J.R.D. Kirk summed up my own feelings on the matter in the space of one Tweet:
Each item of “evidence” that we present can go either way. We can appeal to an empty tomb. They can say the body was stolen. We can appeal to post-resurrection appearances. They can say these are hallucinations. The evidence can only go so far. When it is all said and done we either believe that Peter, James, Paul, and others when they say they saw Jesus resurrected from the dead or we can discount them for a variety of reasons.
I have no reason to believe they lied.
the archives near Emmaus 
I believe Peter, Jacob, James and Paul too. I believe they believed in Jesus’ resurrection and I believe they had visions, as people have visions today. I believe Jesus had predicted his death and vindication by resurrection (and resurrection was a Jewish belief, see Macabees resurrection of martyrs and also general resurrection expectation in Hebrew Bible), and his disciples believed him and interpreted they grief experiences as such. I believe some doubted as Matthew concedes – and after all the rest of the disciple do disappear from christian tradition… they didn’t have visions as Jesus’ closest disciples did. Therefore I don’t believe Jesus rose from the dead, but I can’t prove he didn’t so what I believe doesn’t really matter 😉
For Peter and some of the disciples closest to Christ I can see why they may have had ‘grief experiences’. James doesn’t make as much sense since the evangelist describe Jesus’ brothers as doubting his claims to be Messiah. Paul makes the least amount of sense since he seems to have thought the Christian sect was a heresy that needed to be eliminated even if it meant by murder.
Brian,
I disagree with jrdkirk’s reasoning. I think any reasonable person would ask, “Why think Paul was justified in believing Jesus rose from the dead?”, which takes us right back to the issue of evidence. It is inescapable. Of course, jrdkirk’s point could be that Paul is a trustworthy witness, so we should believe him. That’s a slightly different point, but again, you have to ask what makes Paul a trustworthy witness, which requires that we examine his testimony/evidence.
I agree with you that we have no reason to believe the disciples lied, but why is that? You don’t know them. I don’t know them. So how can we judge their character? We can’t. So why think they were telling the truth? It’s because of the evidence: We have no reason to believe they would steal the body and/or lie about seeing Jesus alive from the dead, and then be killed for that lie.
But what if all they reported was their belief that Jesus rose from the dead, and didn’t say anything about His empty tomb or resurrection appearances? Would you still believe they were telling the truth? I don’t see why you would. You would be asking why they believed this. You would be asking how they knew their belief was true. Again, that takes us back to the evidence.
The fact of the matter is that we rely on much more than the disciples’ claim that Jesus is alive. We rely on the evidence they provided for that claim. If the tomb was not empty, or if Jesus never appeared to anyone after being killed, then we would call their belief into question. It’s because they witnessed His tomb to be empty, and seen Him alive from the dead, and many of them went to their death’s maintaining that Jesus was alive that we believe their testimony.
I also don’t agree with you that the evidence “can go either way.” Yes, people can offer rebuttals to our evidence (theft, hallucinations, etc.), but that doesn’t mean the evidence is equal for the resurrection hypothesis and the competing naturalistic hypotheses. Indeed, the rebuttals are demonstrably weak. No competing hypothesis has the explanatory power and explanatory scope as the resurrection, and thus the conclusion that Jesus rose from the dead is the best conclusion.
I do agree, however, that the evidence can only takes us so far. There comes a point at which one has to make a conclusion about Jesus’ fate that is based on the evidence, and yet surpasses the evidence. It’s a step of trust, but that trust is based on the facts that we know as reported to us by those who witnessed the events in question.
@Jason,
I wouldn’t disagree that the evidence is stronger for resurrection than not. I do agree. What I am saying is that it is one of those things that when it comes down to it we cannot “prove” any of these evidences. Rather, while I agree the evidence is strong, my central reason for belief is I think that the witnesses are trustworthy and have no reason to present the evidence they did unless it were true.
What Kirk is saying, I think, is that the evidence absent of the character of the witnesses does not suffice. There is something important about the character of the witnesses.
Resurrection was a Jewish belief. Those men risked their lives by claiming Jesus had risen from the dead. They would not lie. But if Jesus’ place of burial had been known is would be venerated today.
