William Lane Craig on the Historical Jesus - Interview 2001

is it historically probable to look at the New Testament documents and be open to the miraculous showing up there I think that a person who turns to the New Testament documents to assess the credibility of the portrait of Jesus that they paint for us has to be open to the possibility of a miraculous Jesus emerging otherwise he begs the question if you come to these documents with the presupposition of naturalism that the miraculous does not occur then your conclusions are already built into your presupposition of course what will emerge from your research is a purely human Jesus a purely naturalistic Jesus but that's not the result of the evidence that's the result of your presupposition that says that these things cannot be real these things cannot happen so if we wanted to get at the truth about Jesus of Nazareth it seems to me that short of a proof of atheism we have to be open to the possibility that God has acted in the life and Ministry of Jesus of Nazareth in miraculous ways and let the evidence speak for itself yeah so how would you advise a student or a person who is not a Christian looking at the New Testament and discovers there's a virgin birth there's Jesus walking on the water there's a resurrection from the dead how would you tell them to approach that information well methodologically I would say that you approach these narratives with an open mind that the miraculous could have actually occurred in history and then let the evidence speak for itself follow the evidence where it leads if for example you have good reason to believe that these stories are of the same form as the greco-roman myths of divine men or supernatural figures then you would have good reason to think that these stories are not historical but if they break those forms if they are not parallel to other mythological tales in ancient history if we have good reason to believe that these are historically credible accounts then you've got to be open to following the evidence where that leads then are you opening the door if the miraculous is possible for other religious accounts Book of Mormon Islam other religions oh absolutely I think that you have to be open to letting the evidence lead you to the conclusions that it points to unless as I say you have some prior proof of atheism or prior proof of a certain sort of deity in the absence of some prior proof that there is no such being as described in the Gospels or the Book of Mormon or the Quran then you've got to be willing to let the historical evidence speak for itself that's only good methodology that's being open-minded in not imposing a presuppositional grid upon the evidence before you look at it what kind of evidence is historical evidence talk about that versus mathematical certainty when historians provide hypotheses for reconstructing the past I think they're using a form of inductive inference which is called by philosophers inference to the best explanation and what this means is that you're confronted with a body of data to be explained you then establish a pool of live options for explaining that data and then on the basis of certain criteria you assess those rival explanations to determine which explanation if best would explain the data in the most plausible way and that will be the preferred historical explanation that you pick okay let's take that in terms of the resurrection okay the Christian Church all through 2000 years now has said that Jesus actually rose from the dead the disciples saw him all right but David Hume comes into our discussion here in terms of what is possible from our own experience right and everyone that's watching probably would have the same experiences as we have had namely we've gone to funerals never yet come home with the guy we went to see so our experience is all the dead people we've ever seen have stayed dead all right how in the world then can we say that somebody in history by name of Jesus actually rose from the dead even though the disciples said they saw him alive right we need pretty solid proof do we have that kind of evidence the attempt by Hume and other scientific natural ists to exclude the possibility of miraculous explanations is in effect an attempt to eliminate supernatural explanations and miraculous explanations from the pool of live options it's saying we don't even need to consider these explanations as live options because they are a priori excluded from the pool now the way in which they attempt to do that is through an argument saying that miracles contradict all of our known experience that on the basis of our experience we have certain natural laws or laws of nature and that the resurrection of Jesus is for example incompatible with these laws of nature it's widely recognized among contemporary philosophers however that Humes argument is simply fallacious there's no contradiction between affirming that dead men in general do not rise from the dead and saying that Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead those aren't contradictory statements in fact the Christian believes both the experience that would be contradictory to the statement that Jesus rose from the dead would be evidence to the exact opposite of that namely that of Nazareth did not rise from the dead but you cannot prove that Jesus of Nazareth did not rise from the dead by showing that everybody else in history has always remained in their graves those simply aren't contradictory statements so Humes argument is simply question begging if he says the universal experience contradicts the belief in miracles because he's already assuming and saying that that the evidence for miracles is false so it seems to me once again the only way that you can get at this question is to look at the evidence for and against the particular miracle in question you can't rule out a miraculous event by showing that all other events are non miraculous and character when you look at Jesus Christ and what he has said in the accounts of his life what were the statements that made him more than an ordinary man in your opinion I think that any evaluation of Jesus of Nazareth has to take into account seriously Jesus's own self-concept his own self understanding who he perceived himself to be and when we look at the things that he said and he did that reveal itself concept it turns out that this man had a radical self understanding he thought of himself as the Son of Man parking back to this quasi divine figure in the book of Daniel chapter 7 to whom all judgment and authority on earth would be given he thought that he had the ability to perform miracles and to cast out demons he thought that these exorcisms and miracles were signs of the in breaking of the kingdom of God in his own person and he thought that people's response to him would be determinative for their eternal destiny so if this man was not who he claimed to be he was the most objectionable narrow-minded sort of dogmatist and fanatic that one could imagine these are the kinds of things that we have to explore for to get at the self understanding of Jesus and Nazareth the Gospel writers say Jesus was buried all right do you think that's true it seems to me that there are four fundamental historical facts which any credible historian must account for if he's to give a tenable historical hypothesis about the fate of Jesus of Nazareth the first of these is the honorable burial of Jesus the second of these is the discovery of his empty tomb third would be the post-mortem appearances of Jesus and fourth would be the origin of the disciples belief that Jesus was risen from the dead now with respect to the first of those the burial of Jesus the majority of New Testament scholars who have written on this subject agreed that Jesus of Nazareth was buried by Joseph of Arimathea in a tomb Joseph of Arimathea is that a controversial point I was somewhat amused when Peter Jennings on the ABC special said that according to the Gospels Jesus was laid in the tomb by his mother and his friends now if the story of Jesus burial were a late developing legend that accrued over the decades in the early Christian church that is exactly the sort of pious story that one would expect to find Jesus was buried by his devoted mother and his faithful disciples but that's not in fact what the Gospels say instead what the Gospels say is that Jesus of Nazareth was laid in a tomb by this enigmatic figure Joseph of Arimathea who appears out of nowhere in the Gospels and contrary to expectation gives Jesus of Nazareth an honorable burial in a tomb moreover mark tells us that this man was a member of the Sanhedrin the very Council which had just condemned Jesus to be crucified and that Joseph singles out Jesus among the trio of men that had been crucified for special care by giving him honorable burial in a tomb rather than allowing the body to simply be dispatched into a common grave reserved for criminals this is extraordinary and requires some sort of explanation okay now why does that take precedence over say John Dominic Crossan 's theory that he was just thrown on the trash heap and kind of chewed up by the dogs the burial account of Jesus has a very strong and independent lines of evidence supporting it one of the most important is that it's multiplied attested in early sources in the New Testament where this is one of the most important criteria of historicity because if you have an early tradition that has independent attestation then it's unlikely to be the result of legend or to have been made sure and a lot of people say that it doesn't exist well we do in fact have multiple attestation of the the burial tradition for example it's mentioned in the early tradition that is handed on by Paul in 1st Corinthians chapter 15 where the third line of this formula says that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures and that he was buried and that he was raised and that he appeared and the second line of this formula refers to Jesus burial this tradition has been dated to within five years after the crucifixion of Jesus so this can't be written off of some sort of a legendary tale that accrued over the decades and eventually came to be written down on the Gospels moreover when you compare this formula to the Gospel accounts on the one hand and the early sermons recorded in the Acts of the Apostles on the other what you discover is that this four line tradition is an outline of the early Christian proclamation of the crucifixion the burial by joseph of arimathea in the tomb the resurrection of jesus the discovery of the empty tomb and the appearing of Jesus to various witnesses so that you have here multiple independent attestation of the burial as well as other portions of the tradition isn't that what historians what exactly that isn't that what the Jesus Seminar is saying they want yes of course Marko's board for example says that the first and most important criterion of historicity is multiple independent attestation of an early source and in the case of the burial we have some of the earliest material in the New Testament which is multiple 'ya tested in Paul in the sermons in the Acts of the Apostles in the pre mark and passion story the source of lay behind mark's gospel as well as independently in the source material used by matthew and luke and in john which are independent of mark's account so that we have not