Did the Resurrection Really Happen? | William Lane Craig

welcome to the Veritas forum engaging University students and faculty in discussions about life's hardest questions and the relevance of Jesus Christ to all of life 20 centuries after his death Jesus of Nazareth continues to fascinate thinking men and women most recently Mel Gibson's movie The Passion of the Christ has aroused a storm of controversy and become an unexpected blockbuster of a film filling the airwaves with interviews talk shows and documentaries about the historical Jesus of Nazareth and the key question raised by all of these discussions is the following how are we to understand Jesus of Nazareth now in order to answer that question I'm convinced that we must move beyond the passion to inquire what happened to Jesus of Nazareth after his death several months ago I was phoned by NBC television about being interviewed for their documentary on the last days of Jesus and I asked the producer if they were going to be discussing the subject of Jesus resurrection and she said no they were just going to be talking about the last days of Jesus up until his death on the cross and I said where well then I guess you're not really going to be talking about the last days of Jesus are you and she laughed and said well I see what you mean without the resurrection of Jesus nobody would even care about the last days of Jesus would they well I think that's absolutely right it is Jesus resurrection from the dead that provides the key to his identity and the meaning of his passion you see Jesus had been crucified for his radical personal claims whereby he had put himself in the place of God himself claims which were as famous in Jewish ears but the resurrection of Jesus shows that Jesus was no blasphemer after all as the German theologian vollhardt Pallenberg explains the resurrection of Jesus acquire such decisive meaning not because someone or anyone has been raised from the dead but because it is Jesus of Nazareth whose crucifixion was instigated because he had blaspheme against God if this man has been raised from the dead then the God of Israel allegedly blaspheme by Jesus has clearly committed himself to him the resurrection can only be understood as the divine vindication of the man whom the Jews had rejected as a blasphemer now most people would probably think that the resurrection of Jesus is something you just believe in by faith or not but over the last 50 years there has been a remarkable transformation in historical Jesus scholarship such that today the majority of New Testament historians have come to affirm three central facts about the events following Jesus crucifixion events which I believe are best explained by the fact of the resurrection of Jesus what are these facts well they are number one Jesus post-mortem appearances number two the discovery of his empty tomb and number three the very origin of the disciples belief in his resurrection and what I'd like to do this afternoon with you is look very briefly at each one of these three facts first then the post-mortem appearances of Jesus undoubtedly the major impetus behind the reassessment of the historical credibility of the appearance traditions was the demonstration by the German scholar Yaqui Mira Meuse that in his first letter to the church in ix Greece Paul is quoting from an old Christian tradition or saying which he himself had received an intern passed on to his converts in the fifteenth chapter of his first letter to the Corinthians Paul says for I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received and then comes this ancient oral tradition or saying 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 cave us that's the Aramaic name for Peter then to the twelve now according to Paul's letter to the churches of Galatia in chapter one and verse 18 Paul was in Jerusalem three years after his conversion on the Damascus Road on a fact-finding mission during which time he conferred with both Peter Jesus chief disciple and James Jesus younger brother over a two-week period of time and he probably received this tradition at that time if not before now when you realize that Paul was converted in AD 33 and that Jesus was crucified around ad 30 that means that this list of witnesses to the post-mortem appearances of Jesus goes back to within the first five years after Jesus death and thus it is simply idle to try to dismiss these appearances as mere legends according to John Dominic Crossan a very skeptical radical New Testament critic who believes that many of the events of the gospel passion narratives were invented on the basis of Old Testament motifs it would take at least 5 to 10 years for the early church to find the Old Testament motifs to invent passion story and yet you noticed that this information about the eyewitnesses to Jesus resurrection appearances antedates even the lower limit set by crossing of five years moreover crossing himself admits that it would be virtually impossible for the early church to have invented the resurrection narratives about Jesus after his death on the basis of old testament motifs because there's virtually nothing in the Old Testament which would lead them to anticipate Jesus resurrection from the dead thus we can try to explain away these post mortem appearances as hallucinatory experiences if we want to but we cannot responsibly denied that they occurred Paul's information makes it certain that on separate occasions different individuals and groups of people experienced appearances of Jesus of Nazareth alive after his death according to the German New Testament critic Garrett's Ludum on it is historically certain that Jesus are that Peter and the disciples had experiences after Jesus death in which Jesus appeared to them as the risen Christ and this conclusion is today virtually universally accepted among New Testament historians now at the same time that biblical scholarship has come to a new appreciation of the historical credibility of Paul's information it must be admitted however that skepticism concerning the appearance traditions in the Gospels persists however this lingering skepticism about the Gospel appearance narrative seems to me to be entirely unjustified it is based upon a presuppositional bias toward the physicalism in the Gospel appearance stories Jesus appears bodily and physically alive from the dead and since many New Testament critics retain the presupposition of the impossibility of nature miracles these stories are written off as legendary accretions simply on the basis of that philosophical prejudice against the possibility of nature miracles but considered historically the traditions underlying these appearance stories may be just as reliable as the traditions that paul hands on the physicality of Jesus resurrection appearances is unanimously attested by all of our sources for these appearance narratives and this would be remarkable if none of the original appearances of Jesus were physical in nature how such a unanimous corruption of oral tradition could occur in such a short time while the eyewitnesses were still alive remains unexplained and therefore I find the skeptical prejudice with respect to the appearance traditions and the Gospels to be quite unwarranted and I think that the new appreciation of the historical value of Paul's information needs to be accompanied by a reassessment of the gospel appearance stories as well secondly the discovery of Jesus empty tomb once regarded as an offense to modern intelligence and even an embarrassment for the Christian faith the empty tomb of Jesus has come to assume its place among the generally accepted facts concerning the historical Jesus let me just review briefly some of the evidence that undergirds this conclusion number one the historical reliability of the burial narrative supports the empty tomb now you might ask well how is it that the reliability of the burial account of Jesus supports the historicity of his empty tomb