Brian,
I just spent 20 minutes typing a response and lost it all! Let me try again.
Because I trust you ( 🙂 ), I’ll take your word for it, but what you wrote–as written–reads as if you are saying the evidence could really go “either way,” and the tie-breaker is your personal decision to trust the witnesses.
If by “prove” you mean prove with “certainty,” then I would agree, but very few things can be proven in such fashion. The usual standard of proof is beyond reasonable doubt. And I think we can demonstrate the resurrection of Jesus beyond reasonable doubt, in the same manner as we would demonstrate the truth of any other historical truth claim.
Again, I agree with you that the witnesses are trustworthy, but why think that? As I said before, you don’t know them, so how do you know they are trustworthy? The only basis I can see on which you could conclude that is because of the detailed evidence they provided in their testimony. You test the evidence, find it to be sound, and then conclude that the witnesses are reliable. But if all they did was leave us their assertion that Jesus rose from the dead, would you believe them? Surely not. Not anymore than you would someone telling you they saw an alien. You would need evidence for that claim, especially if you didn’t know the person personally. The same is true of the witnesses of Jesus’ resurrection. I think the only way you can conclude that they are trustworthy (since you don’t know them) is because you have examined the evidence they presented for the claim, and found it true to history. But if it was the evidence they presented that serves as the basis for concluding that the witness is trustworthy, then the evidence is key. One can only conclude that the witnesses are trustworthy to the degree that the witnesses provide evidence for their claim, and that evidence checks out.
Maybe Kirk can speak for himself, but your explanation of his statement doesn’t seem to match his statement. He was quite clear that he believes Jesus rose from the dead, “not because of the ‘evidence’ “, but because Paul believed it, and he believes Paul. I don’t see how that translates into a statement that affirms both the evidence and the character of the witness are important. It seems to be a clear affirmation that the evidence doesn’t matter–only Paul’s claim matters because Kirk chooses to believe Paul. It’s a tweet, and it doesn’t look like there was any context to this, but maybe you know something about what Kirk has said elsewhere that I don’t know about that would change my opinion if I knew of it. But all I have are his words as you’ve posted them, and those words clearly convey the idea that for him, evidence is irrelevant.
Is there a single first-person source for Jesus’ resurrection aside from Paul saying in 1 Cor. “Jesus appeared to me?” That seems to be it for first person sources. Pretty brief and well, doubtful.
Note also the growing number of words allegedly spoken by the resurrected Jesus over time with the story’s retelling:
http://edward-t-babinski.blogspot.com/2010/03/word-about-growing-words-of-resurrected.html
Edward,
In an oral culture is it any surprise that we have so few written sources? How many written sources do we have on various aspects of the life of Caesar Augustus? In addition, the gospels present theological history. While popular scholarship has denounced any eyewitness claims of the gospels it takes more to convince me that a trend in academia that survives only by discovering something new and more novel than the last theory.
As for doubting the Apostle’s account that is a bit subjective. I find him convincing; you do not find him convincing. All we have is his testimony on the matter. I have no reason to believe that he lied, or that he had a hallucination, or any other such theory. You may find his testimony doubtful, I do not.
Hi Brian, I think you’re missing my point about the evidence for lengendary growth. There is every prima facia reason to believe that the story of Jesus’ resurrection underwent legendary growth. “He appeared” seems to be the earliest kernel upon which the legend grew. Accretions after that appear in the NT studied chronologically.
See my letter to Gary Habermas in which I examine the ways in which the resurrection story grew in retellings, chronologically, from 1 Cor. to Mark, Matthew, Luke & John.