simple simply double attestation here we have quadruple and even quintuple multiple attestation of the early burial tradition for Jesus and that's why that the vast majority of New Testament scholars today regard the burial of Jesus as one of the earliest and best attested facts about the historical Jesus that we have why is it then that org and Crossin leave this out after it's fit their criteria the historical credibility of the burial account of Jesus by Joseph of Arimathea leaves skeptical critics an extremely awkward position because you see if Jesus was in fact buried by a Jewish Sanhedrin in Jerusalem as the Gospels claim that means that the location of Jesus tomb was known to both Jew and Christian alike but in that case it's impossible to imagine how a movement founded on belief in the resurrection of a dead man who had been publicly executed in Jerusalem could arise and flourish in the face of a tomb containing his corpse so that those scholars who want to deny such things as the empty tomb the resurrection appearances also find themselves forced to deny the fact of the honorable burial of Jesus despite the fact that this is one of the earliest and best attested facts about the historical Jesus and we have it it's extremely awkward for them some people say well the answer to that is that the disciples stole the body that's why the tomb was empty nobody says that anymore that is a theory that was popular in the late 17th early 18th century popularized by English deists and certain German skeptics that theory has been completely abandoned since the early 1800s no responsible scholar holds to such a thing the only place you would find this kind of explanation is either in propaganda from behind the former Iron Curtain or else in sensationalist popular literature it's it's a theory that's been dead for 200 years modern scholarship would agree that the tomb was empty somewhere after the third day these four facts the honorable burial of Jesus the discovery of his empty tomb the post-mortem appearances of Jesus and the origin of the disciples faith that God had raised Jesus from the dead represent the views of the majority of New Testament critics who have written on these subjects and I want to emphasize I'm not talking here about conservative scholars or fundamentalist I'm talking about the broad mainstream of scholarship those who deny it tend to be radical critics on the left-wing fringe of New Testament scholarship but the majority of scholars who have written on these subjects agree with the honorable burial the empty tomb the post-mortem appearances and the origin of the disciples faith in the resurrection of Jesus now specifically with regard to the empty tomb the majority of scholars who have written on this subject agree that the tomb of Jesus was probably found empty by a group of his women followers early on Sunday morning that represents the historical core of the empty tomb narrative as we find it in mark why do they find it credible the empty tomb story enjoys multiple independent lines of evidence for example as I've already indicated the burial account supports the empty tomb story if the burial account of Jesus is historically accurate then the inference that the tomb was found empty is not very far at hand because the resurrection faith could not have arisen and flourished in the face of a closed tomb secondly I think that the empty tomb story is also multiplied and independently attested in early sources it's attested in the pre-market passion source that is the source that mark used for writing his Gospels but we also have independent sources for the empty tomb in Matthew and Luke and also in John this is evident for example from the fact that Matthew has a quite different account of the empty tomb employing the idea of a guard story which Matthew did not invent out of whole cloth but which represented a tradition which Matthew received most scholars recognize the John's account of the empty tomb and the burial of Jesus is independent of the three synoptic Gospels I also think that the empty tomb is implied at least in the formula handed on by Paul in 1st Corinthians 15 when you look at the third line of that formula which says and he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures that third line corresponds to the empty tomb narrative in the Gospels and to the empty tomb in the sermons and the Acts of the Apostles so again it is a summary and outlined form of the wider story of the empty tomb now return to those scholars like those in the Jesus Seminar that would say they don't agree with that then they have to posit the fact what happened to the body again skeptical scholars have to deny that we do have these multiple sources for the empty tomb in order to deny its historicity and this leads them to extraordinary historical hypotheses for example John Dominic Crossan has to claim that the gospel of Peter which is a second century apocryphal gospel universally rejected in the early churches of forgery actually contains within it the earliest account of the passion and the resurrection of Jesus and that all four of the Gospels are based upon it and upon the Gospel of Mark which has no other source than this core of the gospel of Peter well scarcely any other historical scholar today agrees with crossing on this hypothesis it is it is extraordinary even the other fellows and the Jesus Seminar don't buy into this hypothesis along with crossing and yet these are the links that you have to go to in order to deny that we have multiple independent attestation of the burial and empty tomb accounts so in essence the evidence leaves them hanging at that point well I think the evidence leads them to extraordinarily implausible hypotheses in order to escape the conclusions to which the evidence is pointing in addition to the credibility of the burial story and the multiple independent attestation that we have in in the New Testament for the empty tomb the empty tomb story is also extremely credible in that it lacks any signs of legendary embellishment in order to appreciate this point all you have to do is to compare the mark and account of the discovery of the empty tomb with the stories found in the later apocryphal Gospels which arose in the second and third century and beyond for example in the gospel of Peter the empty tomb is described by having a voice ring out from heaven during the night two angelic beings descending out of heaven and approaching the tomb the stone over the door the tomb rolls back by itself and the two angels go into the tomb the angels then come out of the tomb of supporting Jesus of Nazareth the heads of the two angels reach up to the clouds but the head of Jesus reaches beyond the clouds then a cross comes out of the tomb following them another voice from heaven asks hast thou preached to them that sleep and the cross answers yay and all of this is observed by the Roman guards the Jewish Pharisees and leaders and a great crowd from the countryside who have come to look at the empty tomb now this is how legends look they're coloured and embellished with all sorts of theological and apologetic emotive motifs which are strikingly absent from the market account in mark there's no fulfilled prophecy no ex ssin of Jesus emerging from the tomb no word about Jesus's descent into hell no reflection on Jesus being the king or the Conqueror death the women simply come to the tomb find the stone rolled away the body missing they see an angelic vision-- saying Jesus is not there and they flee from the tomb the narrative is stark in its simplicity and this gives reason to think that we're in contact here with very primitive tradition unembellished by later theological and apologetic developments talk about the fact that it was the women that the Gospel writers said went to the tomb first another ear mark of the historical credibility of the empty tomb story is the surprising fact that the tomb was discovered empty by women now in order to appreciate why this is remarkable you need to understand two things about the role of women in 1st century Jewish society first of all women were quite frankly second-class citizens for example one later rabbinic saying says blessed is he whose children are male but woe to him whose children are female this was clearly the era of pre feminist consciousness secondly the testimony of women was regarded as so unreliable that they were not even allowed to serve as witnesses in a Jewish court of law now in light of this fact how remarkable must it seem that it is women who are the chief witnesses to and the discoverers of Jesus empty tomb any later legendary account would certainly have made male disciples say Peter and John come to the tomb first and discover it empty the fact that it is discovered empty by women whose testimony in that society was regarded as worthless is most plausibly explained by saying that like it or not they were the discoverers of the empty tomb and the Gospels record what for them was a very embarrassing and awkward fact another indication of the credibility of the empty tomb account is the fact that the very enemies of the earliest disciples presupposed the empty tomb in the 28th chapter of the Gospel of Matthew we have Matthew's attempt to refute what the earliest Jewish polemic was saying in response to the Christian proclamation of the resurrection of Jesus now what were the early Jews saying in response to this proclamation he has risen from the dead were they saying these men are full of new wine they're they're drunk or were they saying well no his corpse still lies in the tomb on the hillside know what the earliest Jewish polemic was saying was 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 response to the proclamation of the Resurrection was not to point to the occupied tomb but rather to say that the disciples had stolen the body it was itself an attempt to explain away why the body was missing so that we have here evidence from the very enemies of the earliest Christian movement in favor of the empty tomb evidences which is simply top-drawer because it comes not from the Christians but from the very opponents of the early Christian movement how about extra or non-christian sources people often ask about non-christian sources for the Gospels and I think that behind this question lies a misconception that laymen have about the New Testament that needs to be rooted out first and that is this that somehow the New Testament is a single book which is written by Christians and therefore unreliable and not credible but if there were evidence outside this book ah that would be real evidence that would be credible and this I think is just a complete misconception about what the New Testament originally was lay people need to understand that originally there was no such thing as the New Testament the New Testament wasn't assembled into a single volume until a few hundred years after the death of Jesus what there were originally was simply separate independent documents in the Greek language coming down out of the first century there were Gospels there were letters there were histories of the early church there was an apocalypse all of these independent documents in the Greek language handed down out of the first century telling this remarkable story of Jesus of Nazareth and what the church did was it collected together the earliest of these documents the most reliable of them