Did Jesus Rise From the Dead? | Yale 2014 | William Lane Craig

[Music] good evening everyone my name is Emily Fourier and I'm a junior at Yale Phaethon action I'm delighted that you're all here and have taken the time to attend this important event yell faith in action and Yale students for Christ's are excited to welcome philosopher and theologian William Lane Craig to speak about historical evidence for the resurrection of Christ the resurrection of course is crucial to the narrative of Christ and human salvation but it doesn't come without controversy as it requires one to believe in Supernatural this claim cannot be taken lightly Paul explains in his epistle to the Corinthians that if Christ has not been raised our preaching is useless and so is your faith your faith is futile and you are still in your sins we are happy to have dr. Craig speak on this topic and for all of us to reflect on Christianity's most important historical claim dr. Craig is a research professor of philosophy at Talbot School of Theology he pursued his undergraduate studies at Wheaton College and Graduate Studies at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School University of Birmingham and the University of Munich throughout his career he's authored or edited over 30 books including divine foreknowledge and human freedom God time and eternity and assessing the New Testament evidence for the historicity of the resurrection of Christ note that you'll have a chance to post questions dr. Craig at the end of this event please welcome me in joining dr. William Lane Craig [Applause] thank you very much it's a delight to be here this evening this is actually my second visit to Yale and I have really enjoyed walking about your lovely campus today and what a beautiful venue in which to meet this evening this is just wonderful so thank you very much for the privilege of speaking to you a few years ago I was speaking at a major Canadian University on the existence of God and after my talk one slightly irate student wrote on her comment card I was with you until you got to the stuff about Jesus God is not the Christian God I find this attitude all too typical today most people I think are happy to agree that God exists but in our pluralistic society it's become politically incorrect to claim that God has revealed himself decisively in Jesus what justification can Christians offer in contrast to Hindus Muslims or Jews for thinking that the Christian God is real well the answer of the New Testament to that question at least is clear the resurrection of Jesus the Apostle Paul declared God will judge the world by the man he has appointed he has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead acts 17:31 the resurrection is God's vindication of Jesus radical personal claims to divine authority but that raises the further question how do we know then that Jesus is risen from the dead the Easter hymn writer says you asked me how I know he lives he lives within my heart now I think that that answer is perfectly appropriate on a personal level but when Christian's engage unbelievers in the public square such as in letters to the editor in the local newspaper or on call-in programs on talk radio or in just conversation with fellow co-workers then it's crucial that we'd be able to present objective evidence in support of our beliefs otherwise our claims hold no more credibility than the assertions of anyone else claiming to have a private experience of God fortunately Christianity as a religion rooted in history makes claims that can in large measure be investigated historically suppose then that we approach the New Testament documents not as inspired Holy Scripture but simply as a collection of Greek documents coming down to us out of the first century without any assumption as to their reliability other than the way in which we normally approach other sources for ancient history you might be surprised to learn that the majority of New Testament critics investigating the Gospels in this way accept the fundamental facts under girding the resurrection of Jesus and I want to emphasize that I am NOT talking about conservative or evangelical scholars only but about the broad spectrum of New Testament scholarship Christian and non-christian who teach it's secular universities and at non evangelical seminaries amazing as it may seem most of them have come to accept as historical the basic facts which support the resurrection of Jesus and these facts are four in number first fact number one after his crucifixion Jesus was buried in a tomb by a member of the Jewish Sanhedrin named Joseph of Arimathea this fact is important because it means contrary to the assertion of radical critics like John Dominic Crossan of the Jesus Seminar that the location of Jesus grave was known to Jew and Christian alike this fact is highly significant because the disciples could never have proclaimed his resurrection in Jerusalem in the face of a tomb containing Jesus corpse New Testament scholars have established this fact on the basis of evidence such as the following one Jesus burial is multiple-- attested in early independent sources this is one of the most important criteria of historicity if an event is attested in early independent accounts then it is much less likely to have been invented or made up and this is the case for the burial of Jesus first of all Jesus burial is attested in the very old tradition which is quoted by Paul in his first letter to the Church of Corinth in chapter 15 verses 3 to 5 there Paul writes for I delivered to you what I also received and then he begins to quote this four line formula that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures and that he was buried and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures and that he appeared to Cephas or Peter then to the twelve now Paul here not only uses the typical rabbinical terms received and delivered with regard to traditional material that he is passing on to the Corinthians but verses three to five are a highly stylized four line formula filled with non Paul line characteristics this has convinced all scholars that Paul is just as he says quoting from an old tradition which he himself received after becoming a Christian this tradition probably goes back at least to Paul's fact-finding visit to Jerusalem around AD 36 when he spent two weeks with Peter and James according to his letter to the Galatians chapter 1 verse 18 now when you recall that Jesus was crucified in AD 30 that means that this information goes back to within the first 5 years after Jesus death so short a time span in such personal contact with the principles involved makes it idle to talk of legend in this case but not only that the burial story is also part of very old source material used by mark in writing his gospel the Gospels tend to consist of brief snapshots of Jesus life which are loosely connected and not always chronologically arranged but when we come to the passion story that is to say the story of Jesus suffering and death during the final week of his life we do have one smooth continuously running narrative this suggests that the passion story was one of mark's sources that he used in writing his gospel now most scholars think that mark is already the earliest of the Gospels and Mark's source for Jesus passion is then of course even older comparison of the narratives of the four Gospels shows that their accounts do not diverge from one another until after the burial of Jesus this implies that the burial account was indeed part of the pre Markin passion story so we have independent attestation of the burial from two of the very oldest sources we have concerning Jesus of Nazareth namely the pre Paul lying formula on the one hand and the pre-market passion story on the other number two as a member of the Jewish Sanhedrin the court that condemned Jesus to death Joseph of Arimathea is unlikely to be a Christian invention there was a very strong resentment in the early Christian community against the Jewish leadership for their role in the condemnation of Jesus in Christianized they had been guilty of basically a judicial murder of Jesus of Nazareth it's therefore highly improbable that Christians would invent a member of the court that condemned Jesus who honors Jesus by giving him a proper burial instead of allowing him to be dispatched like a common criminal three no other competing burial story exists if the burial by Joseph were fictitious then we would expect to find either some historical trace of what actually happened to Jesus corpse or at least some competing legends but all of our sources are unanimous on Jesus honorable burial by this figure Joseph of Arimathea for these and other reasons the majority of New Testament scholars today can that Jesus was in fact buried in a tomb by Joseph of Arimathea according to the late John eighty Robinson of Cambridge University the burial of Jesus in the tomb is and I quote one of the earliest and best attested facts about Jesus end quote fact number two on the