well very simply in the following way if the burial account is accurate then the site of Jesus grave was known in Jerusalem to both Jew and Christian alike but in that case it's a very short inference to the historicity of the empty tomb for if Jesus had not been raised from the dead and the site of the grave were known than in the first place the disciples could never have believed in the resurrection of Jesus for a first century Jew the idea that a man might be raised from the dead while his corpse still lay in the tomb was simply a contradiction in terms in the words of the new testament commentator EE Ellis it is very unlikely that the earliest Palestinian Christians could conceive of any distinction between resurrection and physical grave emptying resurrection to them and a resurrection without an empty grave he says would have been about as meaningful as a square circle secondly even if the disciples had somehow managed to believe in the resurrection of Jesus they wouldn't have generated any following in Jerusalem so long as the corpse remained interred in the tomb a Christian movement in Jerusalem founded on the belief in the resurrection of the Dead man would have simply been an impossible folly and thirdly in any case the Jewish authorities would have exposed the whole affair the quickest and surest answer to the disciples Proclamation he has risen from the dead would have been simply to point to his grave there in the hillside or if necessary even go to the extreme measure of assuming the body and parading it through the streets of Jerusalem for all to see that Jesus of Nazareth had not in fact risen from the dead so for these three reasons the historical accuracy of the burial account supplies evidence for the historicity of the empty tomb unfortunately for those who wish to deny the historicity of the empty tomb however the burial account of Jesus is recognized as one of the most historically reliable tradition that we have about Jesus of Nazareth most scholars are united in the judgment that Jesus of Nazareth was buried in a tomb by a member of the Jewish Sanhedrin named Joseph of Arimathea late on Friday afternoon according to John eighty Robinson the late New Testament scholar at Cambridge University the burial of Jesus in the tomb is one of the earliest and best attested facts about Jesus but if that is the case then as I've explained the inference that the tomb was found empty is not very far at hand secondly Paul's testimony supports the fact of the empty tomb here I want to mention two aspects of Paul's testimony in 1st Corinthians chapter 15 that I quoted a moment ago first in the ancient formula or saying cited by Paul the expression he was raised following the expression he was buried implies an empty tomb a first century Jew could not have thought otherwise as he elbowed observes in his very fine study of the empty tomb the notion of the occurrence of a spiritual resurrection while the corpse still remained interred in the tomb is a peculiarities of modern theology for the Jews it was the remains of the man in the tomb that were raised principally in fact the bones of the dead and for that reason Jewish funerary practices were to carefully preserve the bones of the deceased in ossuary Zoar bone boxes until the resurrection at the end of the world I think there can be no doubt that both Paul and the early Christian formula that he cites presuppose the existence of the empty tomb in saying that Jesus was buried and he was raised second aspect of Paul's testimony that is noteworthy is the phrase on the third day he says Jesus was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures I think that this probably points to the discovery of the empty tomb now very briefly summarize the point is that since no one actually witnessed Jesus of Nazareth get up and walk out of the tomb why did Christians come to date it on the third day why not on the tenth day or on the seventh day well I think the most probable answer is that they did so because this was the day of the discovery of the empty tomb by Jesus women followers and therefore the resurrection itself naturally came to be dated on the third day and thus in this extremely early oral tradition handed on by Paul we have very early evidence for the existence of Jesus empty tomb thirdly the empty tomb story is part of the pre Markin passion story and is therefore very old the empty tomb story was probably the end of mark's passion narrative that is the narrative of jesus suffering and death now mark didn't simply write this passion narrative himself rather most scholars believe that Mark had sources for the passion story which he employed in writing his gospel now since Mark is already the earliest of the four Gospels that means that this passion source goes even further back toward the events that it describes in fact according to the German commentator Woodall speche it is an incredibly early source Pesche produces two lines of evidence in support of this conclusion first he notes that Paul's account of Jesus Last Supper which Paul hands on in first Corinthians chapter 11 verses 23 to 25 presupposes the account in the Gospel of Mark that is to say the account of the Supper in the Gospel of Mark is even more primitive a tradition even earlier a tradition than the one that Paul hands on in first Corinthians chapter 11 now since we've already seen that Paul's traditions are incredibly ancient that means that this marking source must be even earlier secondly pêche notes that the pre Markin passion source never refers to the high priest by name it's as if I were to say the president is hosting a dinner at the White House and everybody would know whom I was referring to namely the man that is currently in office similarly the pre mark and passion story never refers to Caiaphas by name but simply calls him the high priest as though he were still in power now since Caiaphas held office from AD 18 to ad 37 that means at the very latest this pre mark and passion source must come from within seven years after Jesus crucifixion this source this goes back to within the very first few years after Jesus death and is therefore a very ancient and reliable source of historical information number four the story itself is simple and lacks any signs of legendary development the empty tomb story as we find it in Mark's Gospel is uncolored by theological or apologetic elimb bella shman sore motifs that would be characteristic of a later legendary account now to give you an idea of what this account is like let me simply read the account in the Gospel of Mark of the discovery of the empty tomb mark chapter 16 verses 1 to 8 now when the Sabbath was passed Mary Magdalene Mary the mother of James and Salome bought spices that they might come and anoint him very early in the morning on the first day of the week they came to the tomb when the Sun had risen and they said among selves who will roll away the stone from the door of the tomb for us but when they looked up they saw that the stone had been rolled away for it was very large and entering the tomb they saw a young man clothed in a long white robe sitting on the right side and they were alarmed but he said to them do not be alarmed you seek Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified He is risen he is not here see the place where they laid him but go tell his disciples and Peter that he is going before you to Galilee there you will see him as he said to you so they went out quickly and fled from the tomb for they trembled and were amazed and they said nothing to anyone for they were afraid now perhaps the most forceful way to appreciate the simplicity of this account is by comparing it with the accounts of the empty tomb found in the apocryphal Gospels of the second century these are Gospels which arose one hundred two hundred three hundred years after the events forged under the apostles names and these do contain all sorts of legendary fictions about Jesus of Nazareth