and put them under one cover and called it the New Testament so that by the very nature of the case our earliest and most reliable sources for the life of Jesus are found in the New Testament to ask what evidence is there outside the New Testament and to discount the New Testament evidence itself is to prefer later secondary derivative sources to the earlier primary sources which is simply bad historical methodology so the question that we need to be asking is not what extra biblical sources are there for the life of Jesus although that's interesting the real question is how credible are these documents when we examine them for what they really were not inspired holy texts but simply independent manuscripts handed down to us out of the first century about this man Jesus of Nazareth and when we examined them using the ordinary canons of historical inquiry I think they come away looking pretty good as historical sources for the life of Jesus and these sources are only confirmed but not contradicted by the extra biblical sources that exist to find the difference between hallucination and vision I think we need to get some terminology straight here we're apt to be misled on the one hand there is what we might call an ordinary appearance of something that we perceive through the medium of our five senses our eyes receive a light rays or photons which go through a strike the retina communicate electrical impulse along the optic nerve and is transmitted to the brain and we see a visual appearance of that thing that would be ordinary perception in addition to that we could talk however about a visionary seeing in which case ordinary perception is not used but this would be a purely intrumental sort of seeing and a vision would be an intramental seeing of something that someone standing beside you wouldn't perceive themselves through the ordinary medium of sense perception but visions could be of two sorts two sorts there could be a vertical vision or a non veridical vision a veridical vision is the actual seeing of something without having the means of sense perception you see the object even though you do not see it via your five senses a non veridical vision on the other hand would be what we would call a hallucination it's purely a projection of the percipient own brain it's not caused by God it's not an actual seeing of the thing its hallucinatory it's a losery and so we to distinguish these types of visual appearances of things if we're to talk without confusion concerning what these appearances were can you give me an example of both vertical horizontal uh an ordinary appearance for example would be the resurrection appearances as they're described in the Gospels where Jesus appears in the upper room he's physically present he eats food in front of the disciples he invites them to touch him and feel him this would be an ordinary appearance of an extra mental object in the external world if there had been people there with tape recorders and cameras they would have had photographic and audio images of Jesus appearing in the upper room that would be an ordinary appearance and a veridical vision I think would be an example of what Steven saw when he was stoned he looked up and saw the heavens open and he said I see the Son of man standing at the right hand of God but the Jewish persecutors about Stephen saw nothing at all they didn't perceive anything and they rushed upon him and stoned him and killed him what Stephen saw was a veridical vision a God induced visionary seeing of the exalted Christ on a loose ination would be a a mirage thinking that you see something but perhaps you're it's it's just a mirage caused by say heat waves or maybe because you you've been drunk and therefore your perceptions are mistaken that's what the disciples may have thought they were seeing when they saw Jesus and wondered what it was that it was going on they may have thought it was just a sort of subjective vision do you think that's why Jesus had to appear so many times to them that they didn't believe their own senses the first time no I I'm not inclined to think that I mean here we're getting into theological issues as to why Jesus appeared to the disciples and so well I think it had something to do with the commissioning of the disciples to carry the gospel to the whole world and that that lay I think at the heart of his appearances and spending time with them all right then what do you say to the skeptic who says it is a hallucination right so the question is what were these post-mortem experiences of these early disciples were they appearances of Jesus in the external world were they political visions were they non veridical visions now it's interesting that the New Testament draws a clear distinction between appearances of Christ and visions of Christ the appearances of the risen Christ were to a limited circle and soon ceased but visions of the exalted Christ went on in the New Testament church Paul saw them when he was praying in the temple in Jerusalem Stephen saw an appearance a rather a vision of Christ at the stoning in the book of Revelation you have a vision of the throne room of God that John sees so the visions in the church were something that did not cease that went on and yet these were distinct from a resurrection appearance now what was the difference between an appearance of the post-mortem Jesus and a vision of Jesus well the answer of the New Testament seems to be clear an appearance of Jesus was an actual appearing in the external world physical tangible extra mental whereas a vision of Jesus was something was purely intrumental and subjective in the mind of the percipient so that I think this gives good grounds for saying that the appearances of Jesus to the disciples were not visionary experiences they were rather extra mental events and I don't know of any other way to explain this distinction between appearances and visions in the New Testament other than the one we're extra mental and the other were interment what's the tip-off from the evidence that they were appearances versus visions in terms of the words how do you know that well don't think it's a distinction that's made in terms of vocabulary I don't mean to suggest that it's rather a conceptual distinction and that is made simply on the basis of the fact that the appearances were thought to be to a limited circle of people they soon seized Paul regarded the appearance to him on the Damascus Road is highly unusual and out of time because it was so late but visions of Jesus went on in the church all the time Paul said in first Corinthians 12 that I have many visions and revelations of the Lord and in the book of Revelation you have a very colorful vision of Jesus so the New Testament is is clearly making a distinction between these resurrection appearances that the disciples first experienced and then the later experience of the church now how do you explain that except to say that the one were intrumental and the other were extra mental I don't know of any other way to explain this distinction and I've never seen any skeptical critic which has been able to differentiate this in any other way yeah again I think there the question will be do we regard the resurrection narratives and the Gospels as historically credible as I say the revolution in New Testament studies with respect to the appearances has come about because of a new appreciation of the Pauline evidence the earliness of this evidence that Paul is handing on but many scholars still remain skeptical with respect to the gospel narratives of these appearances does that mean that the skeptics are actually weaving their own basket coming back together again if you start with Paul and it starts to jive with the Gospels that things are coming together yes very much so the if I may speak candidly I think that many of the skeptical critics have a distinct strategy here that they want to drive a wedge between Paul and the Gospels because the pauline evidence is so early it's so undeniable that you cannot deny that these people had these experiences of Jesus alive after his death so in order to deny that these were the physical bodily appearances narrated in the Gospels you've got to somehow drive a wedge between Paul and the Gospels so as to be able to affirm the Pauline testimony and yet still remain skeptical about the gospel testimony and the success of this strategy will depend entirely upon the plausibility of trying to draw this gulf this divide between Paul and the Gospels I think it's a very difficult thing to do what about hallucination could the appearances have been mere hallucinatory experiences well I'm skeptical about this hypothesis frankly I think that there are a number of reasons to think that this hypothesis is not the best explanation first of all it's very difficult to explain the diversity of the resurrection appearances Jesus didn't appear just once but many times not just to one person but to many different individuals not just to individuals but to groups of people not just under one circumstance and at one locale but in many locales and under a variety of circumstances and the hallucination hypothesis simply can be plausibly stretched to accommodate this kind of diversity let me just give three examples the appearance for example to James the younger brother of Jesus we have good at evidence from the Gospels that neither James nor indeed any of Jesus's brothers believe that Jesus was anybody special during his lifetime that he was the Messiah or the Saviour or anybody of any significance and yet it's equally undeniable that after his death both James and the younger brothers of Jesus all became believers became ardent followers of Jesus in the New Testament church and eventually James emerges as the sole leader of the New Testament church that's all we know about James from the new testament but from Josephus the Jewish historian we learned that James was actually stoned to death by the Sanhedrin during the lapse in a civil government somewhere in the mid 80 60s for his faith in Jesus Christ now most of us have brothers what would it take for you to believe that your brother is the Lord so that you would be willing to be stoned to death for the truth of that belief can there be any doubt that the reason for this incredible transformation in James is the fact that Paul says then he appeared to James you can't I think explain the conversion of James is due to a hallucination because as an unbeliever James wasn't in any sort of chain reaction of enthusiasm among believers he wasn't a follower of Jesus so the hallucination hypothesis doesn't hold much credibility for the appearance to James another one that's difficult to explain I think would be the appearance to the women again it's remarkable that women would be the first to see Jesus risen from the dead any later legendary account would make male disciples to be the first ones to see Jesus risen now that suggests that the women were the first ones in fact to see Christ risen from the dead the reason they're not mentioned in first Corinthians 15 in the list that Paul quotes is because the testimony of women was so worthless that listing them among the list of witnesses would have been actually detrimental it would have been counterproductive rather than helpful so they're all mitad from the list in first Corinthians 15 but we have multiple independent attestation of the appearance