Doctrine of Christ (Part 42): The Work of Christ (35) - Resurrection Hypotheses

February 21, 2018     Time: 38:26

Summary


Assessing Competing Hypotheses To Explain The Three Facts

I said that a case for the historical resurrection of Jesus will involve two stages. First is assembling the facts to be explained, and secondly there will be assessing which is the best explanation of those facts. We have seen that there are principally three facts that any adequate historical hypothesis must account for – the discovery of Jesus' empty tomb, his postmortem appearances to various individuals and groups, and finally the very origin of the disciples' belief in his resurrection. Today we now want to turn to various competing hypotheses that are attempts to explain these three facts. We want to assess their adequacy to determine which is the best explanation.

How do historians go about determining what is the best explanation for any body of facts? According to the professional historian C. B. McCullagh in his book, Justifying Historical Descriptions, there are a number of criteria that historians employ in weighing competing historical hypotheses. These include things like explanatory scope. That is to say, does the hypothesis explain a wider range of data than rival hypotheses? Second would be explanatory power. Does the hypothesis render the evidence more probable than explanatory alternatives? Thirdly would be plausibility. Is the proposed explanation more plausible than rival hypotheses? Number four would be ad-hocness, that is to say, the degree of contrivedness - the degree to which the hypothesis has to postulate certain things for which there is no independent evidence. And then accord with accepted beliefs. To what degree is the hypothesis in accord with widely accepted beliefs? To what degree is it disconfirmed by accepted beliefs? Finally, does the hypothesis surpass its rival hypotheses in meeting the above conditions?

Since any given hypothesis may do really well in meeting some criteria and not so well in meeting other criteria it requires historical skill on the part of the historian to assess competing explanations. But if an explanation has greater explanatory scope and greater explanatory power than rival hypotheses then it is very likely to be the best explanation of the evidence.

So what I would like to do is to weigh the typical hypotheses which have been offered down through history to explain the facts of the empty tomb, the postmortem appearances, and the origin of the disciples' belief in Jesus' resurrection, and let's see how well they explain those facts compared to the resurrection hypothesis, which is that God raised Jesus from the dead.

The very first hypothesis that we want to consider is the so-called conspiracy hypothesis. According to this explanation the disciples stole the body of Jesus and then lied about his postmortem appearances thus faking the resurrection of Jesus. You will recall this was the very first counter-explanation of the resurrection offered by the unbelieving Jewish authorities in Jesus' day. It was revived during the 18th century by European deists. Today, however, the old conspiracy hypothesis has been completely abandoned by modern scholarship. Let's see how it fares when assessed by McCullagh's criteria for justifying historical descriptions.[1]

First of all, explanatory scope. The conspiracy hypothesis does seem to have adequate explanatory scope. It covers the full range of the evidence. It offers explanation for the empty tomb, namely the disciples stole Jesus’ corpse. The postmortem appearances. They lied about these. And the origin of the disciples' supposedly belief in Jesus' resurrection. Again, they lied! So it does have explanatory scope to cover those three facts. What about explanatory power? Here doubts begin to arise about the conspiracy hypothesis. Consider first of all the empty tomb. If the disciples had stolen Jesus' corpse then it would be utterly daft for them to fabricate the story about the discovery of the empty tomb by women. Given the unreliability of the witness of women in Jewish society, such a story would not be the sort of tale that Jewish men would invent in order to fake the resurrection of Jesus. Moreover, the simplicity of the empty tomb narrative is not well explained by the conspiracy hypothesis. where are the citations of Scripture, the evidence of fulfilled prophecy? Why isn't Jesus described in the story as emerging victorious from the tomb as in the later forgeries like the Gospel of Peter? Neither is the polemic with unbelieving Jews well explained. Why isn't Matthew's guard story right there in the pre-Markan tradition? And why isn't the guard placed on Friday rather than on Saturday? In Matthew's story it is entirely possible that the body had been stolen by the disciples Friday night and that the guard was in fact guarding an empty tomb unbeknownst to them. In order to refute the theft of the body hypothesis you need to have something more like the Gospel of Peter. In the Gospel of Peter the guard, which is identified as a Roman guard, is placed immediately on Friday when the corpse is interred in the tomb. So the empty tomb story doesn't look like the sort of account that would be fabricated by conspirators.

