N.T. Wright lectures on the resurrection of Jesus: did Jesus rise from the dead?

Here’s a lecture from N.T. Wright, whose multi-volume case for the historicity of the bodily resurrection of Jesus seems to be getting a lot of respect from the other side, (although I strongly disagree with his economic and political views, which are naive at best). Wright has taught at Cambridge University, Oxford University, Duke University, McGill University, and lectured on dozens of prestigious campuses around the world. He’s published 40 books.

Here’s the video:

For those who cannot see the video, here is a written version of the lecture that Wright gave on the resurrection. And please note that I do not endorse anything that N.T. Wright says on any topic outside of history. History is his field of expertise, and I think he has no authority outside of the field of history.

N.T. Wright’s historical case for the bodily resurrection of Jesus

Wright basically argues that the resurrection cannot have been a myth invented by the early Christian community, because the idea of the Messiah dying and being bodily resurrected to eternal life was completely unexpected in Jewish theology, and therefore would not have been fabricated.

In Judaism, when people die, they stay dead. At the most, they might re-appear as apparitions, or be resuscitated to life for a while, but then die again later. There was no concept of the bodily resurrection to eternal life of a single person, especially of the Messiah, prior to the general resurrection of all the righteous dead on judgment day.

Wright’s case for the resurrection has 3 parts:

• The Jewish theological beliefs of the early Christian community underwent 7 mutations that are inexplicableapart from the bodily resurrection of Jesus
• The empty tomb
• The post-mortem appearances of Jesus to individuals and groups, friends and foes

Here’s the outline of Wright’s case:

…the foundation of my argument for what happened at Easter is the reflection that this Jewish hope has undergone remarkable modifications or mutations within early Christianity, which can be plotted consistently right across the first two centuries. And these mutations are so striking, in an area of human experience where societies tend to be very conservative, that they force the historian… to ask, Why did they occur?

The mutations occur within a strictly Jewish context. The early Christians held firmly, like most of their Jewish contemporaries, to a two-step belief about the future: first, death and whatever lies immediately beyond; second, a new bodily existence in a newly remade world. ‘Resurrection’ is not a fancy word for ‘life after death’; it denotes life after ‘life after death’.

And here are the 7 mutations:

1. Christian theology of the afterlife mutates from multiples views (Judaism) to a single view: resurrection (Christianity). When you die, your soul goes off to wait in Sheol. On judgment day, the righteous dead get new resurrection bodies, identical to Jesus’ resurrection body.
2. The relative importance of the doctrine of resurrection changes from being peripheral (Judaism) to central (Christianity).
3. The idea of what the resurrection would be like goes from multiple views (Judaism) to a single view: an incorruptible, spiritually-oriented body composed of the material of the previous corruptible body (Christianity).
4. The timing of the resurrection changes from judgment day (Judaism) to a split between the resurrection of the Messiah right now and the resurrection of the rest of the righteous on judgment day (Christianity).
5. There is a new view of eschatology as collaboration with God to transform the world.
6. There is a new metaphorical concept of resurrection, referred to as being “born-again”.
7. There is a new association of the concept of resurrection to the Messiah. (The Messiah was not even supposed to die, and he certainly wasn’t supposed to rise again from the dead in a resurrected body!)

There are also other historical puzzles that are solved by postulating a bodily resurrection of Jesus.