to the women in the Gospels now that's significant because again it means that you cannot explain the appearance to the women as being part of a chain reaction through say a guilt complex that Peter suffered because he had denied Jesus three times as some of the skeptical critics would want us to believe the women have priority over Peter here and they didn't suffer from any guilt complex because they didn't deny they were at the cross they were at the tomb when he was buried they came to the tomb on Sunday morning to find the body gone so that the women didn't suffer from any sort of guilt complexes as is hypothesized for Peter by those who defend the hallucination hypothesis finally just a third example that is difficult for the hallucination hypothesis to explain would be the appearance to the 500 brethren here you have 500 people most of whom are still alive at the time of Paul's writing he knows them personally because he knows some have died in the interim and all of them claim to have seen Jesus risen from the dead now again mass hallucinations are extremely rare because as projections of your own mind they are only in the mind of the percipient and therefore you cannot have literally a mass hallucination it would have to be really a mass coincidence of all these people hallucinating Jesus at the same time and that's not impossible but again when you look at the diversity of the appearances this just begins to strain the hallucination hypothesis I think to the breaking point one further problem with the hallucination hypothesis is it has weak explanatory power it's offered as an explanation of the appearances but in fact it does not explain why the disciples came to believe Jesus was risen from the dead for you see given the typical Jewish mentality about beliefs in the afterlife they would have believed that Jesus would have gone to Abraham's bosom to paradise where the souls of the righteous dead would be with God until the resurrection at the end of the world and therefore if they had hallucinate 'add visions of Jesus they would have projected visions of him as exalted in heaven where God had taken him up until the resurrection at the end of the world but that would it most have led them to proclaim the Assumption of Jesus into heaven or the glorification of Jesus in heaven not his literal resurrection from the dead for the Jew the resurrection was an event took place in space and time in history and therefore something more is needed than just hallucinations of the dead man to explain why they came to believe in the resurrection of Jesus rather than merely his translation into heaven one final point about the hallucination hypothesis is that it lacks explanatory scope sufficient to explain the evidence it's only offered to explain the appearances but you see that's only one part of the evidence in order to explain the empty tomb you have to conjoin to the hallucination hypothesis some independent hypotheses in order to explain that data but the resurrection hypothesis as an overarching hypothesis has wider explanatory scope and therefore according to the canons of inductive reasoning is to be preferred the fourth fundamental fact which any credible historical hypothesis concerning the fate of Jesus of Nazareth has to explain is the very origin of the disciples belief that God had raised Jesus of Nazareth from the Dead Sea it's an indisputable fact that Christianity sprang into being in the middle of the first century now why did this movement arise where did it come from well all scholars agree that the reason for the birth of this Christian movement in Palestine in the middle of the 1st century is because these first disciples suddenly and sincerely came to believe that the God of Israel had raised Jesus of Nazareth from the dead but now that occasions an even deeper question where in the world did they come up with that outlandish belief and to appreciate how outlandish it is you need to understand something about the disciples Jewish background they had placed their faith in Jesus of Nazareth as the Promised Jewish Messiah who would deliver Israel from her enemies there's no conception in antecedent Judaism of a messiah who instead of coming and conquering israel's enemies would be vanquished and executed by them and executed and so shameful and disgraceful manner as crucifixion this was simply unheard of in Jewish messianic expectations moreover the idea that Messiah would then be raised from the dead is simply unknown in Judaism coupled with this the fact that according to Old Testament law anyone executed by hanging on a tree is thereby shown to be a cursed by God and the Jews applied this law to crucifixion as well now what this meant is that the crucifixion showed Jesus of Nazareth out to be a man literally under the curse of God it wasn't just that now their beloved master was dead and and and they had lost their their rabbi it was worse than that it was that in effect the Pharisees had been right all along for three years they had been following a man a cursed by God a heretic a Jewish schismatic so that the crucifixion put a question mark behind everything that these men had believed in and entrusted about Jesus in addition to that Judaism had no concept of a resurrection occurring within history read the Jewish literature prior to and up through the first century you will find nothing parallel to the resurrection of Jesus in Jewish thought in Jewish thinking the resurrection always occurred after the end of the world and it was always a general resurrection of all the righteous dead or all of Israel for judgment there was no conception of the resurrection of an isolated individual apart from the general resurrection in advance within history - glory and immortality confronted with Jesus crucifixion and death the disciples would have been throw into complete turmoil even if they had managed somehow to maintain their faith in him at most they could have preserved his tomb as a shrine where his bones could reside until the resurrection at the end of the age when they and their beloved master would be rejoined in the kingdom of God but they would never come up with the unjú is an outlandish idea that he had up been already raised from the dead all right summarize the four points with respect to historical hypotheses concerning the fate of Jesus of Nazareth there are two essential steps in this assessment first of all is a determination of what are the data to be explained secondly is the selection of that explanation from the pool of live options which best explains that data what are the data there are four fundamental facts agreed upon by the majority of New Testament scholars who have studied this and written on the subject that must be explained number one the honorable burial of Jesus of Nazareth by Joseph of Arimathea in a tomb number two the discovery of Jesus empty tomb by a group of his women followers early on Sunday morning following his crucifixion number three the experience on the part of various individuals and groups of people at various locations and under various circumstances of post-mortem appearances of Jesus alive from the dead and number four the very origin of the Christian faith itself in the disciples coming suddenly and sincerely to believe that God had raised Jesus of Nazareth from the dead those are the facts that need to be explained what is the best explanation for for these I believe that when you assess the various alternatives the various live options using the ordinary canons of historical assessments such as explanatory power explanatory scope the degree of ad hoc Nisour contrived Ness plausibility the degree to which it is accord with accepted beliefs the degree to which the hypothesis outstrips rival hypotheses that the best explanation for the facts is that God raised Jesus of Nazareth from the dead I was stunned frankly to here in the ABC special one of the scholars interview suggests that the earliest disciples may have been prompted to come to believe that God had raised Jesus from the dead because of greco-roman myths about dying and rising gods and the reason I was surprised you see is because this was a hypothesis that was bandied about in the so called history of religions school of thought back at the close of the 19th century in the early part of the 20th century but the school soon collapsed and has been virtually universally given up today among New Testament scholars so that the idea that the disciples came to believe in the resurrection of Jesus on the basis of greco-roman myths is simply obsolete generally New Testament scholars today recognize that the proper framework for understanding Jesus of Nazareth is not greco-roman mythology but rather this first century Palestinian Judaism and it is against the background of Judaism that the Prophet from Nazareth is properly to be understood and the whole movement of the Jewish reclamation of Jesus of understanding the Jewishness of Jesus is testimony to this fact now why did that history of religion school collapse well primarily two reasons number one the parallels were spurious in fact there are no parallels to the resurrection narratives or the empty tomb narratives in greco-roman mythology these dying and rising gods did not concern historical figures at all they were merely mythological symbols of the crop cycle the crops dry up and die in the hot arid Mid Eastern summer and then they come back to life when this the winter and spring rains come and it wasn't thought at all that these were applied to historical individuals indeed really they didn't concern resurrections at all these gods like Thomas and Adonis and Oh seers didn't really return to life didn't really come back to life from the dead they still existed in the afterlife so that it's really a complete misnomer to think of these as parallel to the empty tomb and appearance narratives and the belief and the resurrection of Jesus but secondly there's no causal connection between these myths and the earliest disciples you see these myths were known in judaism and jews found them utterly abhorrent they were they were blasphemous to orthodox jews and the idea that the earliest disciples of jesus would sincerely come to believe that jesus of nazareth was risen from the dead because they had heard these myths about osiris and adonis in' and hercules is as absurd as you're coming to believe that some friend of yours is risen from the dead because you saw the movie ET and ET came back to life in the movie it's just historically absurd to think that these men would sincerely have come to believe Jesus was risen from the dead on the basis of these myths and then be willing to go to torturous deaths in attestation to the truth of that belief and it certainly won't explain James and Paul well that's exactly right because these unbelievers like James Paul who are not believers in Jesus when they saw these appear in Thomas exactly a lot of people believe that the disciples had something happened to them because their life was transformed they went out and won the world what do you think happened the third fundamental fact that any responsible historical hypothesis has to account for in explaining the fate of Jesus of Nazareth is the fact that after his death different individuals and groups of people claim to have seen Jesus of Nazareth alive from the on different occasions and under varying circumstances now