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In this episode, Trent responds to critics like Paulogia and Candida Moss who critique the evidence for the Resurrection in the apostle’s willingness to die for their faith in Christ.
Transcript:
Welcome to the Council of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Council of Trent podcast. I’m your host Catholic Answers apologist, Trent Horn. And a very common argument for the resurrection goes like this, Jesus rose from the dead, and we know this because His disciples willingly submitted to torture and martyrdom instead of recanting their belief in Jesus’s resurrection. If they were just making up the story of the resurrection, we’d expect them to admit that once it looked like they’re about to be killed. This argument is often summarized as, who would die for a lie or liars make poor martyrs. While this is a common summary of the argument, I don’t think it’s the strongest version of that argument, and so I’m going to examine a variety of objections to it and in the process modify the argument to make it more persuasive to make a case for the resurrection. But before I do that, I hope I can persuade you to like this video and subscribe to our channel so we can continue to share great content and definitely leave a comment below to let me know what you think of the episode.
All right, so let’s see what we can do with this argument. First, we need to get one thing clear. This argument is not trying to prove by itself that Jesus’s resurrection happened. It shouldn’t be used that way. It’s not trying to prove the existence of anything supernatural. Instead, this argument is part of a larger argument for the resurrection. The main evidence for Jesus’s resurrection is that people who are in a good place to know if Jesus rose from the dead said that this happened. Now, there’s three options when it comes to this kind of testimony. One, Jesus did rise from the dead and the person claiming He did sincerely believes Jesus rose from the dead. That’d be the resurrection hypothesis.
Two, Jesus did not rise from the dead and the person claiming He did does not sincerely believe Jesus rose from the dead; the fraud hypothesis. And three, Jesus did not rise from the dead and the person claiming Jesus did sincerely believes Jesus rose from the dead. This would be the hallucination or sincerely mistaken hypothesis. The goal of the who would die for a lie argument is not to prove option one, it’s just to get option two off the table in order for us to decide if the apostles were correct in their sincere resurrection belief or if they were just sincerely mistaken.
So for example, Paulogia who is an atheistic and YouTuber who often criticizes arguments for the resurrection, has a video on the argument where he raises the point that the disciples could have been sincerely mistaken about the resurrection. I’m not going to address that claim in this episode, although I think this kind of claim would border more on hallucination than a mere mistake. But as I said, that’s a separate argument for a separate episode. Instead, I just want to focus on this question. Did the disciples sincerely believe Jesus rose from the dead? And if they did, does that mean option two or the fraud theory is off the table?
First, I will say that most critical scholars who study the resurrection, even though they don’t believe Jesus rose from the dead, don’t question the disciple’s sincerity. Gerd Ludemann says, “It may be taken as historically certain that Peter and the disciples had experiences after Jesus’s death in which Jesus appeared to them as the risen Christ.” Paula Frederickson is a Jewish scholar who denies the resurrection, but in a documentary on the subject, she said the following.
I know in their own terms what they saw was the raised Jesus, that’s what they say. And then all the historic evidence we have afterwards attest to their conviction that that’s what they saw. I’m not saying that they really did see the raised Jesus. I wasn’t there, I don’t know what they saw, but I do know as an historian that they must have seen something.
These scholars aren’t saying Jesus rose from the dead, but they are saying what motivated the disciples was a sincere belief that Jesus rose from the dead. It’s not fraud. Second, there is a common atheistic retort to who would die for a lie that misses the point of the argument. It assumes the argument is trying to prove the resurrection hypothesis outright when it’s really just trying to disprove the fraud hypothesis. An atheist will say the 9/11 hijackers also died for their beliefs. Does their willingness to die prove Islam is true? No, it doesn’t because the willingness to suffer and die for a belief system does not prove the belief system is true. All it proves is that the apostles were not frauds, they really believed Jesus rose from the dead.
