Scholarship and the Resurrection of Jesus

Kevin Harris:

Dr. Craig, a scholar friend of mine said that it’s improbable that Jesus was entombed by Joseph of Arimathea due to the fact that Pontius Pilate was not the type of man to give permission. He said Pilate didn’t care about Jewish traditions, culture, and that he was a very cruel man with no space for sympathy. He used as an example of when he was extremely terrible to the Jews. So it was unlikely he would have had sympathy for Jesus. He then says that Jesus was left to hang on the cross for a few days and then was buried with the rest of the criminals. As a Christian, I normally try to refute claims. I would say that we barely have any historical information on Pilate to begin with so it’s unlikely if we know his cruelty was a pattern. Secondly, even if he was buried with criminals, that doesn’t explain the multiple resurrection appearances, which is impossible to have been hallucinations, and the amount of faith the apostles had to die for their cause. These questions are bothering me quite a bit so I was hoping you could answer both of them using historical information as much as possible. So my questions are: one, would Pontius Pilate deny Jesus’ burial by Joseph? And two, even if Jesus was buried with crucified criminals, can his resurrection and faith and all his disciples be defended? Genmi, United States.

Dr. Craig: What Genmi needs to understand is the distinction between the probability of Jesus’ burial by Joseph of Arimathea on the background information alone, without considering the specific evidence, and then what the probability of Jesus’ entombment by Joseph of Arimathea is on the combination of the background information plus the specific evidence. And it’s entirely possible that if you consider the entombment of Jesus by Joseph solely on the background information, that it would be improbable, but that this is simply overcome by the specific evidence that we have that Jesus was in fact entombed by Joseph of Arimathea. So his scholar friend is simply ignoring the specific evidence. What his friend is saying is that if you ignore all the evidence for Jesus’ burial by Joseph and you just look at your general background information, it’s improbable that Pontius Pilate would have given over the body of Jesus to be buried. I would say, in the first place, that that’s not very improbable at all. Pontius Pilate was politically shrewd, and he knew when to compromise in order to avoid problems with the troublesome Jewish subjects that he had to govern. So, for example, Josephus tells the story of a run-in that Pilate had with Jews about AD 26. That’s just a few years before Jesus was crucified. Pilate had commanded that there be standards of the emperor placed in the Jewish temple. The Jews protested violently against this desecration of their temple. Pilate sent armed soldiers into the crowds with swords. And at his command, they unsheathed their swords and threatened to kill the Jewish protesters. At that point, the Jewish protesters bared their necks and said, “We would rather die than have our temple desecrated in this way.” And so what did Pilate do? He backed down and had the standards removed. In order to maintain the peace, Pilate knew when to compromise.

Now, you find exactly the same thing happening at the trial of Jesus. Pilate wants to let Jesus go. But when the Jewish leadership begins to threaten a riot and they say to Pilate, “If you let this man go, you are no friend of Caesar’s,” then Pilate, knowing which side of the bread his political butter is on, goes ahead and sends Jesus to the cross. And it is not at all improbable that Pilate would have been willing to give up the body of Jesus, a man he knew was innocent, to a member of the Jewish Sanhedrin, Joseph of Arimathea, in order to allow him to be interred rather than simply buried with the other two thieves on the crosses beside Jesus.

That’s with regard to the background information alone. I don’t think your friend’s argument is very good. And I think that Genmi is right to say we just don’t know enough about Pilate to say with any confidence that he wouldn’t have released the corpse of Jesus to a member of the Jewish Sanhedrin. But all of that is academic anyway because we have specific evidence that, in fact, Pilate did release the body of Jesus. In my written work, I lay out something like five independent lines of specific evidence for the historicity of the burial story. And the vast majority of New Testament scholars, almost everyone, agrees with the historicity of Jesus’ entombment by Joseph of Arimathea.

So the first question that Genmi asks – would Pontius Pilate deny Jesus’ burial by Joseph? – I don’t think we can say that there’s any probability that he would have done that. But in any case, we have specific evidence that he didn’t deny burial, that he acceded to Joseph’s entombment of Jesus. So that’s the point to emphasize: the evidence we have.

As for Genmi’s other question: suppose Jesus was in fact interred by the Romans along with the other two criminals that were crucified. Could his resurrection still be defended? Well, yes, I think it could. You wouldn’t have the empty tomb in that case. But you would still have the post-mortem appearances and the transformation in the lives of the first disciples to believing that Jesus was risen from the dead.

Kevin Harris: Next question.