for example in the so called gospel of Peter a forgery from the second half of the second century after Christ a voice rings out from heaven during the night and the stone over the door of the tomb rolls back by itself from the door then three men are seen descending a rather two men are seen descending out of heaven and entering into the tomb then three men come out of the tomb two of the men supporting the third man the heads of the two men stretch up to the clouds but the head of the third man over passes the clouds then a cross comes out of the tomb and the voice from heaven asks hast thou preached to them that sleep and the cross answers yay now the are how real legends look you see they're embellished with all sorts of theological and apologetic emotive motifs which are conspicuously lacking from the marking account which is stark by comparison in its simplicity number five the tomb was probably discovered empty by women now to appreciate this point you need to understand two things about the role of women in 1st century Jewish society first of all women occupied a low rung on the Jewish social ladder this is evident in such rabbinic expressions as the following sooner let the words of the law be burnt than delivered to women or again blessed is he whose children are male but woe to him whose children are female quite frankly women were second-class citizens in first century Jewish society secondly the testimony of women was regarded as so worthless that according to Josephus they were not even permitted to serve as legal witnesses in a Jewish court of law if a man were caught red-handed by a group of women committing a crime he could not be convicted on the basis of their testimony because the witness of a woman was regarded as so unreliable that it wouldn't even be admitted into court now in light of these two facts how remarkable must it seen that it is women who are the discoverers of Jesus empty tomb any later legendary account would certainly have made male disciples like Peter and John discover the empty tomb the fact that it is women whose testimony was worthless rather than men who are the chief witnesses to the fact of Jesus empty tomb is most plausibly explained by the fact that like it or not they were the discoverers of the empty tomb and the Gospels accurately record what for them was a somewhat awkward and embarrassing fact number six the earliest Jewish polemic presupposes the empty tomb in the 28th chapter of Matthew's Gospel we find the Christian attempt to refute the earliest Jewish polemic against the disciples proclamation of the resurrection now what were Jews saying in response to the disciples Proclamation he has risen from the dead that his body still lay in the tomb that these men were full of new wine no they were saying the disciples came and stole away his body now think about that for a minute the disciples came and stole away his body the earliest Jewish polemic did not deny the fact of the empty tomb but rather embroiled itself in a hopeless dispute in trying to explain away why the body was missing so that the earliest Jewish response to the proclamation of the Resurrection was itself an attempt to explain why the tomb was empty and thus we have evidence for the historicity of the empty tomb of Jesus which is absolutely top drawer because it comes not from the Christian believers but from the very opponents of the early Christian movement themselves now I could go on but I think probably enough has been said to indicate why in the judgment of contemporary scholarship the empty tomb of Jesus belongs to the historical portrait of Jesus of Nazareth according to Jakob Cramer who is 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 so it is today widely recognized that the empty tomb of Jesus is a history Oracle fact as d-h van Dahlen has pointed out it is extremely difficult to object to the empty tomb on historical grounds those who deny it he says do so on the basis of theological or philosophical assumptions but assumptions may simply have to be changed in light of the historical facts finally we can turn to that third body of evidence supporting the resurrection the very origin of the Christian movement itself even the most skeptical New Testament critics admit that the earliest disciples at least believed that God had raised Jesus of Nazareth from the dead in fact they pinned nearly everything on it without belief in Jesus resurrection Christianity could never have come into being the crucifixion would have remained the final tragedy in the hapless life of the Prophet from Nazareth the origin of the Christian movement hinges upon the belief of these earliest disciples that Jesus had risen from the dead but the question now inevitably arises how does one explain the origin of that outlandish belief as are each fuller urges even the most skeptical critic must posit some mysterious X to get the movement going but the question is what was that X well if you deny that that mysterious factor was in fact the resurrection of Jesus from the dead then you've got to explain the origin of the disciples belief in his resurrection as the result either of Jewish influences on them pagan influences on them or Christian influences on them now clearly it cannot have been the result of Christian influences for the simple reason that there wasn't any Christianity yet since the belief in Jesus resurrection lay at the foundation of the Christian movement it cannot be explained as a later creation or retro jetson of that movement but what about pagan influences well back around the turn of the 19th to 20th centuries scholars in the history of religions ransacked the literature of ancient pagan mythology in the attempt to find various parallels to Christian beliefs in pagan myths and in some cases they actually thought to explain the origin of these Christian beliefs on the basis of these pagan influences in particular belief in Jesus resurrection was thought to be paralleled and perhaps caused by pagan myths about dying and rising gods like Osiris or Tammuz or Adonis the movement soon collapsed however and was almost universally given up among new testament scholars principally for two reasons number one upon closer examination it turned out that the parallels were spurious in fact there is nothing in pagan mythology that is analogous to the Jewish belief in resurrection from the dead or to Jesus resurrection in particular myths of dying and rising gods in pagan mythology are simply symbols of the crop cycle as the crops die in the dry season and then come back to life in the rainy season and there's no parallel at all to the notion of a historical individual who dies and then is brought back to life again but secondly in any case there was no causal connection between these myths and the earliest disciples of Jesus Jews were aware of these pagan myths of dying and rising gods and they found them abhorrent and therefore these myths could make no progress at all in 1st century Palestine we find no trace in 1st century Palestine of cults of dying and rising gods these do not appear until the time in the Emperor Hadrian in the second century after Christ and thus in the words of Hans graça a skeptical New Testament critic it is actually unthinkable that the earliest disciples could have come to believe that Jesus was risen from the dead because they had heard the myths of dying and rising crop deities and therefore the resurrection belief on the part of the earliest disciples cannot be plausibly explained away as a result of pagan influences but then what about Jewish influences well in order to examine this we need to back up for a moment and take a look at what Jewish belief in the resurrection was in the Old Testament the Jewish belief in the resurrection of the Dead is attested in three places Ezekiel chapter 37 Isaiah chapter 26 and verse 19 and Daniel chapter 12 and verse 2 during the time between the Old Testament and the New Testament the belief in the