I grant that nearly all martyrs, Christian and non-Christian, sincerely believe their respective religions are true, but a modern Muslim or a modern Christian sincerely believing a miracle happened over a thousand years ago is not good evidence the miracle actually happened. Present day believers are not in a good position to know from their own testimony if the miracle happened, but the original witnesses of the miracle, who were in a position to know if it really happened, do provide compelling evidence worth taking seriously if they were sincere in their testimony. So how do we show the apostles sincerely believed Jesus rose from the dead? Christians will often say this sincerity is evident in their martyrdom and it’s just common to say that 11 of the original apostles, along with Paul and James, the brother of Jesus, were martyred while the Apostle John died of natural causes during his exile to the island of Patmos where he wrote the Book of Revelation.
The difficulty with this approach is that some Christians treat these facts that all the apostles are martyrs as being historically certain or obvious when they aren’t. If we’re not aware of this fact, we can be sandbagged in a discussion or a debate. Consider this exchange with Rabbi Tovia Singer on the subject that he has with a Christian caller.
These men were willing to go to their deaths. How do you explain why, if it was all based on a lie-
I just want to ask you a question, could you give me an example of a disciple that gave his life what he believed in the Christian Bible?
Right, right.
Take your time.
Sorry. Sorry, I’m just trying to think. Peter, maybe was crucified upside down and-
Where in what verse and what chapter in the Christian Bible does it say that Peter was crucified upside down? Where is this in the Christian Bible?
I’m not sure exactly.
So let me help you out here, Roger. There’s a reason why you don’t know where it is and it’s not because you’re not familiar with the Christian Bible, it’s ’cause they don’t exist.
If you’re just an average Christian who has heard the story of Peter being crucified upside down or Paul being executed by being beheaded, you might assume these stories are in the Bible even though they’re not. In fact, one reason to think the Book of Acts was written before the mid-sixties is because the book is silent on the deaths of Peter and Paul that took place during that period. The closest we can come to meeting Rabbi Singer’s challenge would be the death of St. Stephen in Acts seven at the hands of a Jewish mob that stoned him and the death of St. James in Acts 12. Stephen wasn’t a witness of the resurrection even though he saw a vision of Jesus in the heavens before he died. So this doesn’t help our case. James has better of evidence for him, but people will still argue against it and I’ll address that shortly.
My point is just that the martyrdom of Paul and the 11 apostles and James, the brother of Jesus, is not as easy to prove as many people assume, but we also don’t have to prove it because there’s a variety of evidence we can present to show the apostles sincerely believed Jesus rose from the dead based simply on the suffering they willingly endured. The evidence would support the following assertions. One, the apostles suffered for their belief in the resurrection. Two, the apostles risked martyrdom for their belief in the resurrection. Three, the apostles were martyred for their belief in the resurrection.
Each of these three assertions becomes stronger evidence for the apostles sincerity because the risk involved with each of them begins to strongly outweigh any kind of reward. Actual martyrdom would be the strongest evidence, because if a person does not believe in the resurrection or an afterlife based on it then there’s very little reward to motivate the risk associated with death. But we don’t need to go that far, even enduring a lot of suffering and the risk of martyrdom is evidence of sincerity. The key is analyzing risk versus reward. Paulogia makes this point when he brings up the question of Joseph Smith, the alleged prophet and founder of Mormonism.
Joseph Smith was in a position to know whether his story about the golden plates from God was true or not. Joseph Smith was killed for those beliefs and never recanted. Yet, I’m guessing Tim and Eric do not accept this as proof that Mormonism is true.
This is a great question and I think it’s fair to compare the apostles with Joseph Smith.
Smith did endure suffering at the hands of those who opposed him and he was eventually killed in a shootout in a jail where he was being held for trial. Now, it’s possible Smith sincerely believed the stories he told about the Book of Mormon and that he was a religious fanatic motivated by previously existing stories at the time of ancient Jews being the ancestors of Native Americans. In fact, a book published five years before the Book of Mormon called, A View of the Hebrews, tells basically the same story. But it’s also likely, if not more likely, Smith made this up to gain power as a religious leader.
