Dale Allison on the Resurrection Part One

Dr. Craig: Hello, this is William Lane Craig. Credible sociological surveys have revealed an unexpected resurgence of openness and interest among students in the existence of God and the Gospel of Jesus Christ. More than any other Christian ministry, I believe that Reasonable Faith is strategically positioned to supply the evangelistic and discipleship tools to help further this young generation. During the last year, we've continued to produce our animated videos. We have a wonderful series of videos on the existence of God and the evidence for Jesus, and now we're producing an ongoing series on the attributes of God—just releasing the video on divine omniscience, and the next one to come out will be on divine omnipotence. We've also got a new Equip course on the atonement and have developed an app so that you can download these courses and access them easily using your mobile device. We now have over 255 local Reasonable Faith chapters all around the world—from Europe to Nepal to Australia to Muslim countries. These chapter directors who lead these studies are vetted, qualified people, extraordinarily talented and committed to the task of worldwide evangelism and discipleship.

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Kevin Harris: Dale Allison's book on the resurrection is on my list to read, but I haven't gotten to it yet. It's called The Resurrection of Jesus: Apologetics, Polemics, History. I'd like to examine the contributions of Allison's work and look at a couple of key points. He thanks you in the foreword of his book for your replies on his book at the EPS/ETS, I believe it was. So, you've had interaction with Allison's work on the resurrection.

Dr. Craig: Yes, I read his first book and participated in a symposium on it that was then published in the journal Philosophia Christi. It's also included as an appendix in my book Assessing the New Testament Evidence for the Historicity of the Resurrection of Jesus. I've read and interacted with his most recent book in the fourth volume of my Systematic Philosophical Theology dealing with the person and work of Christ. So I consider his work to be extremely important and interesting.

Kevin Harris: Well, let's do this. David Pallmann is active on several theology and philosophy platforms. He recently started a YouTube channel, and he has some criticisms of Allison's book. Let's look at those and use them as points of discussion. In this first clip, he distinguishes between the minimalist and the maximalist approach to the resurrection. Here's clip number one:

There are broadly two approaches to defending the resurrection, minimalism and maximalism, which correspond to two different ways of approaching the gospels. The maximalist approach considers the gospels as holistic sources of information and tries to assess the credibility of these sources by attempting to link them to the original apostles. Instead, he buys into the assumption that the gospels are mixtures of both history and legend. So the task of the New Testament scholar is to try to determine which parts of the narrative can be relied upon and which parts cannot.

Well, David places you in the minimalist camp, Bill. There's your picture right there in the video. He claims that Allison sees the gospels as a mixture of history and legend. Do you agree with this whole assessment?

Dr. Craig: I think this is a terrible misrepresentation of both my views and the distinction between these two approaches. What distinguishes the two approaches is that the minimalist accepts as evidence only those facts which virtually all New Testament scholars accept. The maximalist argues on the basis of his best assessment of the evidence, whether or not it's a minority view. My approach, which is laid out in my book Assessing the New Testament Evidence for the Historicity of the Resurrection of Jesus, is maximalist. This is most evident by the fact that I present extensive arguments for the historicity of the empty tomb, which minimalists do not appeal to.

I think the confusion here results because I try to summarize, for convenience’s sake, the evidence for Jesus’ resurrection under three main headings: the empty tomb, the post-mortem appearances of Jesus, and the very origin of the disciples’ faith. But these are not minimal facts. These are just convenient summary headings of extensive lines of evidence.

Kevin Harris: Pallmann gives two examples in Allison's book on how Pallmann thinks scholars erroneously approach the reliability of the gospels. The first one involves the Gospel of John. Check out clip number two:

For example, when discussing the appearance of the resurrected Jesus to Mary Magdalene, Allison suggests that John's account may be dependent upon Matthew's account. And if this is so, Allison claims, then Matthew must be the only source for this appearance, and John can be discounted as being an independent source. As he says, the issue is John, which a few take to be dependent exclusively on Matthew. If John does nothing but rewrite Matthew, then the latter would be our sole source for Mary's Christophany. The problem is that it simply does not follow that literary dependence precludes the having of independent sources of information. It is entirely possible that the author of the fourth gospel should have depended upon Matthew's gospel literarily and still also had independent access to additional sources of information.

So, Bill, what is your response to that clip?

Dr. Craig: I think this clip illustrates how incredibly misleading Pallmann’s critique is, to the point almost of misrepresentation. I'm really astonished that he thinks he can get away with this. He must not think that lay people are going to bother to look up the references that he quotes, because when you look on pages 47 to 48, just listen to what Allison says. He says, “a few take John to depend exclusively on Matthew, [and that if that were true then Matthew] would be our sole source.” Such a conditional claim is unobjectionable. But then listen to what Allison goes on to say. He says, “It is, however, far from evident that John 20:11–18 rests wholly or even in part on Matthew 28:8–10, with which it shares so few words.” So he thinks that we have, in fact, two independent sources. And in his footnote, he notes that, “While the synoptics have at points influenced John, the Fourth Gospel also preserves traditions that are independent and sometimes early.” So, I think that Pallmann here has really misled his audience with respect to what Allison believes. Allison is arguing for the independence of Matthew and John with respect to this resurrection appearance, which counts importantly in its favor.