Hi, Dr. Craig, I’m an agnostic. I follow much of your work and appreciate your perspective. You have argued in the past that the gospel empty tomb narrative is historical, among other reasons, because it is women that discover the tomb and supposedly Jews would have considered these women unreliable witnesses. I did not find this argument compelling since in no case is there any evidence that the Christians were trying to prove the historicity of the empty tomb on the basis of any woman’s testimony. The women are not cited by Paul as witnesses. Indeed, they are never mentioned by him, nor is Joseph of Arimathea. The Gospels never say the story is based on their testimony. And Acts never appeals to their testimony to prove the empty tomb or the resurrection. I don’t see how angelic appearance at the empty tomb is any different than, for example, the angelic appearance to Abraham’s concubine, Hagar, in Genesis. Are we also to accept that story as true because Jews would not invent female witnesses? Or is it more likely that the creators of such stories wrote them to be accepted at face value and thus felt no need to prove their truth by appealing to the testimony of anyone? I welcome your thoughts on my skepticism and thank you for your consideration, Corey.

Dr. Craig: I think that it’s very clear that in the crucifixion and burial and empty tomb narrative, the women are being used as witnesses. In the first century, the practice of ancient historians in writing historical narratives was to list the people who were witnesses of these events as a way of testifying to their credibility. And this is exactly what we find in Mark. In Mark 15 and verse 40, (this is the crucifixion narrative), it says there were also women looking on from afar, and then it names them, among whom were Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James the Younger and of Joseph and Salome. And then it narrates the burial story of Jesus, and the author says in Mark 15:47, Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Joses saw where he was laid. Two of the same women. And then in chapter 16, in the empty tomb narrative, Mark says, “When the Sabbath was passed, Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James.” You notice in 15:47, he calls her by the name of one son, Mary the mother of Joses. And then here in 16:1, Mary the mother of James. We know that from the earlier verse, she is the mother of James and Joses. So he names them by both sons, then one of the two sons, and then the other son in 16:1. Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome (again) bought spices that they might go and anoint him.

And so by naming the witnesses to these successive events, the author is revealing to us the source of these stories that he’s telling us. And for the empty tomb account, there are no other witnesses. The women are the only witnesses that he’s got. Now, of course, if the empty tomb story is true, this would be a publicly verifiable story, namely, others could go to the site of Jesus’ burial and see that indeed the tomb was empty just as the women said. Nevertheless, the role of the women here is that of witnesses to the narrative that Mark is giving.

This is completely different from the story of the angel’s appearance in the Old Testament to Hagar in Genesis. There, there’s no attempt to name witnesses. This is about how Hagar is driven out. She’s in desperate need, and so the angel comes and reassures her, gives encouragement to her. It’s not at all like the empty tomb, burial, and crucifixion narratives where Mark is recounting these historical events and naming the people who are the source of these stories.

So I think that this clearly is an attempt to use the women as witnesses. And this is remarkable, as I’ve argued, because any legendary account would certainly have made male disciples to be the witnesses to these events. In a patriarchal society like first century Judaism, the testimony of women was not highly regarded. And so no fabricator or legendary story would have women be the witnesses to these significant events at the climax of Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection. And that’s why the vast majority of New Testament historians today agree that these women are being recounted as witnesses to these events and that it is extremely plausible that they were in fact the witnesses of these events because any later legendary account would have had male disciples fill that role.

Kevin Harris: I’m curious. I’ve heard many stories of Christian students who pursue high-level education and are shaken up when they encounter more liberal professors and scholarship. Their world is rocked, in fact. Did you go through anything like that? Were you prepared for your encounters with Hick and Pannenberg?

Dr. Craig: As I studied the historicity of the resurrection and read what we could call liberal New Testament critics have to say about that event, actually, far from shaking my faith, I was shocked at the weakness of the objections that were brought against the resurrection of Jesus. There’s a word in German – kitsch – which just means sort of garbage. And as I would read these leftist critiques of the resurrection, I just thought, it’s the same old kitsch over and over again. I could just predict what the objections would be. And they were so superficial and easily refuted.

What I was surprised to discover, and did not realize when I went to Munich, is that the facts undergirding the inference to the resurrection of Jesus are accepted by the wide majority of New Testament critics today, whether they be liberal or conservative. And these facts are principally three in number. Number one is that the tomb of Jesus was discovered to be empty by a group of his female followers on the Sunday morning following his crucifixion. Number two, thereafter various individuals and groups suddenly experienced appearances of Jesus alive after his death. And then number three, the original disciples sincerely believed that Jesus had been raised by God from the dead despite every predisposition to the contrary.

Those are the facts that are widely accepted. And so the only question was: How do you best explain these facts? And I could think of no better explanation than the one that the original disciples gave, that God raised Jesus from the dead. So both my studies in Birmingham on the kalam cosmological argument and on the historicity of the resurrection in Munich were tremendously confirmatory to my Christian faith.

Kevin Harris: Bill, why did you want to study under Wolfhart Pannenberg?

Dr. Craig: I had, as a result of my work under John Hick at the University of Birmingham, an argument for God’s existence that I felt was cogent and persuasive. But in order to get from theism to Christian theism, you need some reason to believe that Jesus of Nazareth was God’s decisive self-revelation in human history. And I was aware that a popular apologist like Josh McDowell had argued for the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead as God’s divine vindication of the allegedly blasphemous personal claims that Jesus of Nazareth made. So it seemed to me to be logical to look into the historical credibility of the resurrection of Jesus.