resurrection of the Dead became a widespread Jewish belief during Jesus own day it was accepted by the sect called the Pharisees although it was still rejected by the sect called the Sadducees and it's interesting to note that on this score Jesus actually cited with the Pharisees against the Sadducees in affirming the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead so the Jewish idea of resurrection from the dead was itself nothing new but the Jewish conception of resurrection from the dead differed from Jesus resurrection in two fundamental respects in Jewish thought the resurrection always number one occurred after the end of the world never within history it was a resurrection of the dead at the end of the world for purposes of judgment and then going to heaven or hell secondly it always concerned all the people all the dead or all the persons of Israel never an isolated individual in contre distinction to Jesus resurrection was both within history and of an isolated individual person according to yaki mera Mia's and I quote ancient Judaism did not know of an anticipated resurrection as an event of history nowhere does one find in the literature anything comparable to the resurrection of Jesus certainly revivification z' of the dead were known but these always concerned resuscitations the return to the earthly life in no place in the late Judaic literature does it concern a resurrection to glory as an event of history the disciples therefore confronted with Jesus crucifixion and death could only have looked forward to the resurrection at the final day at the end of the world and would perhaps have kept their masters to him as a shrine where his bones might reside until the resurrection on the Judgment Day when they and all the righteous debt of Israel could be reunited in the kingdom of God but they wouldn't have come to believe the unjú ish and outlandish idea that he was already risen from the dead according to Professor CFT mol of Cambridge University we have here a belief which nothing in terms of prior historical influences can account for professor mol points out that we have a situation here in which a large number of people held tenaciously to this belief which cannot be accounted for in terms of the Old Testament or the Pharisees and that these people held on to this belief until they were finally expelled from the synagogue professor mole asks if the coming into existence of the Nazarenes a phenomenon undeniably attested by the New Testament rips a great hole in history a hole the size and shape of the resurrection what does the secular historian propose to stop it up with the birth and rapid rise of the Christian Church remain an unsolved enigma for any historian who refuses to take seriously the only explanation offered by the church itself the mysterious ex is still missing so the question is how then do you best explain these three independently attested facts taken together these three great historical facts the resurrection appearances the discovery of the empty tomb the origin of the disciples belief in Jesus resurrection all seem to point to the historical fact of Jesus resurrection as the most plausible explanation but of course there have been other explanations proffered to account for the resurrection appearances empty tomb and origin of the Christian faith down through history but in the judgment of contemporary scholarship none of these has succeeded in providing a plausible account of the facts of the case and I think this can be seen by just a very rapid review of the principal explanations that have been offered first the so-called conspiracy theory according to the conspiracy theory the disciples stole Jesus corpse and then lied about the resurrection appearances this theory characterized the earliest Jewish anti-christian polemic as we've seen and it was revived by the deists in the 18th century in England and then in Europe today however the theory has been universally rejected by critical scholars and survives only in sensational popular literature or in former propaganda from behind the iron curtain to name just two considerations which were decisive against it number one it is morally impossible to indict the disciples of Jesus with such a crime whatever their imperfections they were certainly good and earnest men and women and not imposters and hoaxers no one who reads the New Testament unprejudiced Li can doubt that these people sincerely believe the truth of this message that they proclaimed and were willing to die for but secondly the theory is quite anachronistic the conspiracy theory really cannot take seriously what a catastrophe the crucifixion was for any faith that the disciples had entertained in Jesus of Nazareth it is guilty of looking at the crucifixion through the lenses of Christian history and belief in the resurrection rather than through the lenses of first century Palestinian Jews messianic movements were common in the centuries for and after Jesus and the Romans always dealt with these messianic movements in the same way they crucified the would-be Messiah and when your favorite Messiah got crucified you basically had two choices either you went home or you got yourself a new Messiah but in no case do we have any movement saying that the crucified Messiah was in fact the Messiah after all much less that God had raised him from the dead this is simply unparalleled in Judaism for Jewish messianic expectations Messiah was supposed to restore the throne of David in Jerusalem and throw off the yoke of Israel's enemies not be humiliatingly executed by them as a criminal and the idea that Messiah was then to be raised from the dead was simply unknown in Judaism hence to try to explain the empty tomb and resurrection appearances by some sort of a conspiracy theory simply seems out of the question secondly the apparent death theory according to this theory Jesus did not really die on the cross but he was taken down alive and placed in the tomb where he revived and somehow escaped to convince the disciples that he had risen from the dead this apparent death theory was championed by late 18th early 19th century German rationalist and unfortunately was even embraced by the father of modern theology F de Schleiermacher today however the theory has been virtually entirely given up and I think it's one of the virtues of Mel Gibson's movie that anyone who has seen that film and the suffering that Jesus of Nazareth endured would realize the patent absurdity of the apparent death Theory to name just a couple of points against it number one it would have been virtually medically impossible for Jesus to have survived the rigors of his torture and crucifixion much less not to have died almost immediately of exposure when placed in the tomb but secondly the theory is explanatorily deficient in any case since a half-dead Jesus bleeding from open wounds and desperately in need of bandaging and medical attention would hardly have elicited in the disciples the worship of him as the risen Lord and the Conqueror of death and these reasons alone I think make the apparent death Theory untenable a third theory was the hallucination theory according to this theory the disciples projected hallucinations of Jesus after his death from which they mistakenly inferred his resurrection the hallucination theory became popular during the 19th century and carried over in the first part of the 20th century as well but again there are good grounds for rejecting this hypothesis first of all it is psychologically implausible to posit such a chain of hallucinations hallucinations are usually associated with either mental illness or substance abuse but in the disciples case the prior psychobiological preparation appears to be lacking the disciples had no expectation of seeing Jesus alive again all they could do would be wait until the resurrection at the end of the world to be reunited with him in the kingdom of God there were no grounds leading them to hallucinate