While the apostles practiced celibacy and weren’t known for using their status to acquire sexual partners, Joseph Smith used his position to acquire dozens of spiritual wives, some of them as young as 14 years old. The apostles also didn’t use their position to gather wealth, they lived as itinerant preachers. Paul even made his own living as a tent maker. The point is that criminals will always tolerate some level of risk, but only in proportion to a certain reward. That seems to be the case with Joseph Smith but not Christ’s apostles. Moreover, while we will see there is evidence of the apostles accepting martyrdom for their beliefs, no such similar evidence exists for Joseph Smith who, as I said, died in a shootout using a gun smuggled into the jail where he was being kept for trial. Hardly what one would call a willingness to submit to martyrdom.
So let’s go back to our three evidences for the apostles’ sincerity. One, the apostles suffered for their belief in the resurrection or they risked suffering. Two, the apostles risked martyrdom for their belief in the resurrection. And three, the apostles were martyred for their belief in the resurrection. All of these claims conform to our background knowledge of the world around us. There are people who suffer and are martyred for their beliefs. Jesus was killed for His beliefs, so it would be expected that those who continued an affiliation with Him in the same historical context risked suffering the same fate.
So let’s start with the first claim. Is there evidence the apostles risked suffering and death for publicly preaching Jesus’s resurrection? Absolutely. First, Jesus’s public preaching about Himself, as I said, led to His own suffering and death, so it was rational for the apostles to assume the same thing would happen to them if they preached Jesus’ message, especially in the city of Jerusalem. Second, we have the firsthand accounts of St. Paul who describes his own suffering at the hands of the Jewish leaders. He says he experienced far greater labors, far more imprisonments with countless beatings and often near death compared to other Christians. He also says the following in his second letter to the Corinthians. “Five times I have received at the hands of the Jews the 40 lashes less one. Three times I have been beaten with rods. Once I was stoned. Three times I had been shipwrecked. A night and a day I had been adrift at sea. On frequent journeys in danger from rivers, danger from robbers, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brethren and toil and hardship. Through many a sleepless night in hunger and thirst, often without food and cold and exposure and apart from other things, there is the daily pressure upon me of my anxiety for all the churches.”
Not only does Paul say he was scoured and almost killed, he admits that before his conversion he used to persecute the Christian Church. In Philippians 3:6, he says he was a persecutor of the church. And in Galatians 1:13 he writes, “For you’ve heard of my former life in Judaism, how I persecuted the Church of God violently and tried to destroy it.” Third, we have the accounts of the early church and the acts of the apostles that described Peter and John being brought before the Sanhedrin and being scoured for proclaiming the resurrection. Acts 8:1 says after the stoning of Stephen that “On that day, a great persecution arose against the church in Jerusalem and they were all scattered throughout the region of Judea and Samaria, except the apostles. Two devout men buried Stephen and made great lamentation over him. But Saul, Paul, laid waste the church and entering house after house, he dragged off men and women and committed them to prison.”
Fourth, we have testimony from the Roman historian Tacitus who says during the time of the great fire of Rome in AD 64, which was when the apostles were still alive, Emperor Nero persecuted Christians. Tacitus writes, “Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus.”
All of this evidence shows that the original apostles would have, at a minimum, risked suffering and death in order to preach the gospel. This is a significant risk to undertake that would only be justified by an even more significant reward such as eternal life or in order to avoid a more serious risk, like eternal damnation for denying Christ. Since, as Jesus says in Matthew 10:33, “Whoever denies Him before men, Jesus will deny before the Father.”
So how would a critic respond to this argument? Paulogia says, “Paul doesn’t count as a witness of the risen Jesus because Paul may have only seen a hallucinatory vision, so his willingness to die doesn’t prove anything.” But what Paul saw is a separate question. All I’m showing is that the 11 apostles, Paul and James, the brother of the Lord, sincerely believed Jesus rose from the dead because they risked being persecuted about it. We can debate what they meant about resurrection later, but they were sincere in their resurrection belief. Paulogia also claims that there’s no firsthand account from any of the apostles saying they suffered for preaching the resurrection. All we have are secondhand accounts like the Book of Acts. Paulogia dismisses evidence like this as well as the martyrdom of James if he says it is only found in one source like the Book of Acts.