1. Jewish people thought that the Messiah was not supposed to die. Although there were lots of (warrior) Messiahs running around at the time, whenever they got killed, their followers would abandon them. Why didn’t Jesus’ followers abandon him when he died?
2. If the early Christian church wanted to communicate that Jesus was special, despite his shameful death on the cross, they would have made up a story using the existing Jewish concept of exaltation. Applying the concept of bodily resurrection to a dead Messiah would be a radical departure from Jewish theology, when an invented exaltation was already available to do the job.
3. The early church became extremely reckless about sickness and death, taking care of people with communicable diseases and testifying about their faith in the face of torture and execution. Why did they scorn sickness and death?
4. The gospels, especially Mark, do not contain any embellishments and “theology historicized”. If they were made-up, there would have been events that had some connection to theological concepts. But the narratives are instead bare-bones: “Guy dies public death. People encounter same guy alive later.” Plain vanilla narrative.
5. The story of the women who were the first witnesses to the empty tomb cannot have been invented, because the testimony of women was inadmissible under almost all circumstances at that time. If the story were invented, they would have invented male discoverers of the tomb. Female discovers would have hampered conversion efforts.
6. There are almost no legendary embellishments in the gospels, while there are plenty in the later gnostic forgeries. No crowds of singing angels, no talking crosses, and no booming voices from the clouds.
7. There is no mention of the future hope of the general resurrection, which I guess they thought was imminent anyway.

To conclude, Wright makes the argument that the best explanation of all of these changes in theology and practice is that God raised Jesus (bodily) from the dead. There is simply no way that this community would have made up the single resurrection of the Messiah – who wasn’t even supposed to die – and then put themselves on the line for that belief.

And remember, the belief in a resurrected Jesus was something that the earliest witnesses could really assess, because they were the ones who saw him killed and then walking around again after his death. They were able to confirm or deny their belief in the resurrection of Jesus based on their own personal experiences with the object of those beliefs.

Filed under: Videos, Afterlife, Apologetics, Appearances, Body, Empty Tomb, Eschatology, Historical Jesus, Historical Method, Judgment Day, Legend, Life After Death, Messiah, Minimal Facts, Mutations, Myth, N. T. Wright, Resurrection, Theology

The historical case for the empty tomb

From Jonathan M, writing for Apologetics UK. He presents 6 arguments for the empty tomb.

Excerpt:

Fact#3: The gospels record that the primary witnesses to the empty tomb were women

All four gospels (including John, who was almost certainly writing independently of the synoptic gospels) make women the first witnesses of the empty tomb, and Matthew and John make women the first witnesses of the risen Jesus. Male witnesses appear only later and in two of the Gospels. This is incompatible with a dishonest intention to write an untrue but convincing account, because of the lowly status of woman as witnesses in the ancient world.

This fact is significant because in both first century Jewish and Roman cultures, women were lowly esteemed and their testimony was not highly regarded. Further, female witnesses were only permitted to be legal witnesses to matters within their knowledge if there was no male witness available. Women were second-best witnesses, and anyone wanting to artificially bolster a fictional account would have without question made male witnesses the primary discoverers of the empty tomb. The Jewish Talmud remarks, “Sooner let the words of the Law be burnt than delivered to women,” and “Any evidence which a woman [gives] is not valid (to offer).” Josephus states further,“But let not the testimony of women be admitted, on account of the levity and of their sex.”

This fact becomes even more significant in light of Luke 24:11, when Luke records that “…they did not believe the women, because their words seemed to them like nonsense.”

The best explanation for why all four gospel writers would have included such an embarrassing and awkward detail is that that is actually what happened and they were committed to recording it honestly and with integrity, regardless of its blow to their credibility.

It’s also important to note when Paul writes about the resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15, he uses the Greek word “soma” which means physical body.

This article on the resurrection from Ratio Christi explains a point that Jonathan missed in his article.

2.The Bodily Resurrection of Jesus Explains Paul’s Use of the Word “Soma”

Whenever the New Testament mentions the word body, in the context of referring to an individual human being, the Greek word “soma” always refers to a literal, physical body. Paul was a very competent rabbi who was trained at the rabbinic academy called the House of Hillel by ‘Gamaliel,’ a key rabbinic leader and member of the Sanhedrin. What is significant is that Paul uses the word soma to describe the resurrection body of Jesus (1 Cor.15:42-44).Greek specialist Robert Gundry says “the consistent and exclusive use of soma for the physical body in anthropological contexts resists dematerialization of the resurrection, whether by idealism or by existentialism.” (1) Furthermore, N.T. Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God shows that the Greek word for resurrection which is “anastasis” was used by ancient Jews, pagans, and Christians as bodily in nature, with this being the case until much later(A.D. 200).

