By DOUG SHAVER
August
2006
It is essentially undisputed that the first
Christians proclaimed: "Christ is risen." But what were they thinking when they said
that? When they declared that God had raised Jesus from the dead, did they mean
that his corpse had returned to life, or did they mean something else? The
answer is obvious if we assume the gospels to be reporting the original beliefs
of the Christian community, but they were not written at the time of the
community's origin. They were written at least a generation later, by unknown
authors relying on unknown sources. They might represent the consensus of
Christian belief during the late first century . . . or they might not. The
gospels could be a product of a late-first-century minority Christian sect that
in due course became the majority and, after gaining sufficient power, became
the only sect that was allowed to exist.
Whether that is what actually happened is less important to my point than whether the uncontested evidence is consistent with its having happened. If it is, then there is room for reasonable doubt about whether the first Christians believed the same thing about the resurrection that evangelicals believe nowadays. And, if the first Christians did not believe that Jesus' physical body was restored to life, then it is more than reasonable to doubt that such a thing actually occurred. So, what did they believe?
We don't know for sure. None of the first Christians wrote anything that has survived. Paul's writings, from around 50 CE, take us as close as we can get to them. They are the oldest Christian writings we know about. Paul clearly believed that Christ had died and been raised from the dead, and he clearly affirms that this was the general teaching of the Christian movement whose advocate he was. But we also know that there were other Christian movements, because Paul himself says so. He had to warn his readers not to trust anyone who preached "another gospel." Why bother, if there was no one preaching any other gospel?
But what did Paul and his fellow believers mean by "raised from the dead"? What, according to Paul, did Christians in the middle of the first century understand the nature of the resurrection to have been? What were they thinking when they said "Christ is risen"? According to the historical Christian orthodoxy, they were thinking exactly the same thing the gospel authors were obviously thinking, but is that fact or just dogma?
Here, in Craig's words, is the argument against orthodoxy.
1. Paul's information is at least prima facie more reliable than the gospels . . . [because] he stands closer in temporal and personal proximity to the original events.
2. Paul's information, in contrast to the gospels, indicates Jesus possessed a purely spiritual resurrection body.
A. First argument
(1) Paul equated the appearance of Jesus to him with the appearances of Jesus to the disciples.
(2) The appearance of Jesus to Paul was a non-physical appearance.
(3) Therefore, the appearances of Jesus to the disciples were non-physical appearances.
B. Second argument
(1) Paul equated Jesus's resurrection body with our future resurrection bodies.
(2) Our future resurrection bodies will be spiritual bodies.
(3) Therefore, Jesus's resurrection body was a spiritual body.
3. Therefore, Jesus possessed a purely spiritual resurrection body.
I would not present the case in just those terms. Premise #1 clearly presupposes, as I do not, the occurrence of certain "original events," and my conclusion would be "Therefore, Paul believed that Jesus possessed a purely spiritual resurrection body." But Craig's version will work for the present purpose. He accepts the first premise for the sake of discussion, and his argument does keep its focus on Paul's thinking, just taking it for granted that whatever Paul believed about Jesus was in the fact the case.
Once again, my aim is not to prove that Craig cannot be right. My aim is to show that is reasonable to think he could be wrong. And so the question becomes: Do Paul's words, as we have them, imply that he could not have believed anything about the resurrection other than what the gospel authors believed? Speculation about how, if he said X, he could have meant Y, can be interesting, but all we can know is that he did in fact say X and then ask how X can be reasonably construed. If multiple construals are possible within reason, then there are multiple things that Paul could have been thinking when he wrote X, and in that case reasonable people can disagree about what his actual thinking was.
Craig begins by attacking the premise "(2) The appearance of Jesus to Paul was a non-physical appearance." The exact nature of the appearance to Paul cannot be determined from Paul's own account, because he gives us no specifics. All he says is that an appearance happened. The only other evidence of possible relevance is the accounts given in Acts (chapters 9, 22, and 26) of Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus. The conventional thinking even in Christian circles has always been that on that occasion, Paul had a vision of Jesus, not a face-to-face encounter with a corporeal Jesus. Craig says it could not have been just a vision, though.
As a matter of fact, however, the appearance in Acts, while involving visionary elements, cannot without further ado be characterized as purely visionary, since in all three accounts it is accompanied by extra-mental phenomena, namely, the light and the voice, which were experienced by Paul's companions.
In other words, it couldn't have been just all in Paul's mind. If his companions saw something and heard something, then something had to be there to be seen and heard. However, the cogency of this argument depends for starters on Acts being historically reliable down to the smallest detail. Craig of course assumes that it is, but a great many competent scholars think his assumption is wrong. It is not the least bit certain that Paul's conversion happened exactly the way Luke says it happened. But let us stipulate that it did. Does Luke say that Paul saw Jesus? No, he does not. He tells the story three times, and all three times, Paul sees nothing but a light. Luke does not use the words "nothing but," but the plain meaning of what he does say is obvious enough to anyone who does not try to read something between the lines. In chapter 9, the narrator says Paul saw a light and he does not say Paul saw anything else. In chapters 22 and 26, Paul is quoted as saying he saw a light, and he is not quoted as saying he saw anything else. It is reasonable to think that according to the author of Acts, Paul saw a light and nothing but a light.