Jesus alive from the dead and the frequency and the variety of the circumstances belied the hallucination theory there is nothing in the case books of hallucinatory experiences in psychology parallel to the resurrection appearances Jesus was not seen merely once but many times not just by one person but by many persons not just by individuals but by groups of people not just at one locale and under one circumstance but at many different locales and under a variety of circumstances not by believers only but also by skeptics unbelievers and even enemies the hallucination hypothesis simply can't be stretched to accommodate this kind of diversity secondly hallucinations if they had occurred would not have in any case led to belief in Jesus resurrection you see us projections of your own mind hallucinations cannot contain anything that is not already in your mind but we've seen that the Jewish conception of resurrection from the dead differed from Jesus resurrection in two fundamental respects given their typical Jewish frame of thought the disciples were they to hallucinate visions of Jesus would have projected visions of Jesus glorified in Abraham's bosom in paradise where the Jews believed the righteous dead went to await the resurrection at the end of the world and thus hallucinations would not have elicited belief in Jesus resurrection which ran solidly contrary to modes of Jewish thinking but it most would have led to belief that Jesus had been assumed or translated into heaven whence he appeared to them on the model of certain Old Testament figures like Enoch and Elijah and thus the hallucination hypothesis is simply explanatorily inadequate when it comes to the disciples belief in jesus resurrection from the dead finally number three nor can loosen ations account for the explanation of all of the evidence they're offered as an explanation of the post-mortem appearances of Jesus but you see they leave the empty tomb of Jesus unexplained and therefore they fail as a complete and satisfactory answer in order to explain the full range of the evidence you have to conjoin to the hallucination hypothesis and independent hypothesis in order to explain away the empty tomb by contrast the resurrection hypothesis has a broader explanatory scope and is therefore a preferable explanation thus none of the previous counter explanations have succeeded in explaining the evidence as plausibly as the resurrection hypothesis itself now this puts the skeptical critic in a somewhat desperate situation to illustrate a few years ago I had a debate at the University of California Irvine on the resurrection of Jesus with a professor who had written his doctoral dissertation on the evidence for the resurrection now he was thoroughly familiar with the evidence and he could not deny the facts of the post-mortem appearances the discovery of Jesus empty tomb or the origin of the disciples belief in Jesus resurrection and so his only recourse was to come up with some alternative explanation of these three facts and so he argued that Jesus of Nazareth must have had an unknown identical twin brother who was separated from him at birth unknown to Mary and Joseph who came back to Jerusalem just at the time of the crucifixion stole Jesus body the tomb and presented himself alive to the disciples who mistakenly inferred that Jesus was risen from the dead now I'm not going to go into how I went about refuting this theory but I think that it's illustrative because it shows to what desperate lengths skepticism must go in order to explain away the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus you might say to me then we'll what do sceptical scholars say to explain the resurrection appearances the empty tomb in the origin of the Christian faith well as a matter of fact they don't say anything modern scholarship recognizes no plausible naturalistic explanation of these three facts those who refuse to accept the resurrection as a fact of history are simply self confessedly left with no explanation at all so in conclusion then these three independently established facts the post-mortem appearances of Jesus the discovery of his empty tomb the very origin of the disciples belief in Jesus resurrection all seemed to point unavoidably to one marvelous conclusion that God raised Jesus of Nazareth from the dead today I think the rational man can hardly be blamed if he believes that on that first Easter morning a divine miracle has occurred yes okay thank you for that presentation dr. Craig we're now going to open up the room floor for questions and so just to reinforce try to keep your questions straightforward and ask questions and you're going to need to use the mic because we are filming it and if you could just be brief and direct them towards doctor you mentioned John Dominic Crossan and he apparently believes in some sort of a resurrection but I my understanding that he denies a physical bodily resurrection and I wondered if you could elaborate on what type of resurrection he is in fact positing and then comment on how that type of resurrection is cannot be squared with orthodoxy for the question is this mic working alright thank you for the question I've dialogue personally with John Dominic Crossan on this and our dialogue has been published in the form of a little book called will the real Jesus please stand up so if you would like to look at that further I commend it to you one of the frustrations that I have with modern theologians is the theological double-talk that they engage in my philosopher friends who are atheists are straight up with you they don't believe in God they say so they don't believe in the resurrection of Jesus they say it didn't happen but modern theologians are disingenuous to the point of duplicity I think I know that's harsh but I think it's true they use these words but so evacuate them of any meaning that in fact they don't really believe in the affirmations that they state for example you're absolutely right that cross and we'll say things like I believe in the resurrection of Jesus and so forth but he really doesn't his view is that after the crucifixion the body of Jesus was taken down probably by the Roman soldiers and simply thrown into a shallow dirt grave reserved for criminals where it either rotted away or was dug up and eaten by wild dogs and nothing happened to the corpse of Jesus in terms of it coming back to life or any such thing for Crossin the resurrection of Jesus means that the earliest disciples or Christian community when they met together in worship sensed the presence of Jesus with them they sense that somehow he was there in spirit and they expressed this by saying he has risen from the dead so that they use language that was frankly it was totally unjú ish I mean that this is not the way a Jew would would speak but this is what cross and thinks is that they expressed their their feeling of Jesus presence by saying he has risen from the dead and that's how belief in Jesus resurrection originated it really originally didn't mean anything happened to the corpse that was thrown in the ground it just meant that Jesus spiritual presence continued on with the disciples the Crossan himself doesn't believe in the resurrection of Jesus in any literal sense of the word or in any Jewish sense of the word a Jew as I indicated in the talk would not say anything of that sort that these modern theologians say they would say he didn't rise from the dead but his memory continues on or we remember Jesus or something but not that he was raised from the dead and the reason that Crossan doesn't believe in these events as events of history is because he rejects the possibility of miracles he doesn't believe in a personal God who can intervene in history and do things that the laws of nature themselves cannot accomplish I think the key moment in our dialogue that I referred to came when during the discussion time during the Q&A I said two Crossin on your view does did God exist