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~slocks/asym/babinski-jordan/2.html
And read my piece on the growing number of alleged words and lectures delivered by the resurrected Jesus:
http://edward-t-babinski.blogspot.com/2010/03/word-about-growing-words-of-resurrected.html
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Also, since Bauckham is in the news a lot please note this review:
“How Accurate are Eyewitnesses? Bauckham and the Eyewitnesses in the Light of Psychological Research” appears in the latest edition of Journal of Biblical Literature 129 (2010) 177-197 http://judyredman.wordpress.com/2010/04/01/eyewitness-testimony-and-psychology/#comment-1358
And this review as well :
It must be said however, that many will remain unconvinced by the alternative model of a “Formal Controlled Tradition” that Bauckham proposes in this book. It may be true that the literary features of mark show a closer connection with the testimony of Peter than is commonly assumed. But the evidence fails to sustain Bauckham’s hypothesis of a fixed body of Jesus tradition formulated by the Twelve in Jerusalem and mediated directly to the author of Mark through the apostolic preaching of Peter. Without accepting Bauckham’s dubious claim that Peter’s appearance at the beginning and end of Mark represents a literary device for identifying the work’s authoritative witness, it is very difficult to affirm the other alleged indication of the author’s reliance on Peter’s testimony, which are ambiguous at best. Equally questionable are the historical conclusions Backham draws from Paul’s Letters about the formal transmission of Jesus traditions. The level of institutionalization thus ascribed to the Jesus movement in the earliest stages of its development strains credibility. Likewise, Bauckham’s hypothesis about the Beloved Disciple as the eyewitness author of the Fourth Gospel will not convince many. Often resting on unproven assumptions, the argument frequently invokes highly conjectural explanations of textual evidence that are not easily affirmed. For examples, most will find fanciful the attempt to account for the infrequency and obscurity of references to the Beloved Disciples by appealing to the author’s need to establish his credibility as a perceptive disciple before disclosing his identity as the actual author of the Gospel. Even if we were to accept as probable many of the conclusions Bauckham draws from the Gospels, there still remains a larger question that weakens the argument of the book. If it is true that the Evangelists attached such importance to eyewitness testimony, then why are indications of this not more obvious and explicit? In response, Bauckham claims that ancient readers would have expected the Gospels to have eyewitness sources and so would have been alert to the subtle indications provided by the text. This explanation ascribes to the Evangelists and their readers a full measure of literary sophistication and an informed familiarity with the canons of Greco-Roman historiography. But this seems to far exceed what we can claim to know about the first eyewitnesses and those who listened to their testimony.
–Dean Bechard of the Pontifico Instituto Biblico, Rome–final paragraph of his review of Richard Bauckham’s, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. Review published in Biblica, v.90, fasc.1, 2009, p. 126-129.
Edward,
This whole comment acts as if I am unaware of the data. I am not unaware of the data. The data stands on its own. What you presented to Gary Habermas it an interpretation of the data. Likewise, Bauckham’s works are interpretations of the data and those who have challenged Bauckham challenge his interpretation of the data because there are other possibile interpretations. To put it simply: this can go on and on and on.
It is altogether possible that you are correct. I am not denying that it makes pefect logical sense. All I am saying is that I do not find it convincing. I find it more likely that there were various amounts of information given in the Pauline Epistles, the Synoptics, and the Fourth Gospel depending on (1) the role of the resurrection in what was being addressed and (2) the perspective of the author.
For Paul the resurrection is interwoven through the whole corpus. It is obvious that it is central to his beliefs. He is one of our earliest writers and if part of his letters (e.g. Rom 1.1-3) are quotations of “creedal” statements from the early church we could very well have evidence that belief in Jesus’ resurrection as a staple part of their message and ethos very early on.
In the Second Gospel there is a very basic kernal of the narrative. You are correct. This does not mean the author of the First Gospel embellished. It means either (1) he had more details or (2) he found the story more valuable to narrative. We can only speculate why Mark ends where he does. Your theory is as good as any, but it is only a theory.
The Third Gospel and the Book of Acts are admitted compilations of the various testimonies compiled by the author. He even seems to suggest that he had to sort out and avoid some spurrious tales. While he may have got it all wrong it is just as possible that he got it right and that he did his thourough research on the matter. Again, we have data and interpretations of that data.
While it is possible that Bauckham is incorrect regarding the author of the Fourth Gospel it is my belief that he is mostly correct. Sure, the Fourth Gospel is theological history. It is anarchronist, and it is hard to know where to draw the lines between how the author viewed Jesus before and after the resurrection, but I think he was an eyewitness and I trust his testimony.
There is a time and place for debating the resurrection. We have done it. But there are likewise limits to its effectiveness. I do not intend on convincing you and I am sure deep down you know you can’t convince me.