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In this episode, Trent responds to Rabbi Tovia Singer’s arguments against the historicity of Christ’s resurrection.
Narrator:
Welcome to the Council of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Happy Easter everyone. I’m Trent Horn, an apologist for Catholic Answers, and today I want to address some of Rabbi Toviaz Singer’s arguments against Jesus’ resurrection. Toviaz Singer has been engaging Christian apologist for some time now, but he does so from a Jewish perspective as a rabbi, but I think that the topic of the resurrection is one of the most effective to discuss with a Jewish apologist. That’s because it can be really easy to get bogged down in the question of whether Jesus fulfilled specific Messianic prophecies such as you end up focusing on small details in biblical Hebrew or the interpretive traditions in the Talmud and things like that.
However, if Jesus Christ did rise from the dead, then almost everyone would agree that this would vindicate not only his claims to divinity, but he and his followers claims of him being the Messiah. Now, I’m not going to address every argument Rabbi Singer has raised against Jesus’ resurrection, but I do want to point out how Rabbi singer’s skepticism towards the resurrection if taken to its logical conclusion would undermine Judaism as well. In other words, we have a case of when Jews argue like atheists. For example, one way that Rabbi Singer argues against the resurrection is by pointing out alleged contradictions between the gospel accounts. Here’s an example…
Rabbi Singer:
Are so incompatible because they’re just different stories. Matthew’s resurrection story begins in Matthew 28th, the last chapter. We are told that early in the morning, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary come to the tomb early Sunday morning there’s an earthquake, an angel rolls away the stone from the front of the tomb. By the time the women encounter the disciples, they know everything. They know everything. Because the angel, the man that rolled away the stone informed them that Jesus isn’t there and he has already risen his gone before the Galilee and there you’ll see him and they have it on directly onward from Jesus who repeats essentially the same exact story. They are thoroughly convinced.
Trent Horn:
According to Rabbi Singer Matthews gospel shows Mary Magdalene learning immediately at Jesus’s tomb from an angel that he rose from the dead and this happened before she met the disciples.
Rabbi Singer:
What I’m very interested in is John. In here we only have to deal with the first two passages of John chapter 20. It’s the first day of the week. Mary Magdalene came early, it was still dark and she writes it to him and she already sees that stone hadn’t been taken away from the front of the tomb. There’s no angel there to inform her anything. She runs back and goes to Simon Peter and the other disciple who Jesus love, meaning John has said to them, they took the Lord’s body out of the tomb and we don’t know where they have laid him. She comes to tomb there’s nothing there. In contrast to Matthew there’s no angel there, there’s no instructions there. She has no clue where he is and as far as she’s concerned, Jesus’ body was taken away.
Trent Horn:
To summarize, singer says, John only shows Mary Magdalene learning Jesus rose from the dead much later after she met the disciples.
Rabbi Singer:
When Mary encounters Jesus for the first time, does she know that? Did she have the information that Jesus rose from the dead or not? Does she know what happened or not? According to Matthew, she definitely knows by the time Mary meets a disciples for the first time Sunday morning, Easter morning, does she know or does she not know that Jesus rose from dead? This is not just a piece of invent. This is the whole story. This is the whole point. This is like everything. This is about, do you know that Jesus rose from dead? That’s everything.
Trent Horn:
First, let’s say this was a contradiction at most all that would prove is that there is a contradiction between the two accounts involving Mary Magdalene, not that the accounts are worthless or that we shouldn’t believe in the resurrection. The evidence for the resurrection primarily comes from the fact that Jesus died and his followers sincerely believed he was alive again. And there’s no good natural explanation for their belief in his resurrection. They didn’t hallucinate that he arose from the dead, for example, because this does not conform to what we know about hallucinations, especially those involving multiple people that you can’t share the same hallucination. And the fact that the disciples could have checked Jesus’ empty tomb to confirm if they were hallucinating a resurrection or if it genuinely happened.
Now, our earliest source for Jesus’ disciples that they claim to see the risen Lord. It doesn’t come from the gospels, it comes from the witnesses described in 1 Corinthians 15.