What about the postmortem appearances? Again, similar doubts arise. A fabricator of postmortem appearances of Jesus would probably describe the appearances on the basis of Old Testament theophanies, that is appearances or visions of God, and descriptions of the resurrection of the dead at the end of the world for Judgment Day as in Daniel 12:2. But in that case Jesus should appear to the disciples in dazzling glory. Why is there no description of the resurrection itself? Why aren't there stories of the appearances of Jesus to Caiaphas and the villains on the Sanhedrin to whom Jesus said he would be apparent? They could then be branded as the real liars for denying that Jesus did appear to them after his resurrection!

But the explanatory power of the conspiracy hypothesis, I think, is undoubtedly weakest when it comes to that third fact, namely the origin of the disciples’ belief in Jesus’ resurrection. Because the hypothesis is really a denial of that fact. It is not an explanation of it; it is a denial of that fact. It tries to explain the mere semblance of belief of the earliest disciples in Jesus’ resurrection. But as critics since the time of D. F. Strauss have universally recognized, you cannot plausibly deny that these earliest disciples at least sincerely believed that God had raised Jesus from the dead. This was a conviction on which they staked their very lives. The transformation in the lives of these disciples is not plausibly explained by the hypothesis of a conspiracy. This shortcoming alone has been enough in the minds of most scholars to sink the old conspiracy hypothesis forever.[2]

What about plausibility? The real Achilles heel of the conspiracy hypothesis is, I think, its implausibility. Here you might mention the usual sorts of objections to a conspiracy such as its complexity, the psychological state of the disciples following Jesus' death, and so on. But really the overriding problem of the conspiracy hypothesis is the anachronism of the hypothesis, namely it is anachronistic to think that first-century Jewish men would intend to fake the resurrection of Jesus. The conspiracy hypothesis views the disciples' situation through the rearview mirror of Christian history rather than through the eyes of a first-century Jew. Remember that we saw there was no expectation whatsoever of a Messiah who instead of establishing David's throne in Jerusalem and establishing his reign and subduing Israel's enemies would be defeated by the Gentiles and shamefully executed by them as a criminal. Moreover, the idea of eschatological resurrection from the dead was just completely unconnected with the idea of the Messiah and was even incompatible with it. So as N. T. Wright has aptly put it, if your favorite Messiah got himself crucified you basically had two choices: either you went home, or you got yourself a new Messiah. But the idea of stealing Jesus' corpse and saying that God had raised him from the dead is hardly one that would have entered into the minds of these first Jewish disciples.

Next, the degree of ad-hocness of the hypothesis. Like all conspiracy theories of history, the conspiracy hypothesis is ad hoc in that it postulates that everything that the evidence points to is really just appearance only. It is explained away by hypotheses for which we have absolutely no independent evidence. In particular, it postulates motives and ideas in the thinking of the earliest disciples and actions on their part for which there isn't a shred of evidence. It can become even more ad hoc as hypotheses need to be multiplied in order to deal with objections to the theory. For example, how to account for the appearance to the five hundred brethren, or how to account for the women's role in the discovery of the empty tomb. You just have to keep accumulating ad hoc hypotheses in order to explain the data.

What about its accord with accepted beliefs? The conspiracy hypothesis tends to be disconfirmed by our general knowledge of conspiracies, their instability and their tendency to unravel overtime. Moreover, it is disconfirmed by accepted beliefs such as the sincerity of the disciples, and also the nature of first-century Jewish messianic expectations, and so forth. So the hypothesis does tend to be disconfirmed by widely accepted beliefs.

Finally, does it exceed its rivals in fulfilling the first five conditions? Obviously not. There are better explanatory alternatives than the conspiracy hypothesis. For example, the hallucination hypothesis is far more plausible than the conspiracy hypothesis because these don't have to dismiss the disciples' belief in Jesus' resurrection as mere appearance and fraud.

The bottom line is that no scholar today would accept the conspiracy hypothesis. The only place that you read about such things is in the popular, sensationalist press or in the internet subculture.

A second hypothesis was the apparent death explanation. You will remember that we saw that around the beginning of the 19th century certain critics such as Heinrich Paulus and Friedrich Schleiermacher defended the view that Jesus was not completely dead when he was taken down from the cross.[3] Instead he revived in the tomb and somehow escaped to convince his disciples that he had risen from the dead. Again, today this hypothesis has been virtually universally given up. Once again, let's apply McCullagh's six criteria to this hypothesis.

First, the explanatory scope of the hypothesis. Again, I think, the apparent death hypothesis does have adequate explanatory scope. It provides explanations for the empty tomb, for the postmortem appearances, and for the origin of the disciples’ mistaken belief in Jesus’ resurrection.