The only explanation that can be given to the emphatic insistence on the early proclamation of the bodily resurrection of Jesus, rather than translation or even a spiritual body is the fact that the apostles did in fact actually witness a material resurrection.

The empty tomb is the sticky wicket when making the case for the resurrection – some people like Mike Licona don’t even use it, because only about 75% of ancient historians will give it to you. The strongest piece of evidence for the empty tomb is that women were the first discoverers of the empty tomb. The New Testament authors would never have made that up. Skeptics who debate William Lane Craig often cite that as their sole reason for accepting the empty tomb. For example, Bart Ehrman accepts it, and he’s a radical. The women followers are crucial to the pivotal event in Christianity.

See it used in a debate

You can see some arguments for the empty tomb made and defended from criticism in this debate with the atheist scholar James Crossley.

This my favorite resurrection debate.

Further study

To hear a related lecture by Craig on the topic of “Who did Jesus think he was?”, click here to download it. The video is here for download. This lecture was delivered in February, 2009 at Columbia University, probably the most secular leftist university in the United States.

Filed under: Polemics, 1 Corinthians 15, Apologetics, Bart Ehrman, Burial, Debate, Debates, Early Attestation, Empty Tomb, Enemy Attestation, Eyewitness Testimony, Historical Jesus, Minimal Facts, Multiple Attestation, Resurrection, William Lane Craig

William Lane Craig debates John Shelby Spong on the resurrection of Jesus

William Lane Craig is the greatest Christian debater in the history of the church, and Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong is a very liberal non-Christian.

Part 1 of 2: (61 minutes)

Part 2 of 2: (42 minutes)

The moderator is none other than the famous journalist David Aikman! The opening speeches are only 15 minutes, and the rebuttals are 10 minutes. This debate is accessible because Craig’s opponent is not really attacking him on a scholarly basis, but more as the pretty typical liberal atheist that you meet at work.

Craig spends all of his opening speech explaining historical methods, sources, dating and how he infers the resurrection as the best explanation of the minimal facts. The resurrection of Jesus is quite awesome to debate when people are given time to explain the historical methods and how the scholars use these methods to evaluate which facts are likely to be historical and which are not.

Filed under: Videos, Appearances, Bible, Bishop, Bodily Resurrection, Christian, Christianity, Debate, Easter, Empty Tomb, Episcopal, Good Friday, Jesus, John, John Shelby Spong, Luke, Mark, Matthew, Minimal Facts, Resurrection, Theology, Tomb, True, Truth, William Lane Craig

N.T. Wright lectures on the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus

Here’s a lecture from N.T. Wright, whose multi-volume case for the historicity of the bodily resurrection of Jesus seems to be getting a lot of respect from the other side, (although I strongly disagree with his economic and political views, which are naive at best). Wright has taught at Cambridge University, Oxford University, Duke University, McGill University, and lectured on dozens of prestigious campuses around the world. He’s published 40 books.

Here’s the video:

For those who cannot see the video, here is a written version of the lecture that Wright gave on the resurrection. And please note that I do not endorse anything that N.T. Wright says on any topic outside of history. History is his field of expertise, and I think he has no authority outside of the field of history.

N.T. Wright’s historical case for the bodily resurrection of Jesus

Wright basically argues that the resurrection cannot have been a myth invented by the early Christian community, because the idea of the Messiah dying and being bodily resurrected to eternal life was completely unexpected in Jewish theology, and therefore would not have been fabricated.

In Judaism, when people die, they stay dead. At the most, they might re-appear as apparitions, or be resuscitated to life for a while, but then die again later. There was no concept of the bodily resurrection to eternal life of a single person, especially of the Messiah, prior to the general resurrection of all the righteous dead on judgment day.