Sunday following the crucifixion Jesus tomb was found empty by a group of his women followers among the reasons which have led most scholars to this conclusion are the following five points first the historical reliability of the burial story supports the historicity of the empty tomb if the burial account is fundamentally accurate that implies that the location of Jesus tomb was known in Jerusalem to both Jew and Christian alike in that case it would be impossible for a movement founded on belief in the resurrection of a dead man to flourish in Jerusalem as it did in the face of a tomb containing his corpse by the time the disciples began to proclaim Jesus resurrection at least that tomb had to be empty secondly the empty tomb story is also attested in early independent sources for example the empty tomb story is also part of the old passion source used by mark the passion story used by Mark did not end in defeat and death with Jesus burial but rather it ends with the empty tomb story which is grammatically of one piece with the burial account not only this but the old tradition cited by Paul in 1st Corinthians chapter 15 implies the fact of the empty to for any first century Jew to say of a dead man as Paul does that he was buried and he was raised is to imply that a vacant grave was left behind moreover the expression Paul uses he was raised on the third day probably derives from the woman's visit to the tomb on the third day in Jewish reckoning after Jesus crucifixion this four line formula cited by Paul summarizes both the Gospel accounts on the one hand and the early apostolic preaching in the book of Acts on the other hand and significantly the third line of this formula and he was raised corresponds to in both cases the story of the empty tomb number three Mark's story of the empty tomb is simple and lacks signs of legendary embellishment all one has to do to appreciate this point is to compare mark's account with the wildly legendary accounts found in the second century apocryphal gospels for example in the so called gospel of Peter which is a forgery from the second half of the second century after Christ the tomb of Jesus is surrounded not only by a Roman guard but also by all of the Jewish chief priests and scribes as well as a large crowd of people from the surrounding countryside who have come to watch the tomb suddenly during the night a voice from heaven rings out and the stone covering the door of the tomb rolls back by itself then two men are seen descending out of heaven and entering into the tomb then three gigantic figures emerge from the tomb two of the men supporting the third man the heads of the two men reach up to the clouds but the head of the third man over passes the clouds then a cross comes out of the tomb and a voice from heaven asks hast thou preached to them that sleep and the cross answers yay now this is how real legends look they are colored by all sorts of theological and apologetic emotive motifs which are strikingly absent from the marking account which is stark in its simplicity by comparison number four the tomb was discovered empty by women the fact that women's testimony was less trustworthy than men's testimony in first century Israel counts in favor of the woman's role in the discovery of the empty tomb according to the first century Jewish historian Josephus the testimony of women was regarded as so unreliable in Jewish society that it should not even be admitted into a Jewish court of law any later legendary story would surely have made male disciples like Peter and John discovered the empty tomb the fact that it is women whose testimony was regarded as worthless who are the chief witnesses - and the discoverers of the empty tomb is most plausibly explained by the awkward and embarrassing fact that they were the discoverers of the empty tomb and the Gospel writers faithfully record what for them was a rather embarrassing fact finally number five the earliest Jewish allegation that the disciples had stolen Jesus body found in the 28th after Matthew's Gospel shows that the body was in fact missing from the tomb how did the tuition leadership respond to the disciples Proclamation he is risen from the dead did they point to his occupied tomb there in the hillside did they say these men are full of new wine no they said the disciples came and stole away his body now think about that the disciples came and stole away his body the earliest Jewish response to the proclamation of the resurrection was itself an attempt to explain why the body was missing and thus we have evidence for the empty tomb that is absolutely top drawer because it comes not from the Christian community but from the very opponents of the early Christian movement themselves now I could go on but I think enough has been said to indicate why in the words of Jakob Cramer an Austrian specialist in the resurrection and I quote by far most exegetes hold firmly to the reliability of the biblical statements concerning the empty tomb end quote fact number three on multiple occasions and under various circumstances different individuals and even groups of people experienced appearances of Jesus alive from the dead this is a fact which is almost universally recognized by New Testament scholars for the following three reasons number one the list of eyewitnesses to Jesus resurrection appearances which is quoted by Paul in 1st Corinthians 15 guarantees that such appearances occurred Paul believed that these persons had seen Jesus alive after his death and Peter and James to whom Paul spoke during his visit to Jerusalem certainly believed that they had seen Jesus risen from the dead these appearances included appearances to Peter or keifa's to the 12 disciples to 500 brethren at one time and to James who was Jesus younger brother second the appearance traditions in the Gospels provide multiple independent at a station of these appearances for example the appearance to Peter is independently attested by Luke and the appearance to the twelve is independently attested by Luke and John we also have independent witness to Galilean appearances in mark Matthew and John as well as appearances to women in Matthew and John thirdly certain of the appearances have earmarks of historicity for example we have very good evidence from the Gospels that neither James nor any of Jesus younger brothers believed in him during his lifetime and there's no reason to think that the early church would generate vicious fictions about the unbelief of Jesus family had they been faithful followers of Jesus all along but it is also indisputable that James and his brothers did become active Christian believers following Jesus death James was considered to be an apostle and he eventually rose to the position of the leadership of the Jerusalem church according to the Jewish historian Josephus James was martyred for his faith in Christ in the ad sixties now most of us have brothers what would it take for you to believe that your brother the Lord Sutch that you would be willing to be stoned to death for the truth of that belief can there be any doubt that this remarkable transformation in Jesus younger brother took place because as Paul says then he appeared to James even goût Ludum on the leading german critic of the resurrection of jesus himself admits and i quote it may be taken as historically certain that Peter and the disciples had experiences after Jesus death in which Jesus appeared to them as the risen Christ end quote finally fact number four the original disciples believed that Jesus was risen from the dead despite every predisposition to the contrary think of the situation that the disciples faced following Jesus crucifixion number one their leader was dead and Jewish messianic beliefs included no idea of a dying much less rising Messiah Messiah was supposed to throw off Israel's enemies and in this case that meant Rome and re-established the throne of David in Jerusalem not suffer at their hands and ignominious death of a criminal secondly according to Jewish law Jesus execution as a criminal showed him out to be a heretic a man literally under the curse of God the catastrophe of the crucifixion for these disciples was not simply that their beloved master was gone but that the crucifixion showed in effect that the Jewish leadership had been right all along that for three years they had been following a heretic a man literally a cursed by God finally three Jewish beliefs about the afterlife precluded anyone's rising from the dead to glory and immortality before the general resurrection of the Dead at the end of the world confronted with Jesus crucifixion all the disciples could do was to preserve their masters tomb as a shrine where his bones could reside until that day when all of Israel's righteous Dead would be raised by God to glory but despite every predisposition to the contrary the original disciples believed in and were willing to go to their deaths for the fact of Jesus resurrection Luke Johnson a New Testament scholar at Emory University muses some