Already you have the bedrock evidence for the Christian faith. Apart from these elements of the gospel narratives, you can also appeal to the gospels that don’t contain this alleged contradiction like what we find in Luke’s gospel, for example. But even if this were a contradiction, secular historical events often have contradictions in their histories, but historians don’t totally dismiss them. In fact, Rabbi Singer’s argument doesn’t even disprove biblical inerrancy or show the Bible has errors because what Rabbi Singer is describing is not an error or a contradiction. It’s the normal kind of discrepancy we find in complimentary accounts of the same historical event. Now, this can be attributed to Matthew compressing events in his narrative or telling them out of order even which we know Mark did since the second century writer Pappius describes Mark’s gospel as not being written in chronological order, and we know there is some kind of literary relationship between Matthew and Mark’s gospel.
But you can also harmonize the accounts involving Mary Magdalene. It could go something like this, “Early in the morning on Sunday, Mary Magdalene and other women go to Jesus’ tomb and they find it empty.” It’s important to note that Matthew 28, 2 through four describes the angel rolling away the stone, but it does not say this happened after the women arrived at the tomb. Instead, this probably happened before, and the women arrived to find the tomb open and empty. Mary Magdalene runs back by herself to the disciples, but she says they have taken the Lord we know not where they laid him. Notice that this statement in John’s gospel indicates Mary Magdalene was with other people even though those other women are not described in John’s gospel. During this time, Mary Magdalene is away with the disciples, the other women who remained at the tomb encounter the angel. Then this group runs back to the disciples and they meet Jesus along the way.
At the same time, the disciples run to the tomb, possibly taking another route, and they arrive to find it empty. The male disciples then leave to their homes. Mary Magdalene returns to the tomb after the male disciples have left and there she encounters Jesus at the tomb.
Now, I don’t see any difficulty with this ordering of the events, but if Rabbi Singer says, “Oh, you know, that’s very convenient to add all this up, to get out of this contradiction.” If Rabbi Singer says that, then he’s going to lose his ability to explain many of the alleged contradictions of the Old Testament. In fact, I was really curious to see how does Rabbi Singer defend the Old Testament from these contradiction based arguments? And this is all I was able to find of a few examples…
Rabbi Singer:
And why does Chronicles present information differently than Samuel King’s? And that’s because of the author, the time, the audience to whom he was speaking and his theological message.
Genesis chapter one is just sort of the headline and then the sub-headline as you see in the newspaper. Now, Genesis chapter two says, “Okay, let’s go back for a moment and see exactly how God created men and woman. Let’s hear the details.”
Chronicles is very much a theological book that uses history to convey theology, and he does this by far more than any other writer in Tanana. Where he changes what seems to be altering datum in order to convey a theological point. That’s why there are all these outrageous contradictions.
Trent Horn:
If Old Testament contradictions can be explained by the biblical author having different thematic intentions that reflected what he chose to include or how he chose to describe it, then why can’t the same approach be utilized to explain alleged New Testament contradictions?
All right, next, Rabbi Singer says, the story of the empty tomb was made up because there was no reason for the women to go and anoint Jesus’ body three days after he had died.
Rabbi Singer:
The spices are added so that during the funeral procession, so that during the burial procession, no one smells the odor of the decaying body. That’s all point of it. Once the body is buried, and I think you know where this is all going, nobody digs up a dead body or in this case, if it’s buried in a mausoleum or buried in a cave, no one uncovers the cave three days later to put spice inside. This is all complete nonsense no one ever does because there’s no reasons to do it. How the heck did this ever wind up in a couple of books of the gospels? The reason is they needed a plot device. They needed a plot device in order to explain how someone would come up with an empty tomb. There was no empty tomb.
Trent Horn:
Rabbi singer’s argument is that the story of the empty tomb is made up because no one would anoint a body with spices after it was buried because the spices were for making the body more aromatic or at least not smell unpleasant prior to burial. Of course, Jesus’s burial is different from most other burials because Jesus was not buried by his friends and family. He was buried by a sympathetic member of the Sanhedrin Council that convicted him, namely Joseph of Aramathea, a secret disciple of his.