Wright’s case for the resurrection has 3 parts:

• The Jewish theological beliefs of the early Christian community underwent 7 mutations that are inexplicableapart from the bodily resurrection of Jesus
• The empty tomb
• The post-mortem appearances of Jesus to individuals and groups, friends and foes

Here’s the outline of Wright’s case:

…the foundation of my argument for what happened at Easter is the reflection that this Jewish hope has undergone remarkable modifications or mutations within early Christianity, which can be plotted consistently right across the first two centuries. And these mutations are so striking, in an area of human experience where societies tend to be very conservative, that they force the historian… to ask, Why did they occur?

The mutations occur within a strictly Jewish context. The early Christians held firmly, like most of their Jewish contemporaries, to a two-step belief about the future: first, death and whatever lies immediately beyond; second, a new bodily existence in a newly remade world. ‘Resurrection’ is not a fancy word for ‘life after death’; it denotes life after ‘life after death’.

And here are the 7 mutations:

1. Christian theology of the afterlife mutates from multiples views (Judaism) to a single view: resurrection (Christianity). When you die, your soul goes off to wait in Sheol. On judgment day, the righteous dead get new resurrection bodies, identical to Jesus’ resurrection body.
2. The relative importance of the doctrine of resurrection changes from being peripheral (Judaism) to central (Christianity).
3. The idea of what the resurrection would be like goes from multiple views (Judaism) to a single view: an incorruptible, spiritually-oriented body composed of the material of the previous corruptible body (Christianity).
4. The timing of the resurrection changes from judgment day (Judaism) to a split between the resurrection of the Messiah right now and the resurrection of the rest of the righteous on judgment day (Christianity).
5. There is a new view of eschatology as collaboration with God to transform the world.
6. There is a new metaphorical concept of resurrection, referred to as being “born-again”.
7. There is a new association of the concept of resurrection to the Messiah. (The Messiah was not even supposed to die, and he certainly wasn’t supposed to rise again from the dead in a resurrected body!)

There are also other historical puzzles that are solved by postulating a bodily resurrection of Jesus.

1. Jewish people thought that the Messiah was not supposed to die. Although there were lots of (warrior) Messiahs running around at the time, whenever they got killed, their followers would abandon them. Why didn’t Jesus’ followers abandon him when he died?
2. If the early Christian church wanted to communicate that Jesus was special, despite his shameful death on the cross, they would have made up a story using the existing Jewish concept of exaltation. Applying the concept of bodily resurrection to a dead Messiah would be a radical departure from Jewish theology, when an invented exaltation was already available to do the job.
3. The early church became extremely reckless about sickness and death, taking care of people with communicable diseases and testifying about their faith in the face of torture and execution. Why did they scorn sickness and death?
4. The gospels, especially Mark, do not contain any embellishments and “theology historicized”. If they were made-up, there would have been events that had some connection to theological concepts. But the narratives are instead bare-bones: “Guy dies public death. People encounter same guy alive later.” Plain vanilla narrative.
5. The story of the women who were the first witnesses to the empty tomb cannot have been invented, because the testimony of women was inadmissible under almost all circumstances at that time. If the story were invented, they would have invented male discoverers of the tomb. Female discovers would have hampered conversion efforts.
6. There are almost no legendary embellishments in the gospels, while there are plenty in the later gnostic forgeries. No crowds of singing angels, no talking crosses, and no booming voices from the clouds.
7. There is no mention of the future hope of the general resurrection, which I guess they thought was imminent anyway.

To conclude, Wright makes the argument that the best explanation of all of these changes in theology and practice is that God raised Jesus (bodily) from the dead. There is simply no way that this community would have made up the single resurrection of the Messiah – who wasn’t even supposed to die – and then put themselves on the line for that belief.