sort of powerful transformative experience is required to generate the sort of movement earliest Christianity was an NT write an eminent British scholar concludes that is why as a historian I cannot explain the rise of early Christianity unless Jesus rose again leaving an empty tomb behind him in summary then there are four facts which are agreed upon by the majority of scholars who have written on these subjects which any adequate historical hypothesis must account for Jesus honorable burial by Joseph of Arimathea the discovery of his empty tomb by a group of his women followers his post-mortem appearances to various individuals and groups and the very origin of the disciples belief in his resurrection now the question is what is the best explanation of these four facts this is where the disagreement begins most scholars probably simply remain agnostic about this question they would say something dramatic must have happened but we can't say what it is but the Christian can maintain that the hypothesis that best explains these facts is God raised Jesus from the dead in his best-selling book justifying historical descriptions the historians CB McCullough lists six tests which historians use in determining what is the best explanation for given historical facts the hypothesis God raised Jesus from the dead passes all of these tests number one it has great explanatory scope it explains why the tomb was found empty why the disciples saw post-mortem appearances of Jesus and why the Christian faith came into being number two it has great explanatory power it explains why the body of Jesus was gone why people repeatedly saw Jesus alive despite his earlier public execution and so forth 3 it is plausible given the historical context of Jesus own unparalleled life and claims the resurrection serves as a divine confirmation of those claims for it is not ad hoc or contrived it requires only one additional hypothesis namely that God exists and even that needn't be an addition hypothesis if one already believes that God exists on independent grounds five it is in accord with accepted beliefs the hypothesis God raised Jesus from the dead doesn't in any way conflict with the accepted belief that people don't rise naturally from the dead the Christian accepts that belief as wholeheartedly as he accepts the hypothesis that God raised Jesus from the dead and finally number six it far outstrips any of its rival hypotheses in meeting conditions one two five down through history various alternative hypotheses have been offered to explain these fundamental facts for example the conspiracy hypothesis the apparent death hypothesis the hallucination hypothesis and so forth such hypotheses have been almost universally rejected by contemporary scholarship none of these naturalistic theories has succeeded in meeting the conditions as well as the resurrection hypothesis now this puts the skeptical critic in a rather awkward situation to illustrate a few years ago I participated in a debate on the resurrection of Jesus with a professor at the University of California Irvine now this man had written his doctoral dissertation on the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus and he was thoroughly familiar with the evidence he could not deny the facts of Jesus honorable burial empty tomb post-mortem appearances and the origin of the disciples belief in his resurrection and so his only real course was to come up with some alternative explanation of those four facts and so he argued that Jesus of Nazareth must have had an unknown identical twin brother who was separated from him as an infant grew up independently came back to Jerusalem just at the time of the crucifixion stole Jesus body out of the tomb and presented himself alive to the disciples who mistakenly inferred that it was Jesus risen from the dead now I won't bother to go into how I went about refuting this theory but I think that the illustration is instructive because it shows two what desperate lengths skepticism must go in order to explain away the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus indeed the evidence is so powerful that today one of the world's leading Jewish theologians Jewish theologians the late Pincus Lapine who taught at Hebrew University in Israel declared himself convinced on the basis of the evidence that the God of Israel raised Jesus of Nazareth from the dead now if this is right then I think it has profound implications the significance of Jesus resurrection lies in the fact that it's not just any old Joe Blow that has been raised from the dead but it is Jesus of Nazareth whose crucifixion was instigated by the Jewish leadership because of his blasphemous claims to divine authority if this man has been raised from the dead then the God whom he allegedly blaspheme has clearly and publicly vindicated his claims the resurrection of Jesus is God's in Matar indicating that Jesus was who he claimed to be so in an age of religious relativism and pluralism the historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus constitutes a solid rock on which Christians can take their stand for God's decisive self revelation in Jesus the rational man can now hardly be blamed if he believes that on that first Easter morning a divine miracle has occurred thank you so much dr. Craig for your thoughtful remarks we will now transition into a time of question-and-answer as you see there's a microphone near the center aisle if you have any questions whatsoever please come forward and form a line in the center aisle also please limit your questions to 30 seconds or less so that we can have as many questions posed as possible this session will last for approximately 20 minutes I think hello hello my name is angel he just want to say first off thank you so much for coming it's a privilege to have you here second off currently I'm in a class and it's a Paul class Paul transformed and one of I actually did a presentation on first Corinthians 15 and before we do the presentation the teacher requires for us to turn in the presentation so she can proofread it and in proofreading it in verse of three through five I believe right yes she marked me down she said Jesus didn't resurrect from the dead but I heard me she why excuse me yes she marked me down because I wrote that Jesus Christ was raised from the dead and she said correction it was only that he was raised as in sort of saying that rooms it leaves room for interpretation of saying he was raised in the sense of it could be in their hearts that can be in their minds it can be in a dream it could to be and I insisted I was like for the sake of the presentation I was like okay fine I'll say that he was raised because I don't want to go against you but I mean how other way can you be raised yeah so I just want to machine or your friend the professor is looking at this through the lenses of modern interpretation rather than through the lenses of a first century Jewish person the verb there is a gear tie which means to be raised up it's the verb indicates raising from death it's the verb for resurrection and so clearly what it's talking about here is Christ died was buried he was then raised from the dead and then appears to these various persons so the the third line there is talking about a resurrection from the dead just as you said and no first century Jew would interpret it otherwise and as I say that third line is a summary statement when you compare to the Gospels in the preaching of the book of Acts of the empty tomb story how the women go to the tomb and find that as the corpse is not there it's no longer occupied so this has always been taken to be Jesus resurrection from the dead and elsewhere Paul will actually use that expression as well from the dead yeah because what she told me was that there is no such expression used by Paul from the dead that's sort of aha it's that how did we interpret the rest of 1st Corinthians 15 where he talks about death Sam was trying to say yeah I eyes again I I think that here we have a case where clearly the person is using is not putting oneself in the shoes of the first century Jewish person and how it would be understood at that time and and that's simply a failure of proper literary interpretation okay well she's the skull when I get a good grade in the class right but I really appreciate your answer and it just helps me support what I was good as well thank you it's possible when you come ask a question when you finish the question you can sit down now just so we can have okay and thank you very much for that wonderful talk now my question is in the place of what's the place of logic and fate and the intersection of that and the reason why I'm asking this question is this you know we we hear that in the last days there'll be the false prophet and all of that and we know that many things happen this days like the case of the Pew Town Hall I I don't know have you heard about that there was this skull that was excavated ourself was belonging to an Haley man and but thirty years down