during the Jurassic age when no human beings were around and he said that's a meaningless question and I said no surely that's a meaningful question during the Jurassic period when there were no human beings alive was there a being who was the creator and the sustainer of the universe and he said well I guess I would have to say no well what became very obvious is that for crossing god is just sort of an interpretive framework that the individual believer puts on reality but there isn't any objective mind independent entity out there who is the creator and sustainer of the universe he didn't exist when there were no human beings because he is an imaginative or interpretive construct of believers the way they view reality and put it on the universe so in fact Crossan is an atheist he's literally an atheist he doesn't believe that God exists and therefore miracles are impossible and therefore things like the resurrection the virgin birth the miracles of Jesus go out the window before you even sit down at the table to look at the evidence so the problem here is not a lot of historical evidence as d-h van Dahlen says it is the theological or philosophical assumptions which are determining the conclusions in a case like this so to answer your final question I think crossings views though he uses the language of Orthodoxy are completely unorthodox and really he's an atheist when you read the account of Mark's passion yes stopped right before marks of account of appearances of Jesus it's been theorized and taught at this school that um that the appearance section of mark was later added right with the early manuscripts of Mark don't have it included correct and I was wondering how that affects the pre marking source and the validity of those okay well it you're quite correct and your professors are correct and telling you that and that's why I didn't read the rest because that's not part of the original source it's not part of the original manuscript so it doesn't affect the original manuscript in any way it just means that later on people took the other Gospels and compiled a sort of composite of the various appearance stories and tacked them on to the end of marks empty tomb story but through textual criticism we now know that those manuscripts were as I say later additions and that the original pre marking or the original marking story as well as the pre mark and Passion source simply ends with the empty tomb story now the unresolved question is this could there originally have been more to Mark's sixteenth chapter that has been lost there's no manuscript evidence of this but is it possible that in fact the original Gospel of Mark did have some appearance narratives in it but that these were somehow lost before copies could be made or something of that sort there are some scholars who think so but I think probably most scholars would say in the absence of any evidence for that that's just conjecture and therefore we should assume that mark simply ends with verse eight first of all thank you for incredibly lucid presentation which that was thrilling I have I'm curious about something because I've never heard anybody teach on this but I wonder how people in the Sanhedrin members the Sanhedrin at the time of Christ might have interpreted or thought about passages in the Old Testament such as thou shalt not leave a soul in Hell neither shalt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption especially the word corruption just curious because I've never heard of teaching on it as I think about it and after your presentation it really you know comes a question for me I mean think of all the times you sat in Sunday school and in church and I've never heard that at all this is a related to my point that I made a couple of times that there aren't in the Old Testament these clear motifs are anticipations of the resurrection of Jesus that would lead a first century Jew with no knowledge of the resurrection to think that on the basis of the Old Testament Jesus would be risen from the dead these passages like Psalm 16:10 that you quote or Jonah being in the whale for three days and three nights and then belched out on the land alive or Hosea six to where it says after three days he will raise us up can only be seen as anticipate Ori of Jesus resurrection when viewed in hindsight it's only after the resurrection occurs that the early Christians can then go back to the Old Testament with that in mind looking for verses that then can be interpreted in that light but when read by Jews prior to the resurrection no one would have read those passages as predicting resurrection of the Messiah or anything of that sort so that's one of the the strengths I think of the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus is that it's something that's so unexpected so on Jewish that it can't be plausibly explained as concocted or inferred on the basis of these Old Testament motifs and even as I say someone like Crossan recognizes that yes um I was wondering it's also a question and just out of curiosity if there would be some reference or text you would recommend on on the would-be messiahs that came before Christ shortly in that time what what totally taking listen what is going on well I think you might take a look at MT Wright's book called the resurrection of the Son of God Wright's book is this massive 800 page study of the resurrection that came out just last summer it's the most thorough historical examination of this topic in English well really in any language now and in there he will give references to these messianic movements that occur in the century before and after Jesus and compare them with the Jesus Movement right is especially strong on this in fact I think his whole book can be seen as the most developed account of my third point namely the very origin of the disciples belief in jesus resurrection Wright's book I think is really the most thorough examination of that question how did these early Jews come to believe something like that God had raised Jesus from the dead so completely contrary to the religion in which they had been raised in the beliefs that they accepted and there you'll get a lot of these references and primary sources actually quoted right there so look at auntie Wright's book the resurrection of the Son of God for some of those sources I want to just make a little comment myself here and that is you said a - first century Jews the interpretation of these Old Testament passages it's still to 20th century Jews the same thing we had a dialogue with our church and Bonet briefed and on the book of Isaiah and they see only the first level the first layer of Isaiah that it was for those people at that time and don't see all the enriching labor layers that we look back using the resurrection right so twenty centuries of Jews still believe the same thing yeah yeah okay this hi this question is regarding your third point yes I just want to throw out a hypothesis that I personally don't believe in please it's a possible objection that could be raised now true there was no Christian belief that could serve as a template for the subsequent believe in the resurrection but what about the idea that a possibility that the growing body of beliefs that were you know based on Jesus's teaching why he was on earth and for example like I'm thinking of the account in John 11 where Jesus is Jesus raised Lazarus mm-hmm and you know the sister of Lazarus expresses the Jewish belief you know when he says you keep your brother will rise well I believe that he will rise at the last day right but he raises Lazarus Jesus raises Lazarus there in history so it couldn't that's event serve as sort of a precedent that to change their conceptual framework well maybe Jesus has okay this is this is a very good question I'm glad you've raised it because it's important to see the distinction between what happened to Lazarus and what happened to Jesus remember the quotation from yaki mera meais that