And remember, the belief in a resurrected Jesus was something that the earliest witnesses could really assess, because they were the ones who saw him killed and then walking around again after his death. They were able to confirm or deny their belief in the resurrection of Jesus based on their own personal experiences with the object of those beliefs.

Filed under: Videos, Afterlife, Apologetics, Appearances, Body, Empty Tomb, Eschatology, Historical Jesus, Historical Method, Judgment Day, Legend, Life After Death, Messiah, Minimal Facts, Mutations, Myth, N. T. Wright, Resurrection, Theology

Do naturalistic theories account for the minimal facts about Jesus’ resurrection?

Here’s a neat post from Ichtus77 on her blog of the same name. She lists 12 facts that are admitted by the majority of New Testament scholars across the broad spectrum of worldviews, including atheistic scholars.

Excerpt:

I am studying “the twelve facts” and want to get down what I’ve got so far. After the facts are displayed, we’re going to turn the whole thing into a logic puzzle.

Here are the 12 Facts:

1. Jesus died by Roman crucifixion.
2. He was buried, most likely in a private tomb.
3. Soon afterwards the disciples were discouraged, bereaved and despondent, having lost hope.
4. Jesus’ tomb was found empty very soon after his interment.
5. The disciples had experiences that they believed were the actual appearances of the risen Christ.
6. Due to these experiences, the disciples lives were thoroughly transformed. They were even willing to die for their belief.
7. The proclamation of the Resurrection took place very early, from the beginning of church history.
8. The disciple’s public testimony and preaching of the Resurrection took place in the city of Jerusalem, where Jesus had been crucified and buried shortly before.
9. The gospel message centered on the preaching of the death and resurrection of Jesus.
10. Sunday was the primary day of worshiping and gathering.
11. James, the brother of Jesus and a skeptic before this time, became a follower of Jesus when he believed he also saw the risen Jesus.
12. Just a few years later, Paul became a believer, due to an experience that he also believed was an appearance of the risen Jesus.

These are the facts that you see admitted in debates by atheistic historians, like in the debate between James Crossley and William Lane Craig. These facts are admitted even by most atheist historians because they pass standard historical criteria, like early dating, embarrassing to the author, appears in multiple sources, and so on. Secular historians don’t accept everything that the Bible says as historical, but they will give you a minimum list of facts that pass their historical tests.

The resurrection puzzle is like a Sherlock Holmes mystery. People deduce what happened from the evidence that is considered to be unimpeachable. The “minimal facts” that EVERYONE accepts. You can even see secular historians assenting to these facts in academic debates like the one I linked above.

So the approach is like this:

1) Use historical tests to get a small number of undeniable historical facts
2) Try to explain the undeniable historical facts with a hypothesis that accounts for all of them

Like Sherlock Holmes says: “…when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

It’s the Sherlock Holmes method of doing history.

So, Ichtus77 lists the minimal facts, and in the rest of the post she surveys the following naturalistic hypotheses to see how well they can account for the minimal facts listed above.

Here are the naturalistic theories:

• The Unknown Tomb theory
• The Wrong Tomb theory
• The Twin theory
• The Hallucination theory
• The Existential Resurrection and the Spiritual Resurrection theories
• The Disciples Stole Body theory
• The Authorities Hid Body theory
• The Swoon theory
• The Passover Plot theory

The main way that scholars argue for the resurrection is to list the minimal facts, and defend them on historical grounds, then show that there is no naturalistic hypothesis that explains them all. The naturalistic theories are impossible. Once you have eliminated them because they don’t account for the minimal facts, you are left with the resurrection hypothesis. Elementary, Watson, elementary.

Filed under: Commentary, Appearances, Authenticity, Bodily Resurrection, Burial, Empty Tomb, Gary Habermas, Historical Methods, History, Jesus, Jesus Resurrection, Michael Licona, Minimal Facts, New Testament, Resurrection, Resurrection of Jesus