the line they discovered I was fabricated so what will happen say they came up with a finding that they found the body of Jesus and they did the DNA I mean did a DNA test on it and I confirmed that and we all rely on the logic of proving that Jesus rose from the dead instead of I mean believing that by faith I mean so all right I don't think you're really talking about logic here I think that's a misnomer what you're talking about is the role of evidence but we're not really talking here about the formal study of logic and logical inference and I think it's very important to understand that the Christian faith is based upon the event of the resurrection it is not based on the evidence for the resurrection if Jesus did not rise from the dead then Christianity is false and no one should believe in it so if someone did actually find the body of Jesus that the corpse of Jesus were found then that would falsify Christiana Christianity would would not be true and no one should believe in it and this is exactly the passage that was quoted by our MC when she introduced this evening that if Christ has not been raised our faith is futile and you're still in your sins so the event of the resurrection is essential to Christian truth worldview but not the evidence for the resurrection the evidence for the resurrection depends upon things like historical methodology manuscript evidence having the right kinds of critical tools and when you think of it for most of human history people have not had those kinds of historical tools to explore the New Testament historically medieval Christians lacked the historical method they basically believed in these accounts on the basis of the church's Authority historical methodology didn't arise until the Renaissance and then even very slowly so critical historiography is a modern discipline and ironically enough even though we are further removed chronologically from the events of the first century we are actually in far far better position to recover historically the facts of the matter then were Christians through most of the intervening centuries because they lacked the historical method but the tools of modern critical astoria graffia documents of the new testament and other documents page in history to historical inquiry and verification or falsification so we're very fortunate to be living now at the end of the 20th and now the beginning of the 21st century where we can establish the historicity of these facts with a good deal of rational confidence but for most of human history that wasn't the case and yet these people believed in the resurrection of Jesus and their faith was not in vain it wasn't futile you don't have to have evidence for the resurrection in order for the resurrection to have occurred you see what I mean so it's kind of like other galaxies prior to the 1920s we had no evidence that there were other galaxies our telescopes didn't reach beyond the Milky Way we had no idea that all those galaxies were out there but they were so that the fact of something doesn't depend on your evidence for it if you have the evidence for it that's wonderful all the better but if you lack it that doesn't mean it's not a fact similarly with respect to Jesus resurrection the event of the resurrection is essential to the Christian faith if it didn't happen Christianity is futile and false but that doesn't mean that Christianity stands or falls on the evidence for the resurrection yes I think that well they're like those facts that you were like all the historians agree on these ones and I agree that like the idea that early Christianity was such a thing means that you know something really big must have happened like I think that's really compelling but other than that it sounds like some of those kind of like go back to what's said in the Bible like specifically that Jesus postmortem we appeared to people so I think it would be really cool if you could talk about what like non biblical sources point to that having happened or is it or is this just supposed to be like evidence for the resurrection given that you like believe that what's that in the Bible is true ah no no remember what I said on the very second page of my lecture this evening I said suppose we approach these New Testament writings not as inspired Holy Scripture but just as ordinary documents written in Greek coming down to us out of the first century telling this remarkable story about Jesus of Nazareth and we approach them just as you would approach the writings of Plutarch or Thucydides or Herodotus or other sources for ancient history and what I'm arguing is that when scholars approached them that way the Gospels and other New Testament materials turn out to look very very good as sources for the life of Jesus of Nazareth including these four facts that I mentioned about the fate of Jesus after his crucifixion what what happened to him so this isn't based upon any sort of assumption that you already believe in in these narratives rather what the critical scholar will do we'll look at all of the ancient sources we have for the life of Jesus including the apocryphal Gospels references to Jesus in Christian writings outside the New Testament references in Jewish writings to Jesus references like Josephus's paragraph about Jesus Tacitus the Roman historian says something about Jesus there's a letter from a Syrian writer named Maura Barr Sarah peein referring to Jesus will assemble all of these sources and then attempt to reconstruct the life of Jesus based upon these sources and the only reason that the documents of the new testing will be privileged in this search is precisely because they are the earliest and most primitive sources and fullest sources we have for Jesus and that's why I was so emphatic about the early dates of the material that lie behind these New Testament documents like the pre Markin Passion source and this formula that Paul quotes these drive us back unbelievably early close to the events which they record and thereby closed the window of opportunity for legend and error to to creep in so the the reason that the new testament materials are so important is simply because as I say they are the earliest and fullest and most primitive sources we have for the life of Jesus thank you for your talk I found most of your points to be very convincing there is one point that I just thought of a rebuttal to so when you said that there the typical religious legends of the day were more embellished and harder to believe in more dramatic you gave an amusing example of how a narrative would be more complex I was thinking at the end though that well you're for fact that you presented they could also be considered a part of a crazy legend one that's just more convincing because it has more of the hallmarks of being humble and quotidian rather than crazy and fantastical so do you think that's a possible what what is the what is the the argument is that the market account doesn't show signs of legendary embellishment it lacks theological reflection it lacks apologetically development very stark and simple and now what is what are you saying that the American expand on that might be legendary embellishment the fact that the unbelieving brothers for example were miraculously turned around immediately to believe in Jesus oh that's not part of the marking account the mark an empty tomb story is the story that tells how the women get up very early before dawn and they collect these aromatic spices and go to the tomb to anoint the body the corpse of Jesus and they ask who's going to roll away the stone when we get there and they arrive and the stone is rolled away and they go in and they see an angelic vision-- who says he is not here he has risen seeing the place where they laid him but go he's going before you to Galilee there you will see him now at the very most the critical scholar might want to excise the angel this angelic figure as a legendary embellishment the the angel serves to interpret the significance of the end why is it empty but apart from the angel the rest of the narrative is just very very starkly simple there's no description of the resurrection no vision of the risen Lord there are no divine titles used of him there's no proof text from the Old Testament about what's happened it's just basically a simple account of these women go to the tomb and they find it empty and they flee from the tomb in terror and astonishment because they don't know what what has happened or what's happened to the body so it doesn't include anything about the conversion of James or any of these other factors and and and this argument specifically is about marks account of the empty tomb and the lack of legendary embellishment that it exhibits by dr. Craig hi I'd like to follow up on the previous lady's question it seemed to me like most of your evidence for proving your four facts was predicated on Scripture itself it seemed like there was very little cross referencing as you suggested in your answer to her question so my question is if why is it