I read where he said there's nothing parallel to the resurrection of Jesus in late Judaic literature he says certainly revivification zuv the dead were known but these always concerned a return to the earthly life Lazarus you see would die again the Daughter of Jairus that Jesus raised from the dead would die again the widow of nain 's son would die again in the case of the resurrection of Jesus what you have is a resurrection to glory and immortality in advance of the end of the world within history so that these mere revivification are not in Jewish thinking the same thing as a bona fide resurrection from the dead to glory and immortality and so they don't actually offer parallels or anticipations of Jesus resurrection but the second thing ironically that needs to be said is that most New Testament historians would be rather skeptical the historicity of Lazarus's resurrection you see it's only in the Gospel of John which is one of the later Gospels and so you're playing scholarly pick and choose if you deny the resurrection of Jesus but believe in the revivification of Lazarus because then you're accepting an event that is less well attested while rejecting an event which is better attested so that's part of the problem here you you can't have it both ways if you're going to accept the evidence for the resurrection of Lazarus then you've got to accept the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus because the evidence for the latter is so much stronger than the evidence for the former I I'd like to get your take on the the Jesus Seminar this seems to have been the impetus behind a lot of these specials on the last days of Jesus the rise of Christianity and so on these guys seem to have really good PR but you know how do they fit into the grand scheme of theology both in America and Europe who are these guys okay thank you very much for that question as well the Jesus Seminar represents the radical left-wing fringe of contemporary New Testament scholars they claim to have about 200 members now that in itself alone would be small because the annual attendance that say the Society of biblical literature convention each year is around eight to ten thousand and the Jesus Seminar claims 200 members but in fact even those 200 members when you look at it more closely includes anybody that in any way has a connection with the Seminar such as even being on a mailing list most of the members of the seminar have relatively poor credentials they teach at community colleges or junior colleges some of them have published nothing in the field of New Testament studies there are probably about fourteen of them that would represent really good first-rate New Testament scholars people like Krauss and funk bored and some of the others but these the viewpoints that they represent do represent a very radical fringe element which is rejected by the majority of New Testament scholars that would meet at for example a society of biblical literature meeting in addition to that I would say that it they are honest at least about their presuppositions in their edition of the five Gospels they state some of their presuppositions and they state the number one presupposition underlying their work is scientific naturalism that is to say that miracles are impossible they say that is no longer possible to believe in the Christ of creed and Dogma once you have seen the heavens through Galileo's telescope so the the whole thing again is built into the philosophical presuppositions that miracles are impossible and that a supernatural Christ is out of the question and therefore naturally you wind up with this human view of Jesus who never made any radical claims didn't anticipate the the coming of the kingdom of God and his person or any of those things that most critical scholars would affirm about him if you'd like to see a good critique of the Jesus Seminar let me mention two books one is a book by Luke Timothy Johnson who is a New Testament scholar at Emory University who is not himself an evangelical or a conservative he would be a kind of middle-of-the-road moderate sort of mainstream New Testament scholar and this book the real Jesus is a caustic denunciation of the Jesus Seminar and their claim to speak as the voice of scholarship he just really really rakes them over the coals he says the whole thing is motivated by a kind of social agenda on the part of Robert funk the founder of the seminar to undermine the view of Jesus that is prevalent in our culture and replace it with this more politically correct humanistic Jesus that the Jesus Seminar wants to happen he sees it basically is not disinterested scholarship but as an overtly social agenda driven movement so that's the real Jesus by Luke Timothy Johnson for a more conservative critique from a conservative end you might look at the book Jesus under fire edited by JP Moreland and Michael Wilkins and it has a wonderful collection of essays from various scholars on things like what did Jesus say what did Jesus do there's an opening chapter on your question who is the Jesus Seminar who are these men that are in it I have a chapter in there on John Dominic Crossan and the resurrection of Jesus where I go into more detail about some of the things I've said here and it's very very fine critique I think of the Jesus Seminar so those would be two resources if you're interested yeah thank you dr. Craig now you started your presentation today by saying you know how we are to understand Jesus Christ we must look at what happened after the resurrection so when you read the Gospels also we see a lot of stories of Christ's life before his crucifixion but when it comes you know after the resurrection we see we don't see much no written text about that and they seem to almost end abruptly as Gibson's movie did after they write seems like there's you know you presented all this right now why why don't we why don't we see much things written about that you know Christ's last days in that sense what did he do what do we know yeah and and you presented you know did he go I mean do we have any books or any texts or anything like that and why is that such well let me first make a slight correction in what you said in your question what I said in my opening statement was that what is key to unlocking Jesus identity is what happened to him after his death not after his resurrection that is what happened to him after his death that is to say that he was raised from the dead I think is as pamandmark said the divine vindicate of the man who had been crucified as a blasphemer and it shows that he was not a blasphemer after all that the god he had allegedly blaspheme has committed himself to Jesus and has vindicated him over his enemies and that I think is enough to show that Jesus was who he claimed to be and to put a sort of divine imprimatur on Jesus teachings and personal claims but in addition to that I guess I don't feel like we have so little about Jesus after his death when you read the various resurrection appearance stories in the Gospels because you you have a rather lengthy series of appearances that they are described there you get a good idea of what Jesus body was like in its glorified form so when you think about the resurrection this isn't something that you anticipate having a whole lot of information about to begin with so I guess my reaction is rather one of surprised that we would have so much information about this I suppose the reason that we don't have more would be that the very nature of the Resurrection appearances were that they were transitory in nature it wasn't as though Jesus came back and then abode with his disciples in the former way that he abode with them but rather he would appear during a brief interval and then it would be over and so these appearances I think had a kind of mystical and numinous quality about them that made the mysterious maybe even a little hair-raising especially at first and therefore they are by their very nature