this general fact is one that is universally acknowledged today among New Testament critics why do the New Testament scholars agree the key factor which has led virtually all New Testament scholars to reassess positively the appearance traditions concerning Jesus after his death was a demonstration by the late German New Testament scholar Yaqui Mira meais that in 1st Corinthians 15 Paul is not writing in his own words but he is quoting from an early Christian tradition or saying that he received and in turn passed on to his converts he uses their the technical rabbinical terminology for the receiving and the transmission of sacred tradition and Paul says that to the Corinthians I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received namely and then he quotes this old pre Pauline tradition 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 kaif us then to the twelve then he appeared to more than 500 brethren at one time most of whom are still alive though some have fallen asleep then he appeared to James then to all the Apostles and last of all Paul says us to one untimely born he appeared also to me this early tradition has been dated to within five years after Jesus crucifixion and thus you have in the early Christian tradition the naming of specific eyewitnesses and groups of people that were widely known in the early Christian church who at least claimed to have seen Jesus of Nazareth alive after his death now we can write these office hallucinations if we want to but we cannot responsibly deny that they occurred and that's why for example Fredrickson in the ABC special says that as a historian I must conclude that these men sincerely believed that they saw something and this something changed their lives so for that reason alone as I say it's virtually anonymous among New Testament scholars that these early disciples groups and individuals did in fact experience these post-mortem appearances of Jesus alive after his death the only question is how do you explain these bill in an article about Peter Jennings and the special Peter Jennings said I never thought about them referring to the four Gospels as historic documents that's where it begins to get sensitive and tricky begin to realize aha I'm going to step on somebody's toes now are these documents to be considered as historic documents or giving historical information that's accurate well I think that's one of the respects in which the judeo-christian scriptures differ from the scriptures that you find in other world religions Christianity doesn't claim to be a philosophy of religion or an ethic for life it's not composed of epic poetry or myths of ages long ago it concerns real historical people that you can read about in the works of persons like Josephus the Jewish historian you can read in his pages about John the Baptist and Anacin Caiaphas and King Herod about Jesus himself and his younger brother James these are real people that actually lived they talk about real events that actually happened that you can read about in secular history from the first century real places that have been discovered by archaeology or that are recorded in other documents of ancient history so one of the remarkable things about the New Testament is it's claimed that revelation has been needed through historical events to mankind and therefore it is susceptible to historical investigation a lot of people have said to me that when they watched the ABC special they thought that at least Peter Jennings would get somewhere close to the traditional view of Jesus their comment afterwards was were they reading out of the same Bible that we are how can some scholars look at the same evidence and come to some such completely different opinions conclusions that's a an excellent question and I think part of it has to do with the presuppositions that the scholar brings to the text fortunately members for example the Jesus Seminar who are skeptical in their approach to the New Testament have made many of their presuppositions abundantly clear they've listed them for example in the introduction to their edition of the so-called five Gospels and according to the fellows of that that seminar the number one pillar of scholarly investigation of the historical Jesus is the presupposition of naturalism that is to say that miracles do not happen and as a justification for this they simply appeal to the German 19th century scholar David Phoebe Strauss and what Strauss said was that there is a difference between the mythological and the historical and the Jesus Seminar classifies as mythological anything that is legendary or supernatural now that is simply a definition there is no argument given for this anything that is supernatural is simply defined to be mythological and therefore non historical now since the story of the Gospels is from start to finish a story of miracles the virgin birth the Incarnation the exorcisms healings the clairvoyant knowledge the of the future prophecy the resurrection of Jesus anyone who comes to the text with that presupposition is of course going to be forced to discount vast tracts of the text as being on historical but it's important to see that that conclusion is not based on the evidence it's built into the presupposition if you come to the Gospels with the presupposition of naturalism then of course what you wind up with will be a purely human Jesus so the issue there isn't one of evidence the issue there is one of presuppositions what is the justification for this presupposition of naturalism okay but help out all of our students and our profs out there that are saying hey that's all I've ever known what would make me open the door to that possibility being a real one I think it's important to see that the question isn't are we going to be open to the possibility of miracles so much as the question is what justification do you have for being closed to the possibility of miracles you see as long as the existence of God is even possible then it's possible that he's acted in history if there is a transcendent creator and designer of the universe then clearly performing miracles would be child's play for such a being so as long as God's existence is even possible we have to be open to the possibility that he's acted in history so the real burden of proof here is on the person who denies the possibility of miracles what justification is there for saying that before we sit down at the table and look at the evidence we're going to throw supernatural hypotheses out the window without even looking at them first that's the question didn't David Hume then bring in the answer which was hey my experience tells me that's all that happens Humes argument in a nutshell is that extraordinary events require extraordinary evidence now at first that may sound very commonsensical and true but probability theorists from condor say to John Stuart Mill studying the problem of how you establish the historicity of highly improbable events have shown that Humes presupposition is demonstrably false otherwise if you were correct you could never be rational in believing a report on the morning news that the winning pick in last night's lottery was a certain number because that is an extraordinarily improbable event and therefore you should never believe any report of such a thing but clearly that's ridiculous something has obviously gone wrong and what probability theorists realized that was that in establishing the probability of an event you must consider more than simply the inherent probability of that event you also have to take into account the probability of the evidence being just as it is if that event had not taken place and thus in the case of the evening news what is the probability that this winning pick would be reported on the evening news if that event had not taken place well if that's low enough that offsets any improbability in the event itself so with respect to the miracles and the resurrection of Jesus the question would be what is the probability that we should have things like the empty tomb the post-mortem appearances of Jesus the sudden origin of the disciples faith in God's having raised Jesus from the dead if in fact the resurrection had not occurred and when you consider that evidence in the mix then it's not at all true that extraordinary events require extraordinary evidence that's simply a false presupposition behind Humes argument find probability what is it in terms of historic probability historians actually don't like to talk about probability in a technical sense now in a loose and everyday sense it simply means what is most likely to have a what's the best explanation but you see historical hypotheses are very difficult to assess in terms of giving actual probability estimates to them like say the chances of this are one out of six or one out of 25 that's just impossible to do for example what's the probability of the resurrection occurring well it seems to me that's inscrutable we don't know what God's will is for all we know the probability that God would resurrect Jesus from the dead might be extremely high we simply have no way of knowing so what historians do in justifying their historical hypotheses is not calculate the probabilities of these hypotheses rather they weigh them by certain criteria like explanatory power explanatory scope plausibility the accord with accepted beliefs the degree to which the hypothesis is contrived or ad hoc and then they compare that with the success of rival hypotheses in meeting these criteria and that hypothesis which best meets these criteria is the one that deserves to be accepted there are two steps involved in establishing a fact or hypothesis about something like the resurrection of Jesus first there is assembling your inductive database and then there is providing the best explanation of that data now when a scholar says for example that believer and unbeliever alike can agree that the first disciples had experiences of Jesus alive after his death that is an inductive data that needs to be explained and it is absolutely correct that the vast majority in fact universal consensus among New Testament scholars is that the disciples did have these post-mortem experiences of Jesus alive from the dead that is an inductive data that needs to be explained now the question is how do you best explain that and that will then be the next step in the investigation to see which hypothesis best accounts for that fact explain it well when you consider this life transforming experience that the disciples had the question is how in the world did they come up with this belief that Jesus was risen from the dead is RH fuller has said even the most skeptical critic has to posit some mysterious X to get the movement going but the question is what was that X well if you deny that that X was in fact the event of the resurrection of Jesus as the disciples claimed then you basically got three alternatives either their belief was due to Christian influences pagan influences or Jewish influences on them now obviously their belief couldn't have been the result of Christian influences for the simple reason that there wasn't any Christianity yet since belief in the resurrection lay at the foundations of the Christian faith it cannot be explained as a later retro jek Shanor invention of that faith but neither can it be plausibly explained from the site of pagan influences back around the turn