Kevin Harris: I tried to get some clarification on this. I did reach out to David, and he replied that he acknowledges that Allison discounts this view, but he brought it up because he says you can include it in a catalog of approaches that New Testament scholars take that Pallmann finds fallacious.

Dr. Craig: Well, I think he owes his audience a clarification on this because the impression that's given is quite different.

Kevin Harris: There’s a second example of Allison’s approach to the Gospels that David brings out. It’s how he approaches the account of the resurrected saints in Matthew. This is clip number three:

Similarly, Allison concludes that Matthew's story of the saints rising in Jerusalem is certainly not historical. He refers to it in other writings as a fiction and as a tall tale. How does he know this? According to him, this is because no other sources report it. As he says, ‘Wright's half-hearted argument arrives at no firm conclusion. In historical terms, there is no way of finding out whether Matthew's little story mirrors an event of the past. My verdict is different. We can be almost pontifical here. Matthew 27:51–53 recounts a miracle unsurpassed anywhere else in the Gospels or other books of the Christian Scriptures. Indeed, if it happened, it is the most amazing event of all time. But it did not happen. The astounding series of prodigies has left no trace in the other Gospels, Acts, Paul, Josephus, or, for that matter, any other pre-Matthean source. It stands alone half a century or more after the incredible events it reports.’

The key problem here is that this is a blatant argument from silence. And as I explained in my video ‘Were the Gospels Originally Anonymous?,’ arguments from silence are seriously problematic. We simply have far too many examples of ancient sources remaining silent with respect to significant events which we independently know to have occurred. At the very least, this should cause us to be wary about concluding with any confidence that an event did not occur simply because there is silence about it.

David’s main complaint on this is the argument from silence. We’ve done podcasts on this. We’ve talked about it. We’ve talked about the possibility of Matthew using apocalyptic language and things like that. But how significant is this mysterious account when it comes to the case for the resurrection of Jesus?

Dr. Craig: The fact that Pallmann would focus on so trivial an issue as this, when Allison has so many important things to say in this book, shows that he really doesn’t have a sound grasp of the central issues. Allison’s book is the most important book on the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection, and we should be talking about Allison’s arguments for the historicity of Jesus’ empty tomb and post-mortem appearances of Jesus, and so forth. The non-historicity of Matthew’s story does not subvert Allison’s conviction that Jesus was crucified, buried in a tomb, that tomb was found empty by a group of his female disciples, and his post-mortem appearances. Let me just read to you a couple of things that Allison says in his book. On page 107 with respect to the burial, he says,

Given that the case against the historicity of Mark 15:42–46, when critically examined, founders, it does not surprise that one can muster respectable arguments for a more conservative conclusion. Namely, Mark 15:42–47 is in its gist historical.

And then he goes on to list three, four, five, six, seven, ten arguments in support of the historicity of the burial account of Jesus in the tomb. This is enormously significant because once you admit that the site of Jesus’ tomb was known in Jerusalem to Jew and Christian alike, then it becomes almost impossible to deny the historicity of the empty tomb when the disciples began to preach Jesus’ resurrection. So Allison offers a robust, multifaceted case for the historicity of Jesus’ burial.

Now, with respect to the empty tomb itself, on pages 162 and following, he says,

The two best arguments against the tradition — namely, the ability of early Christians to create fictions, including fictions involving resurrection [that would be like Matthew 27, the resurrection of the saints], and the existence of numerous legends about missing bodies — while powerful, these objections remain hypothetical and suggestive, whereas the two best arguments for the tradition are concrete and evidential: (A) the short, enigmatic story in Mark 16:1–8, which invited so much revision and expansion, looks like a memory a Christian sought to upgrade, and (B) the involvement of Mary Magdalene and other women commends itself as non-fiction.

So, Allison defends the historicity of the empty tomb of Jesus on these two grounds and dismisses objections to it based on things like Matthew’s resurrection of the saints story. In fact, I think that Allison is too skeptical here. In my published work, I have defended a number of the arguments for the empty tomb against his criticisms. But we mustn’t lose sight of the fact that he does affirm the historicity of the empty tomb on these two grounds.

Finally, what about the resurrection appearances? On page 61 of his book, he deals with the resurrection appearance to the Twelve, which is perhaps the most important resurrection appearance, and he said, “I prefer a slightly more modest formulation: we need not doubt that it really happened.” So Allison does not think that we need to doubt that this post-mortem appearance to the Twelve actually occurred.

These are the important conclusions of his study that we really should be talking about. In fact, if you think about it – just think about this for a moment – Allison’s skepticism about the Matthean passage of the resurrection of the saints actually makes his affirmation of the burial story, the empty tomb, and the post-mortem appearances all the more impressive because this is coming from a man who is quite willing to admit the presence of unhistorical legend in the gospels. And yet, despite that, he feels compelled by the evidence to affirm the historicity of these events. Now that’s really impressive.

Kevin Harris: OK, let’s pick it up right there next time. And by the way, if you want to check out David Pallmann’s new YouTube channel, it’s Faith Because of Reason on YouTube. See you next time on Reasonable Faith with Dr. William Lane Craig.^[1]