But Rabbi Singer’s argument, it doesn’t make sense. If the story of discovering the empty tomb was completely fictional, then why would the gospel authors invent a reason for the women to go to the tomb that they as first century Jews knew, would not make sense? If the gospels had to invent a reason for the women to go to the tomb, they could have just had the women going to the tomb to wail or to offer prayers for their deceased rabbi.
And more importantly, if the account was created for apologetic purposes, you’d have the men, the male disciples escorting the women and the men would then act as reliable witnesses to the resurrection. This is exactly what we see in later apocryphal gospels, ones that were attributed to disciples but weren’t actually written by them. Things like the second century gospel of Peter that include fictional elements like the Jewish priests themselves being at the tomb in order to convince people of the resurrection. And this isn’t even a nonsensical reason for the women to visit the tomb.
Imagine a friend of yours died and for some reason you missed his internment, his burial into the grave site. You then rushed to the grave knowing the funeral is over and you hope to throw some flowers on top of his casket because you’re hoping, well, maybe they haven’t fully buried him yet, and even if they have, at least you can leave some flowers there, but you’re grief stricken, you’re not thinking through all of these details.
The same can be said of the women who go to Jesus’ tomb. They’re grief stricken, and they’re scattered in their thinking. You can even see this in Mark 16:3 when the women say, who will roll away the stone for us? They hope someone can help. And even though they could not take part in the formal anointing of spices before Jesus’ burial, they still want to show love and affection for Jesus by adding spices on their own terms. Rabbi Singer then takes aim at the women’s testimony themselves that Jesus rose from the dead saying that it’s not trustworthy because it comes from Mary Magdalene in particular. Here’s his reasoning.
Rabbi Singer:
And the ancient world, people who suffered from psychosis in particular. Psychosis typically is displayed by people hearing voices that aren’t there and seeing things that aren’t there. Thank God we have all sorts of Hal Doll and lithium, but they didn’t have the financial world nor do they understand these maladies as mental illness. They’d understand that to them. The mental illness that unfortunately so many people suffer from was considered a devil, a demon.
In Luke, we are told that Mary Magdalene, she had demons, not one but many demons cast out of her by Jesus. This Mary is probably the one who imagined seeing a resurrected Jesus, and that’s why she’s so prominent in the resurrection accounts. She’s actually front and center in the resurrection accounts.
Trent Horn:
Rabbi Singer really needs to be careful where this line of thought is taking him. Did Moses really see a burning bush or was it a voice in his head? Did God really tell Abraham to offer his only son Isaac on an altar or was it a schizophrenic episode? Atheists could just as easily make the same arguments against the foundational miracles and divine interventions of Judaism. Some people claim to hear the voice of God are mistaken, but that doesn’t mean they’re always mistaken. Likewise, just because some claims of demonic possession are false, that doesn’t mean there are no genuine cases of demonic possession. And in fact, the Hebrew Bible does describe evil spirits taking hold of people like King Saul, for example. And later Jewish commenters say that passages and things like Psalm 91 are exorcism prayers against the demonic. Verses five through six and Psalm 91 say, “You will not fear the terror of the night nor the arrow that flies by day, nor the pestilence that stocks and darkness nor the destruction that wastes at noon day.”
According to these Jewish commenters, these are references to specific demons, and in fact, there’s an entire book explaining the concept by Garrett C. Vugdenhill, published by Brill, a respected academic press. And it’s simply called Psalm 91 and demonic menace.
Rabbi Singer also has not shown Mary Magdalene was mentally ill. He’s just assuming an anti-supernatural bias here. Also, even if she were mentally ill, that would not explain why Paul converted and came to believe in the resurrection or the other male disciples. Her testimony alone wouldn’t be enough to convince them. Since Luke 24:11 says, the disciples thought that her words were idle tales.