of the last century scholars in the history of religion school attempted to explain the disciples belief in Jesus resurrection on the basis of supposed parallels in pagan mythology but the movement soon collapsed and has now been largely repudiated by contemporary scholars for two reasons first of all the parallels were in fact spurious there really are no parallels in pagan religions to the resurrection of Jesus these were simply mythological symbols of the crop cycle as the vegetation dies during the dry season then comes back to life in the rainy season it had nothing to do with people actually returning from the dead but secondly there's no causal connection between these myths and the earliest disciples Jews found these myths abhorrent they knew of them and they rejected them as incompatible with with Jewish belief and therefore you don't even find any trace of the these myths of dying and rising gods in first century Palestine they don't even appear until around the time of Hadrian so it would simply be unthinkable that these earliest disciples would sincerely now come to believe that God had raised Jesus from the dead because they had heard about these myths of dying and rising crop deities so that leaves us with Jewish influences now the resurrection of the Dead was a common Jewish belief that was widely shared but the Jewish concept of resurrection differed in two fundamental respects from Jesus resurrection first of all the Jewish concept of resurrection was always a resurrection after the end of the world it would come on Judgment Day when God raised the dead for judgment it was never within history secondly it was always a general resurrection of all the people or all the righteous dead of Israel never of an isolated individual and what that means is that the disciples confronted with Jesus execution and death would it most have simply preserved as tomb as a shrine where they would perhaps look forward some day to being United with their master again in the kingdom of God when God would raise Jesus and all the righteous dead of Israel from the dead and inaugurate his kingdom but they wouldn't have come up with the unjú --is-- not landish notion that Jesus had already been raised from the dead and thus if the resurrection of Jesus is not historical that mysterious ex remains a blank there simply is no credible antecedent historical influences that would cause these men to come to believe in the resurrection of Jesus and to go to torturous deaths in attesting to its truth the obvious question that this raises is what de sceptical critics then say well the fact is that they don't know what to say there is no plausible naturalistic explanation of the origin of the Christian way that is offered by critics today they simply admit that we don't know the answer they are left with nothing but a mysterious X a blank and thus as one scholar is putted II the resurrection seems to rip a great hole in history a hole which the secular historian is at a loss to plug if he denies the fact of the resurrection of Jesus prove to our audience that that actually is the case they are running out of naturalistic hypotheses if you will to explain this event roll through some of those that have been proposed and then discarded by the secular scholars themselves within the pool of live options for explaining the fundamental facts about the fate of Jesus of Nazareth are a variety of alternatives that have been proposed down through history for example the conspiracy theory the apparent death Theory the wrong tomb theory the hallucination theory as well as the resurrection theory all of these naturalistic hypotheses have been considered and rejected by contemporary scholarship for example the conspiracy theory was first tried in the late 17th early 18th century by German and English deists they said that the disciples enjoy the easy life of preaching that they had with Jesus of Nazareth and so to continue this life after his death they stole the body out of the tomb and lied about the resurrection appearances well no credible historian or scholar today would hold to such an opinion no one can read the pages in the New Testament and deny that these men and women really sincerely believed the truth of what they proclaim now they might have been wrong but they clearly were not conspirators and deceivers they were willing to go to their deaths for the truth of this belief so that theory is unacceptable it certainly wasn't an easy life well obviously not if they all died they were willing to die for this and many of them did died mm-hmm take another example the the apparent death theory this was suggested by German rationalists in the latter half of the 18th century in the early part of the 19th century in fact it's a sad note of history that the so-called father of modern theology free to Islamic er actually adopted this theory according to this theory Jesus wasn't really dead when he was taken down from the cross there was some spark of life remaining in him and somehow he revived in the tomb managed to escape and convinced the disciples that he was risen from the dead well again this theory was absolutely buried by Strauss in his life of Jesus critically examined in 1835 and what Foust pointed out was simply this that a half-dead Jesus desperately in need of bandaging and medical care who managed to creep out of the tomb and presenting some that the disciples would never have elicited in them the worship of him as the Conqueror of death and the risen Lord so that the theory is just utterly implausible and there are many other problems with it as well but again I don't know of any modern historian or scholar who would defend this and so it goes one after another of these naturalistic hypotheses have been proposed in the course of history and none of them have been able to win the consent of a majority of scholars today so that skeptical scholars who deny the resurrection of Jesus are really left in a quandary they they simply do not know how to explain the origin of the Christian faith these post mortem appearances the discovery of the empty tomb of Jesus and the the account of Jesus burial by Joseph of Arimathea it leaves them in a very very difficult position what the scholars think about the post-mortem appearances what do they do with that material again many scholars I simply leave it alone they recognize that these appearances occurred most of them I think would recognize that trying to explain these away psychologically is just implausible the hallucination theory was suggested in the latter half of the 19th century early half of the 20th century it's been revived recently by Gerald Ludum on a German New Testament critic but for the most part New Testament scholars recognize that the hallucination theory just doesn't cut the mustard it's not plausible and so they're simply left with a question mark they recognize that these events occur but they simply say we just don't know what happened we we can't explain it talked about why the hallucination theory doesn't work in light of Corinthians 15 where Paul cites over 500 people saw Jesus at one time I think on the basis of Paul's evidence alone the hallucination theory is not very credible hallucinations you need to understand our projections of one's own mind they're usually associated with either mental illness or substance abuse and yet in the case of the resurrection appearances we have in this early tradition handed on by Paul a number of appearances which are to a variety of individuals not just individuals but even to groups of people and which are strung out over a long period of time and the hallucination hypothesis simply can't be stretched to accommodate that kind of diversity moreover some of the people in the list were not followers of Jesus when they had these experiences on thinking here of James the younger brother of Jesus who was not a follower of Jesus during his lifetime or of saul of tarsus the Pharisee who was a zealous persecutor of the New Testament church you also have groups of people as many as 500 who said that they saw an appearance of Jesus and Paul knew of the people who were involved in this because he was aware at the time that he wrote this letter to the Corinthian church fifty-five that some of these people had died in the interim though most of them were still alive he knew that they were around they could be questioned he personally had talked with Peter and James to people he names in the list just within five years after the event of the crucifixion when he visited Jerusalem on a fact-finding mission around 80 36 so the hallucination hypothesis simply doesn't have the power to explain that kind of diversity there is no single case in the psychological case books which would be analogous to the resurrection appearances what you would have to do would be to construct an amalgam of cases from different incidents and then lump them all together to try to construct a composite case to find anything parallel to the resurrection of Jesus but there is no single case in the history of psychology that would be parallel to the this series of resurrection appearances the person that's listening to you and just cross the line intellectually mm-hmm and said doggone it all right it happened yeah what's the next step I think that the next step is to realize that Jesus of Nazareth holds the key that unlocks the door to eternal life jesus said I am the resurrection and the life he who believes in Me shall never die and though he die yet shall he live death I think is man's greatest existential enemy because it puts all of human existence with a question mark behind it what is the meaning and significance of my life if ultimately I live only to die and if the human race as a whole lives on way to die the resurrection of Jesus tells us that the grave is not our ultimate destiny that ultimately our destiny is eternal life and fellowship with God that is available through faith in Jesus Christ as he promised so I think that the resurrection of Jesus if it occurred is something that it has tremendous is existential significance for every human being because it holds the key to purpose and meaning in life here on earth and in the life hereafter what's the connection between the facts of history that we've been talking about and true faith faith which is not founded upon fact is not faith at all but delusion if Christian belief is to be different from mythology then it must have a factual foundation otherwise I can't see any difference between believing in Jesus Christ or believing in Zeus or Thor or Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny I mean why should I get up in the cold and the dark on a winter Sunday morning and go to church and worship and pray to somebody who isn't really there if Jesus didn't really rise from the dead if this is not a historical fact then I think my atheist friends are right Christianity would be a lie a delusion and we'd only be fooling ourselves better to abandon it and forget it than to delude ourselves into thinking that this still has some sort of value as a mythological symbol in terms of faith how does one actually take the step make the plunge if you will and become a true believer in Jesus this is this is a very interesting question as I read the New Testament Jesus is risen and ascended to the right hand of the Father and in his stead the Spirit of Christ takes over in in