that we take the New Testament to be of such validity and to be what to be so valid why do we take it to be valid and wait wait one second and at the same time not fully believe that say the stories in the Odyssey occurred in reality or that other great Greek fictions were also real what separates the new twelve in a sense the lecture this evening is the answer to your question the lecture this evening is an explanation of why most scholars today think that the story for example of the discovery of the empty tomb is historical or why Joseph of Arimathea is taken to be the person who buried Jesus I mean think of the burial account of Jesus I am in no way as I said privileges the New Testament where we're looking at all of the ancient sources for Jesus but what we have in the case of the burial is what sources support this story besides the New Testament why do you ask that question question that question betrays the assumption that the sources in the New Testament are somehow suspect and are not to be taken as evidence but if something's outside the New Testament ah now that's real evidence oh well that's all the weight now that's question baking because what I'm saying is that you look at all of the sources that we have for the life of Jesus equally and that in in the case of the Gospels these are the earliest and most primitive sources that we have for the life of Jesus and so to ignore them in favor of extra biblical sources would be simply mad as historical methodology you the historian always will look at the earliest most primitive documents as his most reliable documents and what I tried to show this evening is that these facts are for example take the burial multiple-- independently attested in early documents and this is one of the most important criteria that historians used for establishing a fact of ancient his right which is which like brings me to my question right what other sources attest to this well in the case of the burial account there's something like five different sources independent sources some of which are among the earliest of the New Testament I mentioned too in my talk tonight this pre Pauline formula that Paul quotes in his first letter to the church in Corinth Greece is a information shouldn't the letters from the Apostles also be taken with a grain of salt in that case it just seems to me like that of the Resurrection is dependent on the truth of Scripture and that you know screen no it's not and no your you you have not shaken loose yourself from the presupposition that that this is somehow an inspired document and that you believe in it because it's inspired that's not the way critical historical Jesus scholars work and it's not a matter of the fact that Paul says it as I see what's critical here is that Paul is quoting from a pre pauling tradition that goes back to within the first five years after the crucifixion this is a source which is incredibly close to the original events which Paul himself used quotes and passes on so it's nothing to do with Paul he's just the intermediary who passed on this this tradition similarly with the premark and passion story mark may have been written in the early 60s but the primar compassion story goes back even earlier than that many scholars will date at around ad 40 or so that's just ten years after the death of Jesus now you compare that with sources for say the life of Alexander the Great we're the earliest sources or earliest biographies we have of Alexander are written by Aryan and Plutarch four hundred years after the death of Alexander and yet they're still regarded by classical historians as largely reliable accounts of his death the sources that we have for the life of Jesus are just incredibly close to the events that they are about and therefore they are taken extremely seriously by historians today and and you can't write them off because hundreds of years later the church collected these documents put them under one cover and called it the New Testament right I mean originally there wasn't any such thing as the New Testament there were just all these separate documents written in the Greek language Paul's letter to the church in Corinth Paul's letter to the church in Thessalonica Luke's Gospel of the life of Jesus John's gospel of the life of Jesus all of these various documents were then later collected and put under one cover called the New Testament and and therefore it's just bad historical methodology to say well that's in the New Testament therefore this isn't an important historical source or isn't a valuable historical search that's just treating it anachronistically you've got to treat these documents for what they originally were and then look at or apply the criteria for historicity to the documents with a view toward determining what is reliable in them and what is unreliable and can be ignored or discarded yes hi my name is Sinclair Williams you said that a lot of historians accept the four facts but disagree about the explanation for them Ryan you gave kind of you know just a kind of a ridiculous example about Jesus having a twin brother right what are I guess what is the best explanation I suppose aside from the resurrection of Jesus for these four facts that you have heard well as I said no naturalistic hypothesis has generated a great number of scholars today in its following garelu Dammam has defended the hallucination hypothesis but he hasn't generated much following in that explanation one difficulty with the hallucination hypothesis is while it tries to explain the appearances it doesn't say anything to explain the empty tomb right and so it has a narrow explanatory scope and fails that criterion for best explanation another explanation that's very interesting would be what one might call the necromancy theory that a Body Snatcher stole the body of Jesus to use the body parts in magic potions and spells and that the disciples had visions of Jesus that are similar to bereavement visions that widows or widowers will often experience upon the death of a husband or a wife and that Jesus being close to them they had a sort of bereavement vision of Jesus but again I don't know of scarcely any scholars that have followed this hypothesis necromancy does not seem to have been practiced in 1st century Israel especially in Jerusalem and these sort of bereavement visions don't lead people to think that the person is risen from the dead as NT Wright has nicely put it in the world of antiquity in the ancient world a vision of a dead person would not be evidence the person was alive it would be evidence that he was dead so these sorts of hypotheses though they're out there haven't generated a great deal of following I think for the most part scholars who don't accept the resurrection will simply be agnostic they'll say we don't know often they will say something had to have happened something dramatic must have occurred to account for this change but we don't know what it is and sometimes they will say as a historian I cannot infer a supernatural cause or explanation because as a historian I am methodologically confined to naturalistic explanations and since none of them work I'm left with agnosticism and what I'm suggesting is the Christian doesn't need to be so methodological II limited he can offer the resurrection hypothesis and I think defend it as the best explanation when judged by those criteria like explanatory power explanatory scope plausibility and so forth yes thanks again for being here dr. Craig my question is something that you hear a lot today even in Christian circles is that ultimately the historicity of the resurrection is unimportant when compared to the existential commitment to the way of Jesus or the narrative of Christ or the way of Christ and my question to you is about the legitimacy of remaining a Christian while denying the bodily resurrection of Christ is it sorry for the pun at life or death issue further yeah well I'm I'm persuaded that it is a life or death issue as you put it that to deny the resurrection of Jesus is to deny an essential tenant of the faith if he did not rise from the dead then it seems to me as Paul said that the Christian Proclamation is just false and it's no good trying to symbolize it or reinterpret it you could still be a theist you could still believe God exists but I don't think you should be a Christian theist because Jesus was just a false messianic pretender and his resurrection didn't occur and therefore he was a failed messianic pretender just as the Jewish leadership thought he was yes these questions my question is pretty much essentially what the gentleman before me just asked which is how do you respond how do you respond to liberal Christians who insist that the resurrection was not literal it was written literally but it was actually spiritual and they focus on Jesus's personality and teachings and not the theology of him rising from the dead right ante Wright wrote a book called the resurrection of the Son of God 800 pages long Gary Hebert masses characterized this book