What about its explanatory power? Well, this is, again, where the theory begins to founder. Some versions of the apparent death hypothesis are really just variations on the conspiracy hypothesis where the disciples decide to hoax Jesus’ resurrection by making it appear that he was dead and they actually took him down alive and revived him in the tomb and so forth. So it merely substitutes hoaxing his death for stealing the body. In that case it really collapses into the conspiracy theory and shares all of the weaknesses of that theory.

A non-conspiratorial version of the theory is also saddled with great difficulties. For example, consider its account of the empty tomb. How are you to explain the fact of the empty tomb given Jesus’ merely apparent death since a man sealed inside of a closed tomb could not possibly have opened the tomb in order to escape? It would be physically impossible. Or consider the postmortem appearances. As D. F. Strauss explained, the appearance of a half-dead man desperately in need of bandaging and medical attention would hardly have elicited in the disciples the belief that he was the risen Lord and the conqueror of death! Finally, what about the origin of the disciples’ belief in Jesus’ resurrection? Again, it doesn’t adequately explain that since seeing a half-dead Jesus desperately in need of medical care would not have elicited belief in his resurrection from the dead in the Jewish sense of that term, but would have led them to believe that in fact he had not died – that he had somehow escaped the executioner’s vengeance. It would not have led them to believe he was gloriously risen from the dead in contradiction to their own eyes.

What about the plausibility of the apparent death theory? Here, again, I think the theory just fails miserably. Roman executioners could be relied upon to see that their victims were dead. Since the exact moment of crucifixion is uncertain – the victim actually dies of asphyxiation as he is unable to breathe – executioners could ensure that the victim was in fact dead by a spear thrust into the victim’s side such as was done in the case of Jesus. This is attested in extra-biblical classical sources. Moreover, what the theory suggests is virtually physically impossible. The extent of Jesus’ tortures and crucifixion was such that he could never have survived the crucifixion and entombment. Even if he were still alive when taken down from the cross he would have expired almost immediately in the tomb. The idea that a man so critically wounded could go on to appear to the disciples on various occasions in Galilee and in Jerusalem is just fantasy. So the theory is really quite implausible, I think.

What about its ad hocness? Again, the apparent death hypothesis, especially in its conspiratorial versions, can become enormously ad hoc.[4] For example, some 19th century authors invite us to imagine secret societies that were engineering this hoax, stealthily administered potions to make Jesus appear to be dead, conspiratorial alliances between Jesus’ disciples and members of the Sanhedrin, and so forth. All of this with no evidence whatsoever in support. It is completely ad hoc.

What about its accord with accepted beliefs? The apparent death hypothesis is massively disconfirmed by medical facts concerning what would happen to a person who had been scourged and then crucified. It is also disconfirmed by the unanimous evidence that Jesus did not in fact continue among his disciples living with them after his death.

Finally, does the hypothesis significantly exceed its rivals in fulfilling conditions one to five? Again, it hardly does that. There are better hypotheses. So, once again, this theory has virtually no defenders today among New Testament historians.

START DISCUSSION

Student: Is this similar to what Muslims believe?

Dr. Craig: No, it isn’t, in fact. What Muslims tend to believe is that Jesus wasn’t even crucified. So it wasn’t that he was crucified and managed to survive. It is rather that God substituted a kind of double for him on the cross so that Jesus was not crucified but this double was. In Islamic tradition, not in the Qur’an but in Islamic tradition, this double is often identified with Judas Iscariot. Judas was crucified in Jesus’ place and that it looked like Jesus was crucified! So the orthodox Muslim position is quite different. It denies the fact of the crucifixion and thereby flies in the face of what every historian believes about Jesus of Nazareth. If there is one single historical fact about Jesus of Nazareth that is indisputable it is his crucifixion.

Student: So if they believe that Judas was crucified as a double for Jesus, how do they rectify the empty tomb? Because they would still have a body that they would have to get rid of. Do they try to go back to the theory that they stole the body away?

Dr. Craig: I don’t know if there is a sort of orthodox Muslim view on facts of the empty tomb. They tend to believe that the Gospels have been corrupted in the course of their translation and transmission. So in a sense it could be very much like the legend hypothesis that we will consider later – that these aren’t really facts. But that is why we’ve spent so much time looking at the evidence for the empty tomb and the postmortem appearances so that these can’t just be written off as legends.