Jesus place takes the Ministry of Jesus and what makes a person a Christian or not is not whether that person goes to church or reads the Bible or even believes intellectually the right doctrines or truths about God in Christ rather the essential difference between a Christian and a non-christian is the presence of the Holy Spirit of Christ in that person's life it is the regenerating presence of the Holy Spirit of Christ in a person that renews and transforms that person from the inside out that makes him a new individual and establishes an intimate connection with God bringing new life and new fellowship with God and so as I read the New Testament that is ultimately the thing that makes the difference is the presence of the Spirit of Christ in a person's life and so to appropriate the benefits of Christ's death one has to simply turn to Christ in repentance and faith acknowledging his death on one's behalf and inviting him through his spirit to come into one's life to be ones Lord and one Savior to take control of one's life and to bring that regenerating power of the Holy Spirit to bring new life and light where before there was only death and darkness contrast what you're just saying here with Peter Jennings who says we cannot tell you whether or not Jesus is the Son of God that is a matter of faith and another place he talks about it's okay for you to have your faith to be similar to a person who believes in flying saucers hmm go ahead and believe in that that doesn't mean that I believe that you're believing in something that's real but if it satisfies you that's fine that's not the kind of faith that you're talking about I just can't persuade myself that it doesn't matter what you believe just so long as you're sincere that kind of thinking frankly leads to Jonestown to Waco to Heaven's Gate where any sort of delusion can be believed in as long as you're sincere and we've seen the terrible terrible consequences in human tragedy that that kind of thinking leads to it really does matter whether or not what you believe in is true not just whether or not you're sincere if I could give an illustration a few years ago I had corneal transplant surgery in both of my eyes now as a scholar my eyes are my life's work and I wasn't about to go under the knife with just any old surgeon I wanted to ensure that I had the very finest corneal surgeon before I would submit to that surgery and so my wife and I did some research and investigated who did corneal surgery who was the best and finally determined who was the finest corneal surgeon in the United States and having determined that on the basis of our evidence I was then willing to place my trust in him and allow him to operate on my eyes now I think it's similar with respect to faith in Christ you shouldn't just leap blindly into the dark believing in anything or everything that could be suicidal rather you look at the evidence you try to determine what is the truth and then on the basis of that you place your trust or your commitment in that which you believe to be true as a very influential scholar I am sure that you must have colleagues who have come to you and said come on Jesus is the only way to God isn't that a little bigoted isn't that a little narrow-minded and our pluralistic society you're the only one that's right what would you say to them in our day of religious relativism I think that the notion that Jesus is the only way to God comes across as deeply offensive to many people including scholars and I think here we begin to really get at some of the route with respect to skepticism about Jesus of Nazareth because like it or not Jesus of Nazareth was not politically correct and we want a politically correct Jesus and I personally think that much of modern scholarship is driven by the desire to have a politically correct Jesus rather than this dogmatic narrow Jesus who claim to be the absolute revelation of God the Father to mankind who claim to be the only way to God who claim to be the sole sacrifice for human sin and it is this desire to have a politically correct Jesus that is distorted and guided the judgment I think of some skeptical New Testament critics but one has to say the historical facts simply cannot be determined by considerations of political correctness otherwise you're allowing ideology to drive historical studies and that's just bad methodology you've got to let Jesus be Jesus you've got to let him speak for himself and be who he was otherwise you are simply imposing your ideology you're politically correct Jesus on the jesus of history and you will be apt to come up with a Jesus who looks just like you and that frankly has been largely the history of the quest of the historical Jesus as one researcher said each scholar looked down the long well of history and saw his own face reflected at the bottom I think that most people would agree that if you were to take that story as real literal whatever you want to say that Jesus actually said those things Jesus turns out in many ways to be a very scary person in the sense he's talking about determining the eternal destiny of every man woman and child that lives absolute morality does exist that God is watching yeah but along the way you also have this tremendous message of forgiveness and love but they go together and you can't dictate talk to that the problem is that so many people want a comfortable Jesus they wanted Jesus who doesn't ruffle their feathers one that fits in with their political and social agenda and so often you will find that the Jesus of history reconstructed by skeptical critics is a politically left feminist universal health care now sort of Jesus whom they feel very very comfortable with and they're not allowing the Jesus of history to really be himself in all of his strangeness in all of his discomforting and difficult sayings we need to allow him to speak to us even though it might make us feel uncomfortable and when we do I think we'll find a much more radical Jesus than the Jesus of the skeptical critics how about a loving Jesus I think that's certainly part of it though that's the part that in a sense has been over-emphasised in the past the the Jesus who taught the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man but they don't see the same Jesus who overturned the temples are overturned the tables in the temple or pronounced the woes on the Pharisees it's this is a Jesus who was loving and compassionate but also a Jesus who was holy and uncompromising in his devotion to God the Father and the father's program for human history find it interesting that some of the folks that have the pride problem see Jesus as loving those that have a sin problem are afraid of Jesus and don't see the loving side give a word of hope to the folks that just feel that they could never be friends with Jesus well the remarkable thing about Jesus is that he associated himself with the downtrodden the unclean the diseased the outcasts of Jewish society people that were regarded as morally and ritually unclean by the religious people of that time this is highly significant in more than one way Jesus table fellowship with prostitutes and and tax collectors and sinners was a way of saying the kingdom of God is open to you and you are welcome to come into it to sit at table with me and fellowship in the kingdom of God but it was also an even deeper and more radical claim than that because you see by associating with such people normally religious folk would have thought that Jesus made himself unclean but in Jesus eyes it was just the opposite through contact with him they were made clean so that it was his cleansing and forgiveness that was imparted to them rather than their contamination to him in other words it was a kind of oblique way of asserting again his divine status to forgive sins and to welcome sinners into the kingdom of God and so this I think can be a tremendous encouragement to folks who just don't feel good enough it was for that kind of person that Jesus came I loved his saying that those who are well do not need a physician but those who are sick how would you advise people to approach the historical information about Jesus when we come to a historical study of Jesus of Nazareth we immediately confront an enormous stumbling block right at the start namely the story of Jesus of Nazareth from start to finish is a story of miracles the scripture claims that he was born and conceived of a virgin that he was God incarnate that he performed various miracles and healings that he exercised demonic spirits that he had clairvoyant knowledge that he was able to predict the future and ultimately of course that he rose from the dead and ascended into heaven now how do you make sense of these sorts of events which are miraculous in nature if you come to the Gospels with the presupposition that miracles are impossible that every event in history has a purely natural explanation then obviously you will not be able to make sense of the Gospels you are going to have to regard them as non historical and mythological in what they report but would such a presupposition be justified well it seems to me that that is a deeper philosophical question which New Testament critics really are not very well equipped to address this is a question that needs to be addressed by philosophers and meta physicians because really it's ultimately a question about the existence of God if there is a creator and designer of the universe who has brought it into being then if such a being exists clearly he could intervene in the course of history and perform miraculous acts and so in the absence of some sort of a proof of atheism it seems to me that we have to be open to the possibility of miracles it would be bad methodology to simply dismiss these in advance before even looking at the evidence that they might have actually occurred otherwise we could be ruling out the true hypothesis simply on the basis of a philosophical presupposition for which we have no justification and it's interesting to note that in modern science for example in physics scientists are quite willing to talk about realities which are quite literally meta physical in nature realities which are beyond our spatio temporal dimensions realities which we cannot directly perceive or know but which we may infer by certain as it were signposts of transcendence in the universe to something beyond it and perhaps the miracles are like that Jesus regarded his miracles as signs of the in breaking of God's kingdom perhaps these miracles in the life of Jesus are as it were signposts of transcendence to something beyond the universe something greater breaking in in a dramatic way in the life and Ministry of Jesus of Nazareth and it seems to me that as open-minded people we simply cannot exclude this in advance without looking at the evidence we have to be willing to look at the evidence and follow it where it leads to find tradition for me when scholars talk about tradition the layperson is apt to misunderstand that the layman when hears the word tradition thinks of fiddler on the roof and things of tradition as a sort of blind irrational following of certain practices the way it's always been that's not what biblical scholars are talking about what biblical scholars are talking about is pieces of information that have been memorized and handed down carefully from one person to another and in oral cultures especially