as an 800 page word study of the word resurrection and what right shows is that in the ancient world resurrection whether as conceived by Jews or is denied by pagans referred to the physical bodily resurrection of a dead person to new life and there simply is no attested usage of this word in any other way that is what it meant so that liberal Christians who attempt to do theological salvage operations I think by symbolizing it or reinterpreting it are I think really just afraid to admit that if Jesus didn't rise from the dead Christianity is false and we should have the courage to say that and and walk away from it you you can't have your cake and eat it too so in interacting with folks like this I think what one needs to do is just to do good historical work on how these terms were understood in the first century and especially in Jewish culture and context and there it is very plain that resurrection meant the bodily physical space time resurrection of the dead person so I wondered if you could speak to some of the pre Christ resurrect resurrection myths in other cultures and there are similarities and parallels and what what myths are you thinking of here I mean just like all of them there are a ton a lot of people will you know point to these as saying that there may have been some influence or inspiration there yes in the late 19th century and on into the early 20th there was a school within a school of thought within German New Testament scholarship called the religione Shula which meant the history of religions school and what these scholars did was ransack the literature of ancient mythology pagan religion trying to find parallels to Christian beliefs including the resurrection and in some case they tried to actually explain the origin of these Christian beliefs through the influence of pagan mythology and resurrection you still find this sort of stuff repeated on the internet by people like Bill Maher and the zeitgeist movie and so forth what they don't realize is that this is over 100 years out-of-date the old history of religion school collapsed in the early 20th century and is no longer taken seriously by New Testament scholars principally for two reasons number one it turned out that the supposed parallels were spurious when you examine these so-called myths of dying and rising gods like Adonis and Osiris and Tammuz and so forth it turns out that they really don't concern coming back to earthly life at all for example Osiris lives on in the underground world and in the nether realm of the Dead or in other cases these are just symbolic ways of portraying the the vegetation cycle the crop cycle it's the vegetation dies in the dry season and comes back in the rainy season in no case does it have anything to do with a historical individual or actual resurrection from the dead so that when you do this kind of comparative religious work it is extremely important that one be sensitive to the nuances and the details and it turns out that they really are outside of Judaism nothing in pagan mythology that is truly parallel to Jewish belief in the resurrection of the Dead the second reason it collapsed was not only were the parallel spurious but there was no causal connection between those myths and early Christian beliefs Jews were familiar with these pagan beliefs and they found them abhorrent and so there is no trace in first century Palestine of cults of dying and rising gods and in any case it would simply be unthinkable that people like Peter and James the disciples of Jesus would actually come to believe this unjú ish an outlandish idea that Jesus of Nazareth was risen from the dead because they had heard stories of Hercules or Osiris or something of that sort so that the causal link is simply missing and so pagan mythology has ceased to be actually a relevant category in the interpretation of the historical Jesus today what has happened is what some scholars have called the Jewish reclamation of Jesus that is to say scholars have rediscovered the Jewishness of Jesus Jesus and all the disciples were Jews and it's against the backdrop of first century Judaism that Jesus and the Gospels are to be understood not against the background of pagan mythology and you might have wondered how could so obvious effective ever been missed by scholars well I was talking to James Crossley who is a New Testament scholar at Sheffield University in England and not a conservative by any means and I said to him how could New Testament scholars have been so derailed as to have missed the Jewishness of Jesus and he said it was anti-semitism German anti-semitism and that just hit me I thought wow it is true that German theology for four decades has led the way in historical Jesus and New Testament studies and the same anti-semitism in German culture that eventually led to the second world war he thinks colored historical Jesus studies so that Jesus needed to be seen as an Aryan it was unthinkable that he could have been a real Jew and what has happened now with the Jewish reclamation of Jesus is that people are reading the Gospels against the background of first century Jewish thought and when you do that as I've said then the Gospels come out looking very good as historical sources for the life of this first century Jew yes thanks for coming out professor I had a quick question for you uh what are your thoughts on the Shroud of Turin which is often sort of understood considered by many to be a cloth that covered just during the resurrection and left an imprint of his image on the actual cloth I must say that the evidence for the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin is very impressive when you read the results of the steam that investigated that they've shown that this is not a painting it the blood on it is real it contains three dimensional data that no forger could seemingly have produced it's not a burn or a scorch that could have been made it is a stunning image that just is so radically in contrast to medieval art when you look at medieval or Renaissance painting you go to a museum and that the figures the paintings look stick like almost cartoonish they're so unrealistic and and yet the Shroud is an atomic the figure on the Shroud is anatomically so realistic it's utterly unlike a medieval painting and so it's very very hard to explain but given those carbon dating tests that showed the Shroud to be on medieval cloth I do not think it's wise to appeal to the shroud as evidence or as authentic until those carbon dating tests re run and overthrown and certainly there are a lot of people now that are saying that those tests were defective there's a claim that when the shroud was damaged in a fire that the nuns who care for it re wove certain parts of the shroud with new threads to repair it and that the sample taken from the Shroud and carbon dated was unfortunately from part of the new cloth and therefore doesn't record accurately the date of the original now who knows if that's true I mean III think that we just have to stay judgment until and if the Catholic Church will permit these carbon dating tests to be redone yes uh hi thank you for coming out I'd like to take issue with your fourth point mainly in terms of the fact that there does seem to be an impetus for the disciples to say that Jesus was resurrected and that's mainly you said it yourself that if Jesus is not resurrected he's a failed messianic pretender so would it also be an equally plausible explanation to say creating a resurrection after the very well-supported fact of his crucifixion would that not be a very reasonable thing for them to do to create the resurrection it wouldn't be a Jewish thing to do as I said the idea of messiah being killed executed by his enemies is completely on jewish there is no expectation at all that messiah rather than establishing the throne of david and commanding the respect of Gentiles and Jews alike would be shamefully executed as a common criminal so this puts a question mark behind any hopes that they had entertained that Jesus was Messiah also I indicated that according to Old Testament law Jesus hanging on a tree or execution by hanging on a tree showed him to be under God's curse and a Jew wouldn't come up with the idea of reversing that by resurrection from the dead because as I say for a first century Jew the resurrection never occurs of an isolated individual apart from all of the righteous debt of Israel and it never occurs within history prior to the end of the world the resurrection occurs only on Judgment Day when God is going to raise all the dead and judge them and so what typically happened with these failed messianic movements is that the followers just disbanded and these movements fell apart NT Wright has said when you look at these messianic movements from the first century before Jesus through the first of the the first century after Jesus he said it always was the same pattern the Romans crucified these messianic pretenders and the movements fell apart in no case did they ever say well he he is risen