangelical Christian. No liberals need apply.
It actually is not that hard, however, to find disinterested information on first-century Jewish thinking, and Craig's account is misleadingly simplified. After "Hear O Israel, the Lord our God is one," there wasn't much you could say with much confidence that all Jews would agree with you. Among those who believed in a resurrection, it apparently was as Craig says, but a lot of them didn't believe in any resurrection at any time. And, there were other beliefs held by some Jews—a minority perhaps, but those groups existed, and there is no good reason to assume that the first Christians were not influenced by one of them, or even were one of them.
And, it is not a fact that Judaism alone was the only potential source of the first Christians' religious ideas. Judaism everywhere, in Palestine no less than in the diaspora, had been modified by Hellenism, and in lots of different ways. Hellenistic philosophy was nowhere near monolithic, either. Possibilities that might have been unthinkable to Jews during Isaiah's time could have become thinkable in Paul's day. No analysis of what the first Christians could possibly have believed can be undertaken absent a thorough review of first-century Greek philosophy. It cannot be just presupposed that they would have been locked into the mind set of whatever passed for the Jewish orthodoxy of their time.
Still, Craig pushes the uniqueness of Jesus' resurrection.
As for the second point, the Jewish idea of resurrection was always of a general resurrection of the dead, not an isolated individual. It was the people, or mankind as a whole, that God raised up in the resurrection. But in Jesus' resurrection, God raised just a single man.
We can give Craig a pass on his argument that the Old Testament stories of dead people coming back to life don't count. There were many other religions besides Judaism in those days, and they had lots of followers all over the empire, and some of them did say that a single man had been raised from the dead. It therefore just isn't true that there was no place where the first Christians could have gotten such an idea.
And so the gospel stories were not really as unprecedented as Craig suggests. But what if they had been? Is a new idea more improbable than a dead man returning to life? Granted, few people ever actually have any new ideas, and when they do it is rare that the ideas catch on among other people. Human beings tend to be conservative. Seldom do they want anything to do with innovative thinking. But exceptions happen, especially in unsettled times, and the first-century Middle East was very unsettled socially, politically, philosophically, and religiously.
"Left to themselves," Craig says, "the disciples would never have come up with such an idea as Jesus' resurrection." But we don't really know that. We know nothing for certain about them. Craig reminds us that they were "fishermen and tax collectors, not theologians." Yes, that's what the stories about them say, but what of it? Are all fishermen so intellectually incompetent that none could ever come up with a significant new idea and get other people to believe it? It is true that the gospels portray the disciples as a bunch of unbelievably thickheaded fools, but they were written after the Jewish War, when Christianity was beginning its drift toward anti-Semitism. Many scholars argue persuasively that the gospel authors' purposes included an effort to distance Christianity from its Jewish origins. Portraying its Jewish founders as idiots would have furthered that purpose.
Craig tries to suggest that the early rapid growth of Christianity is inexplicable unless the resurrection really happened. He would have us think that people would not have believed it if those who told them about it didn't have convincing evidence such as eyewitness testimony. But are at least two things wrong with this argument. First, it assumes a widespread devotion to rationalism among the ancients that is nowhere in evidence. We have no reason at all to suppose that people of the first-century Middle East were on the whole any less gullible than people of the 21st-century United States. Second, the surviving secular historical record indicates that Christianity did not in fact grow rapidly at first. It was practically invisible throughout the first century and barely noticed even well into the second.
A story does not have to be true for people to believe it, not even for very large numbers of people to believe it. If a new religious cult is telling a story that is prima facie contrary to the experience of ordinary people, then it can take some time to attract significant numbers of new converts. But given enough time, and enough zealotry on the part of the cult's members, there is scarcely anything that large numbers of people cannot be induced to believe.
Next: What did the apostles see?