Only source we have for the martyrdom of James, son of Zebedee, is a single non-corroborated New Testament document, and around here we call that for the Bible tells me so. Just like James, our single source, that eyewitnesses were preaching anything at all about Jesus is-
This for the Bible tells me so objection, it’s not very helpful. Paulogia is assuming that in order to believe an historical account it must be corroborated by something else. But most ancient history is uncorroborated. Suetonius’ claim that Emperor Claudius expelled the Jews from Rome is only corroborated by Acts 18. It’s not found in other ancient historians like Josephus or Tacitus. Pontius Pilate’s scuffle with the Jews over golden shields in Jerusalem, it’s only recorded in the Alexandrian writer Philo. And Josephus is often the only source for important events in history at that time, like the siege of Masada. But you don’t see Paulogia saying these are cases of Philo tells me so or Josephus tells me so. Everyone at that time was religious, be they Christian, pagan, or Jewish and they believed in miracles. Yet skeptical historians can at least believe the mundane events in those writers and the suffering. And persecution described in the Book of Acts would fall into that mundane category that any scholar should accept. And frankly, scholars do accept that. In another video, Paulogia just says that this description doesn’t mean he’s saying the testimony is false.
Whenever I say, for the Bible tells me so, I’m always referring to a discrete claim presented in the Bible that doesn’t correspond to any external source or often an internal source and that doesn’t mean the claim is automatically false, it’s just affirmation that the particular claim isn’t corroborated.
But it would be easy for a casual observer to draw this conclusion based on the music and the general tone of the joke. For most atheists saying, for the Bible tells me so, is a way of saying there’s no good reason to believe the biblical testimony or that the testimony is probably not true or is fictional. Also remember that we are comparing ordinary claims. If we can trust a single source to tell us about a battle that happened in the ancient world or a protest that broke out or people being expelled from their homes, why can’t we trust a single source like the Book of Acts that attests to the ordinary claim that some people were persecuted for their beliefs? Paulogia might say Acts is not historically reliable, whereas Josephus is, and that’s a separate discussion. But to simply assume the testimony of Acts is not enough to prove an ordinary fact, but Josephus’ testimony is, demonstrates a bias against the New Testament evidence instead of an honest assessment of it.
I’m not necessarily even saying that Paulogia is doing this in these videos, but I have seen many other people do this as well, so it’s important to watch out for it. Paulogia also says there’s no evidence in the New Testament that the apostles besides Paul, Peter, James, and John even preached the resurrection, but it seems unlikely they would’ve been known as apostles, a title which means messenger, or that they would’ve figured prominently in the Christian community if they just sat around and didn’t do anything. The gospels described the disciples preaching during Jesus’ earthly ministry and it describes Jesus giving all of them the great commission to preach the gospel to all nations. So once again, there’s no reason to doubt that all the apostles were involved in church planting and public witnessing even though these activities brought with them the threat of persecution and death, thus evidence of the sincerity of their beliefs.
Paulogia also claims there are non-religious rewards that could have motivated the apostles to insincerely risk so much suffering. But remember, as we discussed earlier, there’s no evidence the apostles used their status to acquire traditional rewards like wealth or women. Now, Paulogia says that they could have been motivated by a preaching career that didn’t involve manual labor.
It doesn’t have to be life-changing Elon Musk level money for someone to be motivated by money. The disciples in question were fishermen-class laborers when they met Jesus. Now they are able to be traveling preachers rather than return to the nets. Even that modest kind of money can be motivation.
All right, let me ask you a question. Would you be willing to preach the gospel for the rest of your life in the part of Libya controlled by the Islamic State that beheads Christians. I’ll even pay for your expenses. You won’t ever have to hold a job again. Only the most sincere person would take up an offer like that. Finally, Paulogia just says, the disciples may have been motivated by the joy that just comes from having any authority at all, even if they didn’t sincerely believe in the resurrection.