from the dead and is he is the Messiah after all this is just a completely unjú ish thing to do he says what right says is the disciples faced with the crucifixion of Jesus would basically have two choices either you go home or you find yourself a new Messiah but it would be completely on Jewish to think that contrary to Jewish beliefs that he was risen from the dead and and was the Messiah after all even if they had wanted to say that Jesus was say a douche martyr who had been martyred for his faith like the Maccabee and martyrs that still wouldn't lead to belief in his resurrection even if they had said well God has translated him to heaven he's been taken up to heaven and is in glory and we will meet him again someday that still wouldn't believe I lead to belief in his resurrection so there needs to be some kind of an adequate explanation for this radical mutation in Jewish categories that would lead them to think that this man was risen from the dead as an isolated individual in advance of the eschatological resurrection at the end of the world and was therefore Messiah and I see no reason to think that it wasn't the explanation that they themselves gave namely that God raised him from the dead and that's why they came to believe this very unjú ish and radical idea thank you I would like to close with just a personal remark I mentioned at the beginning of my talk this evening that there are really two avenues to a knowledge of the resurrection of Jesus there's the historical Avenue that we talked about tonight but then there's also that personal existential Avenue that the Easter hymn writer talks about when he says I know he lives because he lives within my heart and I believe that both of these are equally valid ways to a knowledge of Jesus resurrection if I may speak existentially and personally I myself wasn't raised in a Christian family but when I became a teenager I began to ask what I call the big questions in life Who am I why am I here where am I going and I felt very keenly what I later discovered in French existentialist writers to be the meaninglessness of life that terminated in my death and ultimately the death of humankind in the heat death of the universe I felt deeply the darkness and despair of the absurdity of a life that was doomed to end in the grave at the same time I also was embittered by another factor that I later discovered in existential authors the inauthenticity of human existence and relations as I struggled with my existential questions I began to attend a large local church in our community looking for answers but what I found there instead of answers was just a social Country Club where the dues were $1 a week in the offering plate and the other high school students who pretended to be such good Christians on Sunday lived for their real God the rest of the week which was popularity and they would do anything in order to serve that God and this deeply troubled me because I thought Here I am so spiritually empty inside and yet externally at least I'm leading a more moral life than they are and they claim to be Christians they're all just a bunch of hypocrites they're all phonies pretending to be something they're not and soon this attitude began to spread toward other people everyone I said is really inauthentic everyone is holding up a plastic mask to the world while the real person is cowering down inside afraid to come out and be real and so I hated them for their inauthenticity and phone enos and I threw myself into my studies and shunned relationships with other people I don't need them I said I hate them I want nothing to do with them I was on my way frankly toward becoming a very alienated young man and yet at the same time in moments of honesty and introspection when I looked into my own heart I sensed deeply a desire to be loved and to love others and I realized at that moment that I was just as much a phony as they were because here I was putting on this brave face that I don't need people and I don't want people and yet deep down inside I knew that I really did and I realized that I too was inauthentic I was a hypocrite and so that hatred turned in on myself or my own phone enos and hypocrisy and I don't know if you understand what this is like but this kind of inner anger just eats away at your insides day after day making every day miserable another day to get through and I remember I walked into my high school German class one day and I sat down behind a girl who was one of these types that was always so happy that it just made you sick and I tapped her on the shoulder and she turned around and I said to her Sandi what are you always so happy about it anyway and she said we'll bill it's because I know Jesus Christ as my personal Savior and I said well I go to church and she said that's not enough bill you've got to have him really living in your heart and I said well what would he want to do a thing like that for and she said because he loves you bill and that just hit me like a ton of bricks here I was so filled with anger and hatred inside and she said there was someone who really loved me and who was it but the god of the universe and that thought just staggered me to think that the God of the universe could love me bill Craig that worm down there on that speck of dust called the planet Earth I just couldn't take it in well I went home that night and I found a New Testament that had been given to me by the Gideons when they came to our great school in the fifth grade I'd never cracked it before but now I opened it and began to read it and as I read the Gospels I was absolutely captivated by the person of Jesus of Nazareth there was a wisdom about this man's teaching that I had never encountered before and especially there was an authenticity about this man's life that wasn't characteristic of those people who claimed to be his followers in that local church I was going to and I realized then I couldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater and as I read the New Testament I saw why God seemed so unreal to me that the message of the New Testament was that my own wrongdoing the things that I had done and said and thought that were wrong had spiritually separated me from God so that I was the the relationship that I had been created to have with God was ruptured and it was no wonder that God seemed so unreal to me but the good news of the New Testament was that God had sent His Son Jesus into the world to pay the penalty for my sin so that by him my relationship with God could be restored and I could come to know God in the way that I was created to well to make a long story short after about six months of the most intense soul-searching that I've ever been through in my entire life I finally just came to the end of my rope and I cried out to God and as I did so I I felt this tremendous infusion of joy like a balloon being blown up and blown up until it was ready to burst and I remember I rushed outside it was a warm Midwestern summer's evening and as I looked up at the Stars I could see the Milky Way from The Horizon to Horizon and as I looked at the Stars I thought huh God I've come to know God and that moment changed my entire life because you see I had thought enough about this during those six months to realize that if this message were really the truth if it were really the truth I could do nothing less than devote my entire life to sharing this message among mankind and so that's basically why I'm here at Yale this evening because I love to share the truth of this message of Jesus with university students who are about the same age that I was when my life was turned upside down so if you were to ask me why I believe in the resurrection of Jesus I would point not only to the objective historical evidence for this event but I would also point to the inner personal existential experience of a relationship with the Living Lord Himself and this is a reality which I believe if you have never found it you can experience as well and so if you have never done so I would just encourage you to do what I did that evening go home pick up a New Testament and begin to read it and ask yourself could this really be the truth could there really be a God who loves me and to his sent his son to die for me and to be raised from the dead for eternal life and an vindication of his claims I believe that it could change your life in the same way that it changed mine thank you [Applause] wonderful thank you again dr. Craig I know we've all been given much to think about as we leave tonight so I'd like to thank all the students and staff of the LK connection and Yale students for Christ who were to make this event be great following my remarks all yell students are invited to the Dwight Hall common room for ice cream to continue our discussion and talk about what we've heard tonight also everyone is encouraged to take a free copy of Tim Keller's counterfeit God's which are placed right outside so again thank you dr. Craig and thank you for attending blessings to you all [Applause]