Finally, if you were going to invent the story of Jesus rising from the dead, why would you make your first witnesses not just women who are already unreliable witnesses among Second Temple Jews, but have one of these women be someone who had been possessed by demons? Rabbi Singer’s argument actually supports the authenticity of these accounts because these accounts of the discovery of the empty tomb are not what we would expect if the accounts were fabricated. However, Rabbi Singer anticipates this kind of reply, and here is what he says to it.
Rabbi Singer:
Let’s say I concede the fact that the first people to ever claim that Jesus rose from the dead and that they saw it were women. Let’s say I concede it just to make this whole thing easy. What does that mean? Should I convert to Roman Catholicism because women are claiming that they’re meeting Jesus over lunch, over a bagels and Locke sandwich? Am I then to accept every claim made by a woman or allegedly made by a woman? Should I then accept that because no one ever heard of such a thing? Of course, it’s object nonsense. Let’s say we have women in the Philippines or in Singapore or in San Paulo, the largest Roman Catholic country in the world who claim that they have breakfast with Mary every morning and as I said, they typically are women for some reason. It’s women who meet Jesus, that meet Mary, they talk to Mary. Why don’t you become a Roman Catholic? The answer is, of course, it’s nonsensical.
Trent Horn:
Rabbi Singer misunderstands the evidential value of the women as witnesses to the empty tomb. The point is not that every woman’s testimony should be believed. The point is that in a society where the testimony of women had little to no value in a court of law, you’d expect people making up this story to invent more reliable witnesses. In the modern age, it is expected that women as much or possibly more than men, would be candidates to observe a Marian Apparition. If a Marian Apparition were fabricated, we’d expect female witnesses. However, Marian Apparitions do pose a problem for Protestants, and this is something that I note in my new book, “When Protestants Argue like Atheists.” Definitely go pick up a copy if you haven’t already. Since the evidential quality of Marian Apparitions is equal to if not better than the evidence for Christ’s resurrection, that doesn’t mean Marian Apparitions are more important. Only that we are closer in time to the sources for these apparitions than for the resurrection. Now, Rabbi Singer’s retort might work against Protestant missionaries that he encounters, but his appeal to Marian Apparitions, it won’t be as successful against Catholics.
Rabbi Singer:
This is the joke I tell. Why did God invent Mormons? So Christians will know how Jews feel. The Mormon claim is that Jesus is going to make his second coming in Jackson, Missouri. Well no one in a million billion years would ever think that Jesus was going to make a second coming in Jackson County, Missouri, which the Mormons claim, and it’s therefore so outlandish it must be true. Why don’t you all go to Utah and become Mormons? The answer to that question is because it’s object nonsense.
Trent Horn:
All right, what about Mormons? They make all kinds of crazy claims, right? Rabbi Singer says. Does that mean the claims of Mormonism are true? Once again, the argument is not that a crazy sounding claim must be true. The argument is simply that given the nature of testimony in the ancient world, it would be very odd for someone inventing a story to purposely choose unreliable witnesses like a group of women.
In fact, in order to bolster the Book of Mormon’s credibility, Joseph Smith gathered a group of upstanding men in his community to claim to be witnesses to him possessing the golden plates. Though there are accounts of Smith differ in important respects from the apostolic accounts of the resurrection. For more on that, check out my booklet, “20 Answers Mormonism”, as well as a section in my new book, “Devil’s Advocate.” I got a lot of resources out there for you to check out. Definitely go and pick them up.
Finally, I will say that the evidence for the resurrection is so good that one Jewish scholar has accepted that Jesus rose from the dead, but he still does not believe Jesus is the Messiah. That scholar is Pinchas Lapide who says in his book, “The Resurrection of Jesus, a Jewish Perspective”, he writes the following. “If the defeated and depressed group of disciples overnight could change into a victorious movement of faith based only on autosuggestion or self-deception without a fundamental faith experience, then this would be a much greater miracle than the resurrection itself.”