END DISCUSSION

Let’s go to the third hypothesis which is the wrong tomb hypothesis. This was first proposed in 1907 by a scholar named Kirsopp Lake. This theory holds that the belief in Jesus’ empty tomb was simply based on a mistake. According to Lake, the women lost their way going to the tomb early that Sunday morning in the dark and they happened to come upon a caretaker at an unoccupied tomb in the garden. He said something like this to them: You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth. He is not here. See the place where they laid him [pointing to a different location]. The women were so rattled by meeting this person that they fled from the tomb. After the disciples had then experienced visions of Jesus alive, the women’s story evolved into the account of their discovery of Jesus’ empty tomb.

Unlike the previous two theories that we’ve just discussed, Lake’s hypothesis was stillborn right from the beginning. It generated almost no following whatsoever among scholars. Let’s see why. First, what about its explanatory scope? Lake’s theory really doesn’t explain the postmortem appearances.[5] He tries to give an explanation of the empty tomb but he says nothing to explain the postmortem appearances. So you are going to have to conjoin some additional hypothesis. For example, the hallucination hypothesis to the wrong tomb hypothesis in order to cover the full scope of the evidence. In that sense the theory does not have sufficiently wide explanatory scope.

What about its explanatory power? Consider the postmortem appearances. Since it says nothing to explain the postmortem appearances it obviously has zero explanatory power when it comes to the postmortem appearances. You are going to need to rely upon some independent hypothesis for that.

What about the origin of the disciples’ belief in Jesus’ resurrection? Again, the theory doesn’t really give a plausible explanation of that belief. Merely going to the wrong tomb and finding a man there who says that Jesus isn’t there would hardly lead a first-century Jew to believe that Jesus is risen from the dead which would completely contradict Jewish beliefs about the nature of the resurrection.

What about the empty tomb? Any later check of the empty tomb would have revealed the women’s mistake. Certainly the disciples themselves would have wanted to verify the women’s report that the tomb was empty. In any case, since the burial site was known to Jew and Christian alike (remember Jesus was interred by a member of the Sanhedrin, Joseph of Arimathea) the Jewish opponents of the Christian movement would have been only too happy to point out the women’s error.

What about plausibility? The wrong tomb hypothesis is also implausible in light of the evidence that we have that the site of Jesus’ tomb was known to Jew and Christian alike in Jerusalem. It also doesn’t explain well the fact that the empty tomb story is extremely early. It doesn’t show signs of theological development and reflection and so forth. Insofar as the hallucination hypothesis proves to be implausible (we will see that later on), Lake’s theory will also share in that implausibility if it needs the hallucination hypothesis to explain the full scope of the evidence. So the theory is implausible in a number of ways.

What about its being ad hoc? Lake’s theory is ad hoc in that it treats the evidence selectively and arbitrarily. For example, Lake accepts the historicity of the women’s visit to the tomb, and he accepts as historical their intention of going to anoint the body. But he ignores the reason that they noted exactly the location of the tomb because of that intention in Mark 15:47 and Mark 16:1. Because of their intention of going to anoint the body, the women noted where Jesus' corpse had been interred, and Lake just ignores that fact. He accepts the one fact but not the other, but he gives no grounds or basis for that. It is ad hoc.  Again, Lake regards the words of the caretaker, You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, He is not here, as authentic, but he passes over in silence the words, He is risen.  But all of this is the language of Christian proclamation if any of it is. So there is just no grounds for that ad hoc selectivity as to what is historical in the angel's words and what is not.

Similarly, there is no grounds for taking Mark's young man (as he calls him) to be a human rather than an angelic figure. The Greek word that is used here for the young man is often used of angels, and his white robe is typical for angelic appearances. Moreover, the women's fear and astonishment and trembling is a characteristic motif in the Gospel of Mark for confrontations with the divine, and it presupposes that we are dealing here with a confrontation with an angelic figure.[6] So it is arbitrary and ad hoc to accept some of these facts but not the others.

Finally, is the hypothesis in accord with accepted beliefs? The wrong tomb hypothesis is disconfirmed by the generally accepted beliefs that Joseph of Arimathea did bury Jesus in the tomb and thus could point to the correct burial location. You would have to say maybe Joseph of Arimathea and any servants with him suffered heart attacks and died before they could be asked where the tomb was, and that is just to multiply more ad hoc hypotheses.