I saw over and over, it only takes the smallest piece of power for people to lust after that power. So you put someone in charge of the bake sale table, that person is all in on the power of that bake sale table. You put someone in charge of making sure where people are going to sleep, well, they take that kingdom pretty strongly. It feels to me like these apostles, these disciples got a taste of what it was like to be popular.
It’s true there are a lot of people that enjoy petty power like how people enjoy snitching on one another to the authorities during the COVID lockdowns, but it’s also true that petty people don’t like to get into trouble. Those same people who love their authority over the bake table at church willingly went along with what the government said to close churches even when the orders had become irrational. They did as they were told because they didn’t want to be punished with a fine or lose their jobs, which is suffering that’s hardly comparable to what the apostles faced. So I find it highly implausible the apostles were just as petty, but were willing to take on such potent risks.
One scholar who has criticized claims of early Christian martyrdom is Candida Moss, in her book, The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom. However, her book focuses almost entirely on martyrdom in the post-apostolic age rather than on the martyrdom accounts of the original apostles. Moss writes the following, “That Paul himself would admit that he had participated in this practice of persecution lends credibility to the narrative of Acts, but it does not prove that Jews persecuted Christians.” Why not, you may ask. Moss gives an incredible answer. “The primary reason for this is that there were no Christians. Not only did the name Christian not yet exist, but the idea of Christians as a group distinct from the rest of Judaism did not exist in the lifetimes of the apostles end.” This is half true. The apostles considered themselves faithful Jews who followed the Messiah and were preaching the kingdom of God to all people, Jews and Gentiles. Acts 21:39 records Paul saying long after his conversion, “I am a Jew from Tarsus in Cilicia.”
In Galatians 2:15, Paul calls Peter a Jew who lives like a Gentile and in Philippians 3:5, Paul calls himself a Pharisee, which coheres with him using the title in Acts 23. But the apostles were Jews who were called Christians just as other Jews were called Essenes. In Acts 11:25 through 26, it says “Barnabas went to Tarsus to look for Saul and when he had found him he brought him to Antioch. For a whole year they met with the church and taught a large company of people. And in Antioch the disciples were for the first time called Christians.” In Acts 26:28, King Agrippa tells Paul, “In a short time, you think to make me a Christian.” And in first Peter 4:16 Peter says, “Yet if one suffers as a Christian, let him not be ashamed, but under that name let him glorify God.”
In a footnote, Moss admits that her claim about the apostles not being Christians only works if you reject the reliability of Acts and First Peter, but if the documents are authentic then they show the term Christian was used during the time of the apostles. David Harrell, in his study of the term Christian in First Peter, says it may have originated from an outside group and was a denigrating term, which is why Christians did not use it more often and the New Testament doesn’t describe Christians explicitly calling themselves Christians. It was an outsider term originally meant to denigrate them. Moss writes, “The historical period when Stephen died and Paul was writing cannot be considered a period in which Jews persecuted Christians, because Christians did not yet exist. At the very worst, and assuming that Luke is telling us the whole story, this is a situation of conflict and tension between various Jewish groups. This tension may have occasionally erupted into violence, but this does not mean that Christians were persecuted.”
This is just a bunch of semantic nonsense. Jews who follow Jesus, whether or not you call them Christians, were violently persecuted by Jews who did not follow Jesus. That’s all we need to prove when it comes to demonstrating that the apostles willingly faced persecution for their belief in Jesus. Moss also has to downplay non-Christian sources to maintain our argument that Christ followers were not known as Christians until the end of the first century. If you want to read an excellent defense of the historicity of Nero’s persecution of Christians see Van der Lans’s and Bremmer’s article, Tacitus and the Persecution of the Christians: An Invention of Tradition?, linked in the description below.