Do we need any more to account for what his companions experienced? No, not as long as there is reasonable doubt that they actually experienced anything. Craig tries to argue that there can't be any reasonable doubt, but he fails.
[I]f Luke had invented the extra-mental aspects of the appearance to Paul, we should have expected him to be more consistent and not to construct such discrepancies as that Paul's companions heard and did not hear the voice. These inconsistencies suggest that the extra-mental phenomena were part of Luke's various traditions.
Credit where due: Unlike most evangelical apologists, Craig at least does not deny the inconsistencies. Nor, apparently, is he claiming that Luke must have gotten the stories from Paul himself. But then what are left with? Just because Luke didn't invent the incident or embellish it doesn't mean nobody else did. We cannot know to what extent the Damascus Road story in Acts has any connection with Paul's actual conversion experience. Even assuming it to be generally accurate, though, nothing in the plain language compels us to believe that Paul was confronted on that occasion by a corporeal Jesus. The most parsimonious construal of Acts, considered in light of everything Paul himself wrote, is that the risen Christ appeared to Paul in a vision. Craig tries to make Paul say otherwise: "But it is interesting to note that when Paul speaks of his 'visions and revelations of the Lord' (II Cor 12.1-7) he does not include Jesus's appearance to him." But he also does not indicate in that passage that it is an exhaustive list of every vision he ever had, and neither does he say that he did not see the risen Christ during his visit to the third heaven.
Craig tries again to insist that the early Christian community clearly distinguished between visions and appearances, but his argument begs the question of the historical continuity of Christian thinking. Nothing in any of the earliest Christian writings clearly indicates that Paul or his contemporaries would never refer to a vision as an appearance. Apparently realizing this, Craig then tries to refute the next premise.
Suppose the appearance to Paul was purely visionary. What grounds are there for believing premise (1), Paul equated the appearance of Jesus to him with the appearances of Jesus to the disciples? Usually appeal is made to the fact that Paul places himself in the list of witnesses of the appearances; hence, the other appearances must have also been visionary appearances like his own. This, however, does not seem to follow.
Strictly speaking, that is correct. That Paul does not say there was a difference does not logically imply, necessarily, that there was no difference. But is it an unreasonable interpretation? I don't think so. If Paul gives no indication that there was any difference between his experience and that of the other people he mentions, then it is reasonable to infer that, in his mind, there was no difference. Craig says Paul "is not concerned here with the how of the appearances, but with who appeared." Actually, his primary concern clearly is neither with the how nor the who, but with the simple fact that there were appearances. More particularly, though, there is no suggestion of any debate over who it was who "died for our sins . . . was buried, and . . . rose again the third day . . . [and then] was seen . . . ."
Craig then tries to argue that Paul is in effect arguing only for some kind of equivalency between his experience and everyone else's.
Paul is not trying to put the appearances to the others on a plane with his own; rather he is trying to level up his own experience to the objectivity and reality of the others. Paul's detractors doubted or denied his apostleship (I Cor 9. 1-2; II Cor 11.5; 12.11) and his having seen Christ would be an important argument in his favor (Gal 1.1, 11-12, 15-16; I Cor 9. 1-2; 15.8-9). His opponents might tend to dismiss Paul's experience as a mere subjective vision, not a real appearance, and so Paul is anxious to include himself with the other apostles as a recipient of a genuine, objective appearance of the risen Lord. By putting himself in the list, Paul is saying that what he saw was every bit as much a real appearance of Jesus as what they saw.
But this assumes Craig's conclusion. Paul makes no reference, here or anywhere else, to anyone's quibbling over the precise nature of Christ's appearance to him versus his appearances to the other apostles. Besides, while Paul elsewhere does address objections to his apostolic credentials, nothing in the context of this passage suggests that he is doing it here. I Corinthians 15 is not about whether Paul is really an apostle. It is about whether Christians are justified in believing that they will be resurrected.
So much for the first argument. To address the second, Craig embarks on an analysis of the original Greek terminology. Being myself both unconversant and illiterate in Greek, I cannot judge his counterargument, but I can note that he acknowledges the existence of expert opinion contrary to his own. Very well. If even a few experts think Craig is mistaken, then it is reasonable for me to think that Craig could possibly be mistaken. Therefore he has failed to demonstrate, as he claims to have demonstrated, that "the critical argument designed to drive a wedge between Paul and the gospels is fallacious." Thus it remains reasonable to think that according to Paul's own testimony, those who saw the risen Christ did not see him in the flesh but only in visions.