transitory brief and so forth rather than having a kind of extended narrative as though Jesus were staying with them Luke says that these resurrection appearances continued over a period of about 40 days but they weren't continuous during those 40 days that that would be a 40 day period that would be punctuated by these appearances so I guess I think that by the nature of the case one wouldn't have an extended narrative and it's rather remarkable that we do have what we do yes yes I'm wondering if you could respond to the Muslim belief that Jesus actually wasn't crucified at all okay I've made it appear to be the case and therefore his resurrection appearance is what I'm actually be resurrection appearances yes in my theological work at the University of Munich although I wrote on the resurrection of Jesus my side area of expertise on which I was examined was Islam and I never dreamt that this would be something on which I would be speaking someday but in the aftermath of 9/11 and our heightened awareness of Islam in the world I've been called upon more and more to address these kinds of questions and so I welcome this question is a very interesting one in my dialogue with Muslim theologians when I I've had events on university campuses with them this is one of the points that I press them very hard on because the crucifixion of Jesus is in the words of Robert funk the founder of the Jesus Seminar the one indisputable fact about Jesus of Nazareth that everybody recognizes and so I find it ironic that of all the facts that the curtain or that Mohammed would have denied about Jesus would be the one indisputable fact that everybody recognizes about Jesus of Nazareth namely that he was executed by crucifixion and the reasons for that is that we have a multitude of sources independent sources in the New Testament of the test to this we have extra biblical sources in Tacitus and Josephus that attest to this also it passes the criterion of embarrassment that is to say it isn't it is something that the early church would never have invented for its would-be Messiah had it not in fact been true it was something the early church had to overcome rather than invent so they're very very good grounds historically for believing that Jesus was executed by Roman crucifixion and yet the Quran denies this without a shred of historic ground for doing so the Quran was written by a man six hundred years after the event who had no independent source of historical information about Jesus of Nazareth who simply received and codified in the Quran tales of Jesus that were found in the apocryphal Gospels like the infancy Gospel of Thomas as well as in the New Testament or that were just circulated in the Arabian Peninsula and so the the Quran contains at its heart an egregious historical error namely that Jesus of Nazareth was not crucified and in my debates with Muslim theologians on this perhaps the most interesting response that I've received so far was the claim by Shabbir Ali who is a Canadian Muslim apologist he is willing to agree that Jesus was in fact crucified which really compromises the Quran because the Quran says they did not crucify him but Ali is willing to grant that he was crucified but he says he wasn't actually killed he least subscribes to the apparent death theory and he thinks that they took him down alive from the cross placed him in the tomb and before he could die in the tomb Allah assumed him into heaven so he will go you know like 90% of the way toward the Christian view but then at the last minute he has a sort of body-snatching view of Jesus where God takes him away I pointed out to shibir in the debate that what this means is that Allah then deceived one-third of the world's population by foisting Christianity upon the world by by snatching away the body of Jesus so the disciples had find the empty tomb see these appearances and think he's risen from the dead and thereby allows deceive most of the world into believing in Christianity which is is surely implausible and he didn't have a good response to that so I think this is a really major problem for the the Quran is its historical portrait of Jesus is so fundamentally at its heart inaccurate yeah although we don't have many stories or accounts of post-resurrection appearances of Jesus there is one account of his meeting with his disciples on the road to Emmaus could you take us on a walk down that road and give us a picture of what Jesus might have told them connecting his death his resurrection his life who he was with the Old Testament all right in this Emmaus Road story we have a tale here of a very early appearance of Jesus the there are two persons it may be a man and his wife walking back to a village of Emmaus which has not been positively identified but was probably a village within six or seven miles of Jerusalem they're walking back to Emmaus and all of a sudden a stranger comes alongside and begins to walk with them and he asked them why they look downcast and sad and they say haven't you heard what's happened and then they relate the passion story of Jesus and talk about how Jesus of Nazareth was a man attested by wonders and so forth and many of us had hoped that he would be the Messiah but now he's been put to death and they're walking back dejected to Emmaus but they say a very strange thing has happened some of the women visited his tomb and found it empty and and others went and checked out the woman's report but they didn't see him and so they don't have any faith in his resurrection and then the stranger begins to say to them you're your men of little faith you're slow of heart to believe and he begins to expound to them these Old Testament passages to show them that the Messiah would have to suffer and die in order to enter into his glory and he probably unfolded scriptures like the one that was mentioned here Psalm 16:10 Psalm 22 where the the psalmist writes my God my God why have you forsaken me the very words that Jesus would pray on the cross and describes the the horrors of what sounds like crucifixion he probably opened isaiah 53:2 these men and shared with them about the suffering servant predicted by Isaiah and showed them how the Messiah in fact would have to suffer and die in order to be glorified in other words the the stranger shows them that when read in retrospect they could see in fact what they had not been anticipating or accustomed to see namely this idea of a messiah who would suffer and die and they asked the stranger then to sup with them because the evening or the afternoon is far gone and he agrees to do so and as they set a table and he begins to break the bread and assumes the place of the household master by breaking the bread it says suddenly the scales fall from their eyes and they recognize him they recognize that it's Jesus and as soon as they recognize him he vanishes out of their sight and they then grabbed their things and that very same evening they rush back to Jerusalem excited that they have seen him and tell and they find the twelve disciples gathered in the upper room who in the meantime have have heard from Peter that Peter is also seeing Jesus alive and they say the Lord is risen indeed he has appeared to Simon and that then the people from the Emmaus tell him what they have seen and experienced and the the story ends by them saying didn't our hearts burn within us as he opened to us the scriptures and explained to us what the Christ would be like and so this is a story of a resurrection appearances that is one of the most lovely in the Gospels but also incorporates I think a lot of the lessons that the early church would learn about the person of Jesus and and his identity as the Messiah and the suffering servant predicted by Isaiah for more information about the veritas forum including additional recordings and a calendar of upcoming events please visit our website at Veritas org

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Published: Mon Nov 21 2011