Finally, does it exceed its rivals in fulfilling conditions one to five? Again, nobody thinks that the wrong tomb hypothesis outstrips is rival hypotheses.

One of the few Jewish attempts to deal with the facts concerning Jesus' resurrection was proposed by Joseph Klasner in 1922. I called this the displaced body hypothesis. According to Klasner, Joseph of Arimathea, because of the shortness of the time and the lateness of the hour, placed Jesus' corpse in his own family tomb. But this was merely temporary. He then moved the corpse later to the criminals' graveyard. Well, the women were unaware that Joseph had later displaced the body and so they went to his family tomb on Sunday morning and found it empty, and hence the disciples erroneously inferred that Jesus was risen from the dead.

Although no scholars defend Klasner's hypothesis today, I have seen this hypothesis repeated by popular authors on the internet. I think in light of what has already been said about these other theories its shortcomings are evident.

First, what about its explanatory scope? The displaced body hypothesis has narrow explanatory scope. It is an attempt to explain the empty tomb, but it says absolutely nothing about the postmortem appearances of Jesus or about the origin of the disciples’ belief in Jesus' resurrection. So you are going to again need to conjoin to the displaced body hypothesis independent hypotheses to try to account for the full scope of the evidence.

What about its explanatory power? Klasner’s hypothesis obviously has no explanatory power with regard to the appearances and the origin of the disciples' belief in the resurrection since it says nothing about these. What about the empty tomb which it does try to explain? Here it faces the same obstacle as Lake's wrong tomb hypothesis. Namely, since Joseph and any servants that were with him who helped with the internment of the body knew what they had done with the corpse the theory is at a loss to explain why the disciples' error wasn't corrected. Unless, again, you resort to ad hoc conjectures that Joseph and all of his servants somehow suddenly died before they could be asked what they had done with the body.

Someone might say perhaps Jesus' corpse would have no longer been identifiable by the time Joseph said, This is what we did with it – we put it in the criminals' graveyard. But that answer misses the point. The point is that the earliest Jewish-Christian disputes about the resurrection of Jesus, remember, were not over the identity of his corpse but rather they were about why the tomb was empty. The Jewish authorities had said the disciples had stolen the body and that is why it was missing. Had Joseph merely displaced the body, the earliest Jewish-Christian polemic would have taken a very different course trying to describe whether or not the remains were in fact Jesus' remains rather than somebody else's. The Jewish-Christian dispute never went that route; rather the route it went was trying to explain why the tomb was empty.[7]

What about plausibility? The hypothesis is implausible for a number of reasons. Insofar as we can rely upon rabbinic sources, the criminals' graveyard was only about fifty to six hundred yards away from the site of Jesus' crucifixion. Moreover, Jewish practice was always to bury executed criminals on the very day of their execution. So that is what Joseph, as a member of the Sanhedrin, would have wanted to accomplish. He would therefore have placed the body directly in the criminals' graveyard so that he wouldn't have to move it later on or defile his own family tomb with the body of a condemned criminal. The criminals' graveyard was close enough that Joseph could have placed the corpse directly there. In fact, Jewish law did not even permit the body to be moved later as this hypothesis suggests. The only exception was you could move the corpse to the site of the family tomb. Of course in this case we are not talking about removing the corpse to Jesus' family tomb but rather to the criminals' graveyard. So Joseph had adequate time following Jesus' death for a simple burial and to lay it in the criminals' graveyard without the need to put it in his own family tomb and then displace it later.

Next to last, what about the ad hocness? The theory is not greatly ad hoc, but it is somewhat ad hoc in that it ascribes to Joseph motives and activities like displacing the body for which we have no independent evidence at all. So it is mildly ad hoc.

What about its disconfirmation by accepted beliefs? The theory is disconfirmed from what we know about Jewish burial procedures for criminals such as I just mentioned a moment ago.

Finally, does it significantly exceed its rivals in meeting conditions one through five? Again, no historian thinks that this hypothesis outstrips its rivals in meeting these criteria.

We come then to the myth or legend hypothesis. This is a good place to end our lesson for today. We will take up D. F. Strauss’ theory that is also the theory of Bultmann and modern New Testament criticism that the empty tomb, the postmortem appearances, and so forth are simply the result of the accumulation of myth and legend.[8]

 

[1]          5:04

[2]          10:07

[3]          15:15

[4]          20:00

[5]          25:00

[6]          30:00

[7]          35:02

[8]          Total Running Time: 38:35 (Copyright © 2018 William Lane Craig)