Channel: ReasonableFaithOrg

Views: 96,911

Rating: 4.7430511 out of 5

Keywords: William Lane Craig (Philosopher), Reasonable Faith, Jesus Christ (Deity), Resurrection, Rise from the Dead, Christianity (Religion), Bible, Agnosticism (Religion), Atheism (Religion), God, Resurrection Of Jesus, Easter, Yale University (Organization), Can we trust the New Testament, New Testament (Religious Text), 1 Corinthians 15

Id: _NAOc6ctw1s

Length: 88min 12sec (5292 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 18 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

I'm not going to subject myself to WLC again. I'm going to guess that he trots out the old argument that the only "reasonable" conclusion is that Jesus rose based on the idea is that it's the ONLY thing that could explain it.

It is a classic argument from ignorance. Provided any of the empty tomb accounts actually happened and aren't just myth, one could make up any number of ad hoc explanations of natural origin as to why. Every one of these would be infinitely more probable than a person rising from the dead simply because they involve things we know can happen.

Bottom line, is that if there was an empty tomb, we don't really know why and neither does he.

[u/JLord]

The story of the empty tomb comes from the Gospels. If you believe whatever the gospels say then Craig's argument is pointless because it is attempting to prove something you already accept as true. If you don't trust the gospels then you don't accept a key premise of his argument. So who is ever going to find it convincing?

It's only useful to people who already believe but want to think that there is some logical reason for their belief.

[u/redbird3669]

I have no respect for anyone that disables comments for their videos. He is either a controll freak that wants no discussion about what he says, or he can't back up what he says and he knows it. Jerk.

[u/Tringard]

For those that are scared off by its apparent length, the lecture itself is only 30 minutes. I haven't listened to all of the Q&A that followed.

The one thing to really focus on here is that the entire argument rests on the idea that each book of the New Testament (especially the gospels and 1 Corinthians) is an independent, trustworthy source. Most, or effectively all, scholars do not believe that the gospels are independent, but rather that there is a strong relationship between Matthew, Mark, and Luke as they borrow from each other and seem to use common outside sources (a wikipedia link to get you started if you want to read more about this). Thus, every time you see him mention that something is "multiply attested by independent, early sources", he is referring to multiple books of the bible. The supposed independence is his strongest evidence in favor of the validity of Jesus' appearances after resurrection in his "Fact 3".

In the end, given agreement from these "sources" that the location of Jesus' tomb was known (fact 1), it was found empty by women followers (fact 2), he was seen multiple times by multiple groups post-mortem (fact 3), and the otherwise inexplicably firm belief of the disciples in his resurrection (fact 4), the best explanation is that Jesus rose from the dead because:

• It has great explanatory scope
  
• It has great explanatory power
  
• It is plausible
  
• It is not ad hoc or contrived
  
• It is in accord with accepted beliefs
  
• It outstrips any other explanation
  

to which I can only respond with What?!, by what definition of "plausible" and how is resurrection agreeing with accepted Christian beliefs not simply circular logic. There are multiple ways to attack his "facts", my primary responses are to the idea of them being independent and the idea that they are trustworthy - that is, accurate representations of the originals which were actually written near to the time of Jesus' life.

[u/jas010]

So I'm OP... Just noticed my original text didn't get posted for some reason... Sorry if that caused confusion. I posted this just to hear some exchristians thoughts. I'm going through deconversion and thought this was mainly bs but maybe had some interesting points I wanted to look into more.

[u/[deleted]]

I would consider reading Bart Ehrman or Paula Frederiksen for some alternative views on the historicity of the resurrection. They made it click for me.

[u/kleedrac]

So was this posted by a christian who buys all of WLC wondering why we have a dissenting view?

[u/[deleted]]

Define "rise" and "dead".

IMO, Hellenistic thought was more ingrained in pre-supposed "Jewish" society, and therefore, a mythological being escaping from the underworld ( not really dead ) was actually a believable scenario for Hellenistic Jews and Gentiles.

Define "empty tomb". Define all the nouns in your propositions WLC; as soon as we have consensus about what they actually mean, then a debate is possible.

[u/NewLeaf37]

Except:

A. Accepting, for sake of argument, the historicity of the Markan account of the empty tomb, WLC makes a gigantic leap in logic from that to "Jesus really was raised." For instance, the figure who announces the resurrection isn't an angel, but a young man. For all we know, this young man had stolen the body himself (perhaps he was a Jew who felt that Jesus didn't deserve an honorable burial, perhaps he was a follower of Jesus trying to restore hope to the rest of the disciples) or maybe he had even witnessed other grave robbers steal it and was trying to comfort the women. The possibilities are many, and Craig mistakes a lack of certainty for a lack of probability.

B. He contrasts the Markan account with an apocryphal one, saying the former bears none of the marks of legend the other does, but conveniently never touches on the much more elaborate stories of Matthew, Luke, and John. Mark, namely, has no appearances of the risen Jesus. They see the tomb, young man tells them "He is risen," they run away scared.

C. WLC treats these references throughout the NT as presenting a consistent picture, but that's hardly the case. Matthew borrows Mark's verse in which the disciples are told to go to Galilee to meet Jesus and then depicts them doing exactly that. Luke drops this line and instead has them see Jesus for the first time in Jerusalem (which also makes it consistent with its sequel Acts, in which Jesus ascends from outside Jerusalem 40 days later). The Lukan reference to Jesus appearing to Peter, which Craig takes to correspond with Paul's statement, is quite oddly and ambiguously worded; Cleophas and another disciple arrive, saying they've seen Jesus alive, and then randomly blurt out, "And appeared to Simon!" While Peter's birthname is always presented as Simon Bar-Jonas, nothing indicates that they exclusively meant him. In fact, based on the sentence structure and the anonymity of the other person, it sure sounds like Simon is Cleophas' walking buddy.

C1. While I'm on the subject, don't you find it odd that Luke's first resurrection appearance is to two, previously unmentioned disciples and not to the women at the tomb or the Twelve Eleven? Not only that, but they don't even recognize him until after he's gone? My personal hypothesis is that this incident happened, but it was someone else entirely. Cleophas and (I'm just going to call him) Simon were on the fringes of the movement, so they didn't know Jesus all that well, probably only saw him from a distance, etc. But something about this stranger reminds them of him. And, once he's gone, they work themselves up into the belief that it was Jesus! Coupled with the apparently empty tomb, this could be just the spark the early church needed to begin a belief in the resurrection.

D. "It is plausible." No, mofo. Just adding God to a scenario you can't fully explain does not equal plausibility. "It requires only one extra hypothesis: that God exists." Again, no. It also requires that God gives a crap about humanity, that he is especially invested in this one Jesus fellow, etc. You haven't demonstrated any of that, because that's ultimately what you're trying to prove. Therefore, circular reasoning.