Lapide does not believe that Jesus is the Messiah though because he doesn’t think that Jesus truly brought the kingdom of God into the world or he failed to fulfill Messianic prophecy. But this makes a premature judgment based solely on Christ first coming Christians of long held that the Old Testament describes the Messiah coming twice, once as a suffering and rejected servant as described in Isaiah 53 and a second time as a liberating king as described in Isaiah 11.
Just because Jesus has not fulfilled prophecies about world peace or the conquering of death we see in Isaiah 11 and 25, that doesn’t mean Jesus is not the Messiah. He can still fulfill those prophecies at his second coming. There were even Jews from before the time of Christ who believed in two comings of the Messiah, but for them they thought it involved two different Messiahs. The original Hebrew texts of Zachariah 6:11, for example, refers to crowns in the plural being made for the king and priest involved in building the temple and the first century apocryphal Jewish work, the testament of Simon. Well, it says the following, “My children obey Levi, and in Judah shall you be redeemed and be not lifted up against these tribes from them shall arise to you. The salvation of God for the Lord shall raise up from Levi as it were a priest and from Judah as it were a king God and man, so shall he save all the Gentiles and the race of Israel.”
We should also note that Isaiah 11:9 promises that through the Messiah, “The earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.” In the first century, there were probably about 8 million Jews and less than 10,000 Christians out of a global population of about 300 million people. That means that less than 3% of the population had knowledge of the one true God and only .0003% possess the fullness of God’s self-revelation as the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit.
Today, one third of the world’s population is Christian, and more than half the population, which includes Jews and Muslims profess belief in the God of Abraham or in one God. Now, while still denying Jesus as the Messiah, Lapide admits that God used Jesus’ resurrection to spread knowledge of the true God throughout the entire world. Dennis Prager even made a similar comment in a recent conversation he had with Jordan Peterson.
Dennis Prager:
I thank God for America’s Christians, and Myoni said, if it weren’t for Christians, the world wouldn’t know about the Torah. I’m a big Christian fan.
Trent Horn:
And Pinchas Lapide says this, “The experience of the resurrection as the foundation act of the church which has carried the faith in the God of Israel into the whole Western world, must belong to God’s plan of salvation. Since this Christianizing is based irrevocably on the resurrection of Jesus, the Easter faith has to be recognized as part of divine providence.” And remember that’s a Jewish scholar who is saying this.
Now some Jewish commenters, they do try to reduce Jesus to being simply a misunderstood rabbi. Rabbi Schmole Boite, for example, says this, “Once Jesus is stripped of his anti-Semitic cloak and restored as the wise rabbi and devoted Jewish patriot he was, there is much Jews can learn from him.” But in his book, a Rabbi talks with Jesus. Rabbi Jacob Nucener says this though, “Jesus was not just another reforming rabbi out to make life easier for people, it is disingenuous to offer Jesus a standing within Judaism that Christianity rightly finds trivial and beside the point, if not Messiah, God incarnate then to what grand issue of faith does my affirmation of a rabbi’s or a prophet’s teaching pertain.”
And in response to Rabbi Nucener, Pope Benedict the 16th pointed out that, “The issue that is really at the heart of the debate is thus finally laid bare. Jesus understands himself as the Torah, as the word of God in person.”
C.S. Lewis popularized the Lord, liar, lunatic argument for Jesus’ divinity saying that Christ could not merely be a good teacher given the radical divine claims he made about himself. And I would say that same argument applies to those Jews who say that Jesus was just a good rabbi. If anything, ancient and medieval Jews were more consistent. And when they ascribed nefarious motives to Jesus and used those motives to explain things like his miracles by saying he did the work of demons or was a sorcerer. But if you do recognize Jesus as serving Yahweh’s providential, design as Lapide does, well, maybe it’s because Jesus is Yahweh incarnate, the creator God who became man and died to aone for our sins so that anyone could belong to his chosen people by having faith in him.
Thank you guys so much for watching this. If you want more resources on how to respond to Jewish arguments against Christianity, I recommend Dr. Michael Brown’s four volume work, “Answering Jewish objections to Jesus.” But thank you all so much and I hope you have a very blessed day and a very blessed Easter season.
Narrator:
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