Wolfhart Pannenberg was famous in German theology for his defense, historically, of belief in the resurrection of Jesus. Whereas most German theologians were either skeptical of the event of the resurrection or thought that it was something to which historical investigation was completely irrelevant, being assumed only by faith, Pannenberg was rigorously historical in his approach to the resurrection appearances and the empty tomb and the origin of the disciples’ belief in his resurrection. And so I thought if I could study under Pannenberg on this subject, I could develop a case for the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection that would beautifully complement my work on the kalam cosmological argument, and that is exactly what happened. Three books came out of that work under Pannenberg, including The Son Rises.

Kevin Harris: I’ve always been impressed by Pannenberg’s insight on what you call the religio-historical context of the resurrection as the key to its significance. You mentioned this in chapter six of the book, and you’ve used it very effectively in several of your debates. For those not familiar with this insight, tell us about it.

Dr. Craig: The question has to do with the interpretation of a miracle. How do you know that an event is a miracle? And what is the significance of that event? I think as David Hume showed, a purportedly miraculous event taken in isolation from its context is inherently ambiguous. He gives the example of the revivification of Queen Elizabeth. And he says even if all the witnesses agreed that Queen Elizabeth somehow rose from the dead, resumed her throne, and ruled for several more years, I wouldn’t have the least inclination to believe that she was miraculously risen from the dead. I would believe the most preposterous naturalistic explanation for this imposture rather than say that God raised her from the dead. And I think Hume is right about that.

What makes the case of Jesus of Nazareth so different, as Pannenberg points out, is the religio-historical context in which it occurs. It comes as the climax to Jesus’ own unparalleled life and teachings, whereby he put himself in the very place of God himself. He was convicted by the Jewish Sanhedrin on the charge of blasphemy for having blasphemed against God and then was delivered over to the Romans to be crucified as a traitor. And as Pannenberg says, if this man has been raised from the dead by God, then those allegedly blasphemous claims have been publicly and unambiguously confirmed by the God of Israel who was allegedly blasphemed by Jesus.

So whereas Queen Elizabeth’s revivification would inspire nothing but curiosity, the resurrection of Jesus, I think, is pregnant with theological significance because of the powerful religio-historical context in which it occurs. It is God’s vindication of the man whom the Jewish authorities had rejected as a blasphemer.

Kevin Harris: I was crowded in with 4,000 other people at that Parsons debate in Dallas that you did, and he brought up some kind of an illustration, I think, of what if you heard that some professor at the university were flying around the campus like Superman? Wouldn’t you want good evidence for that? Would you believe it? And I leaned over to my friend and I said, “Watch this. He’s going to use the religio-historical significance as key from Pannenberg,” and sure enough, that’s the first thing you began to rebut with and was part of that. My friend looked at me, he thought I was so smart. But I remember that moment. You know, Bill, there were books out on the resurrection when you wrote The Son Rises. What did you want to contribute to the topic? Did you think anything was missing in the popular or scholarly works?

Dr. Craig: I wasn’t really very familiar with scholarly works on the resurrection of Jesus. One of the things that this study in Munich did for me was to unearth this treasure trove of German scholarship on this subject which has never been translated into English. I was shocked that some of the best books on the resurrection of Jesus were not available in English.

In fact, you asked for an anecdote. The first day that I visited Pannenberg in his office in the Schellingstrasse in Munich, he took me into the theological library on the floor of the theology department and he said to me, “Well, why don’t you get started with these three books?” And he pulled three books off the shelf. One of them was in German, two of them were in French. And I could not possibly have said to Pannenberg, “Oh, Professor Pannenberg, I can’t read these.” I was expected to be able to do that. And so, having just spent nine months in French language school, I was equipped to handle the French. And then we’d been to German language school. I was prepared for that as well. And so, as I say, there was really a treasure trove of literature that had never been translated into English that became available to me.

What I was familiar with was popular apologetics for the resurrection. Things like Frank Morison’s book, Who Moved the Stone?, or Josh McDowell, Evidence That Demands a Verdict. But frankly, this popular-level apologetic was stuck in the apologetics of the 18th and 19th century. It was all about who stole the body and why the disciples couldn’t have stolen the body. The tomb was guarded by Roman soldiers who would have prevented the theft and so on and so forth. And that sort of popular-level apologetics is just completely out of date. It has been completely undermined by modern scholarship, which doesn’t treat the resurrection narratives as reliable. The skeptical scholar says there never was a guard at the tomb. And many skeptics will say the empty tomb story is a late-developing legend that never really happened. So the popular-level apologetic that I was familiar with was just soon evacuated of any importance. What I gained as a result of this study was a much more sophisticated and scholarly apologetic for the resurrection that is rooted in the best contemporary New Testament research.