such as Jewish culture the ability to memorize and pass on faithfully large tracts of sacred tradition accurately was a highly prized and highly developed skill that was inculcated in children right from their primary education on up through the rest of their lives and it's these kinds of traditions that the scholars are after when they're looking for early sources about the life of Jesus scholars say that first Corinthians 15 Paul passes on authoritative tradition the message of the early Christians before the New Testament was even written what is it how do you know that the fact that Paul is quoting from a tradition that he himself received and then passed on in first Corinthians 15 three to five is enormous ly significant because it means that this information does not date from AD 55 when Paul wrote the letter rather it dates from the time of the original tradition itself which scholars estimate to go back within the first five years after the crucifixion and that's what we have here is an extremely early and valuable source of historical information now the reason we know that this is tradition rather than Paul's own free composition is that he uses the technical rabbinical terms for handing on and receipt of sacred tradition in the letter and also this tradition that he hands on is full of non pall line literary characteristics it's written in a Semitic style which goes right back to original Aramaic rather than Greek and it's in a memorise aful form that would make it easy to pass on to later generations so scholars unanimously have recognized that what we have here in first Corinthians 15 is an extremely early tradition about the death burial resurrection and appearances of Jesus why are scholars today so impressed with the fact of the passion narratives in the Gospels why do they think that it's early why do they think it's accurate why are they impressed tradition also comes into play when we talk about the passion story in the Gospel of Mark our earliest gospel by the passion story we mean the final week of Jesus suffering and death and burial and resurrection this is again significant because it means that this historical material does not date from the time of Mark's Gospel but rather even earlier before Mark's Gospel and this pre mark and Passion tradition that mark used may go back as early as the ad 40s within ten years or so after the death of Jesus and thus it's an extremely early and valuable source scholars think that there was such a source because when you read the Gospel of Mark it tends to be composed of independent little stories about the life of Jesus that are strung together rather like pearls on a string but when you come to the passion story there you now have one long continuous narrative rather than these independent vignettes that just exist side-by-side and that suggests that what Mark had here was an independent and early tradition that he himself employed in writing his gospel is the evidence in history so strong that even Jewish scholars would agree Jesus rose from the dead one of the most remarkable features about the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus is that today one of the world's leading Jewish theologians Pincus Lapita teaches in Israel has declared himself convinced on the basis of the evidence that the God of Israel raised Jesus of Nazareth from the dead I remember the first time I heard Lapita lecture when I was a student at the University of Munich under Pallenberg in Germany I nearly fell off my chair when lipet came to the conclusion of his lecture and said that he believed as a historian that Jesus rose from the dead and I asked him well then why don't you become a Christian and he said because I don't see any inherent connection between Jesus rising from the dead and Jesus being the Messiah now Pollin Berg responded at that point I think that we would have to explore again the connection between Jesus claims to be the Messiah and gods raising him from the dead clearly if God raised him from the dead that seems to be pretty good reason for thinking that those claims were true can you summarize quickly the three quests what they were and bring us up to speed in terms of the Jesus Seminar where they fit the first quest of the historical Jesus took part in the latter half of the 19th century and ultimately came to an end in the skepticism of Albert Schweitzer where he said Jesus comes to us as a man unknown we really don't know who this man was and the reason for that conclusion was that they could not find any stratum in the Gospels that held a non supernatural non-miraculous Jesus the second quest began in the 1950s or so where scholars began to reassess once more the historicity of Jesus in light of wood off boatman's claims that we know nothing more about him and what could be written on a four by six index card and there the Jesus that they tried to discover again seemed to be related to the greco-roman world in which Palestine existed the third quest which has come now at the end of the 20th century is basically a rediscovery of the Jewishness of Jesus it's recognised that the second quest was wrong in seeking to understand Jesus against the backdrop of pagan religion and culture rather we need to understand Jesus of Nazareth against the backdrop of first century Palestinian Judaism and it's this recovery of the Jewishness of Jesus that characterizes the so-called third quest the interesting thing is that people in the Jesus Seminar tend to Lodge somewhere in between the second and the third they often will give mouth service to the Jewishness of Jesus but nevertheless they still largely tend to use categories of Mythology and thinking of Jesus in terms of divine man images and so forth which are really part of the second question largely rejected by the majority of scholars today as the correct interpretive categories for Jesus some of the critics say it's only one account that puts guards at the tomb where their guards of the time well now this is a question that I think is probably best left out of the program because the the vast vast majority of New Testament scholars would regard Matthew's tomb store or guard story as unhistorical I can hardly think of anybody who would defend the historicity of the guard at the tomb story and the main reasons for that are two one is because it's only found in matthew and it seems very odd that if there were a Roman guard or even a Jewish guard at the tomb that mark wouldn't know about it and there wouldn't be any mention of it the other reason is that nobody seemed to understand Jesus resurrection predictions the disciples who heard the most often had not an inkling of what he meant and yet somehow the Jewish authorities were supposed to have heard of these predictions and understood them so well that they were able to set a guard around the and again that doesn't seem to make sense so most scholars regard the guard at the tomb story as a legend or matthean invention that isn't really historical fortunately this is of little significance for the empty tomb of Jesus because the guard was mainly employed in Christian apologetics to disprove the conspiracy theory that the disciples stole the body but no modern historian or New Testament scholar would defend a conspiracy theory because it's evident when you read the pages of the New Testament that these people sincerely believed in what they said so the conspiracy theory is dead even in the absence of a guard at the tomb the true significance of the guard of the tomb story is that it shows that even the opponents of the earliest Christians did not deny the empty tomb but rather involve themselves in a hopeless series of absurdities trying to explain it away by saying that the disciples had stolen the body and that's the real significance of Matthew's guarded the tomb story many times scholars would look at the burial story of Jesus and they see Joseph of Arimathea coming and taking the body and that doesn't seem to make sense why does it actually make sense if the burial account of Jesus were a late developing legend that accrued many decades later in the Christian Church one would expect Jesus's burial to being conducted by his disciples or his mother and family or or some such thing instead what we have in the earliest account indeed in all the accounts is this enigmatic figure Joseph of Arimathea who appears out of nowhere in the Gospels and gives Jesus of Nazareth an honorable burial this is contrary to what was normally done with the bodies of executed criminals which were simply thrown into a common dirt graveyard in fact that's probably what happened to the corpses of the two thieves that were crucified with Jesus but Joseph singles out Jesus for an honorable burial in a tomb what is especially remarkable out this is that Joseph is said to have been a Sanhedrin a member of the very Council that had condemned Jesus to the cross now given the hostility in the early Christian church toward the Jewish leaders who had engineered what amounted to a judicial murder of Jesus it is simply incredible that the earliest Christians would have invented or the legend would have produced a figure like Joseph of Arimathea who is a Sanhedrin who does what is right by Jesus of Nazareth and therefore it seems extremely probable that Jesus was in fact interred by this man Joseph of Arimathea who gave Jesus a proper and honorable burial in the tomb give me an illustration from science that would show that God is possible I think there are many good reasons to believe that there is a transcendent creator and designer of the universe for example modern cosmology tells us that the universe is not eternal but that physical space and time matter and energy came into existence at the point of the Big Bang a finite time ago and since something cannot come out of nothing there must be transcendent creator that brought the universe into being moreover scientists exploring the initial conditions of the universe in the last 30 or 40 years have been stunned by the discovery of how complex and delicate a balance of fundamental constants and initial conditions must be present in the Big Bang itself in order for the universe to be life permitting the chances of this happening by mere chance alone are simply incomprehensible and I think that this gives good grounds to believe that there's an intelligent designer of the cosmos a non-scientific reason to believe in God would be the existence of objective moral values in the world if there is no God as a transcendent anchor for moral values then everything becomes relative but in that case there's nothing wrong with the Holocaust or apartheid or ethnic cleansing or genocide if we believe there are objective moral values then we have good reason to believe that there is a transcendent good or ground in which these are located so I think there are many different reasons to believe that a transcendent creator and designer and source of goodness exists

Channel: drcraigvideos

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Keywords: William, Lane, Craig, Jesus, Seminar, John, Ankerberg, Peter, Jennings, Search, Resurrection, Gospels, Liberal, Left, Wing, Orthodox, History, Theology, Historian, Theologian, Conservative, Empty, Tomb, Atheist, Atheism, Miracles, David, Hume, Dominic, Crossan

Id: xUKW2Bm5P2k

Length: 111min 24sec (6684 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 13 2011