All right, let’s talk about the question though, were they actually martyred? All right, so to summarize, we’ve shown the historical evidence makes it highly likely the first apostles were sincere in their belief in the resurrection, they willingly faced the risk of persecution and the risk of death. Paul says he was persecuted and he almost died at the hands of persecutors through things like stoning. But can we show the apostles were martyred or that they accepted the ultimate risk of death instead of rejecting their faith? The definitive treatment of this question is found in Sean McDowell’s book, The Fate of the 12 Apostles. McDowell admits, however, that for eight of the apostles, the evidence for their martyrdom is not very strong. He notes that in many cases the evidence for those apostles being martyred comes from sources written over a century or two later.
That’s why Moss says these events are the stuff of legend, not history. The stories about the apostles tell us a great deal about how early Christians thought about and valued suffering and death, but they are not historical accounts and they do not demonstrate that Christians were persecuted. While the church affirms a martyrdom of the 11 disciples except for John, more skeptical scholars are likely to reject many of these accounts as being legendary because the earliest sources for them are a century or several centuries later.
That leaves Peter, Paul, James, the brother of Jesus, and James, the son of Zebedee, which McDowell says for Peter and Paul, he gives the highest possible probability for the evidence and says it’s very probably true for the two James’s. Note, he gives the highest evidence for James, the son of Zebedee, in his book, but in recent interviews, McDowell has downgraded James, the son of Zebedee, from the highest possible evidence to the second highest possible evidence because James’s death is only recorded in the Book of Acts among the early sources.
So let’s start with James, the son of Zebedee. Acts 12, one through two takes place after the apostles sent famine relief to believers in Judea. It says, “About that time, Herod, the king, laid violent hands upon some who belonged to the church. He killed James, the brother of John, with the sword and when he saw that it please the Jews, he proceeded to arrest Peter also.” James’s death is also corroborated in Mark 10:39 which records Jesus telling James, who wishes to sit at Jesus’ right hand, that James doesn’t understand that Jesus will be killed and this will inaugurate His kingdom. Jesus tells James, “The cup that I drink, you will drink. And with the baptism with which I am baptized, you will be baptized.” The Herod in Acts 12 is Herod Agrippa. He’s the grandson of Herod the Great, the guy who tried to kill Jesus when he was a small child and the nephew of Herod Antipas, the guy who killed John the Baptist.
Paulogia just says this passage isn’t helpful because it doesn’t say why Herod killed James. But from the context, we see that James’s death pleased the Jewish leadership and so Herod followed it up by attacking Peter, the leader of the early church. The natural inference is that James was killed because he was part of the Christian movement and that James chose to remain in the movement publicly even though he faced suffering and probable death for doing so. Now, Paulogia just says James had a reputation in the gospels for being a hothead and so he could have just been executed for a crime like disturbing the peace. Even if that were true, what was James doing that disturbed the peace? The most obvious answer was preaching the Christian faith. Any other reason seems ad hoc and there’d be no reason to include it in Acts.
Also, merely disturbing the peace would not warrant beheading, maybe flogging or scourging, but as McDowell notes in his dissertation, “According to Jewish law, execution by sword was the punishment for murder or apostasy. Herod lived as a faithful Jew so he would naturally have been concerned to stop the growth of any heretical sect. According to Deuteronomy 13:6 through 18, “If an individual entices the Jews to go and serve other gods, then that person is to be stoned to death. But if that person entices the entire city to follow other gods, then that person is to be killed with the sword.” Kistemaker concludes, “In the eyes of Herod Agrippa, James had led the city of Jerusalem astray.” Agrippa seemingly had both political and religious reasons for having James killed with the sword. Because of this, we have every reason to believe that James, the son of Zebedee, was a true martyr for the Christian faith. He died rather than recanting his belief in Jesus and so we can say he sincerely believed the message he preached.
What about James, the brother of the Lord? As I’ve noted in other episodes, the word brother in this passage doesn’t have to mean child of the same mother. It can refer to step-siblings or cousins. First that James is willing to endure suffering and even death is evident in his decision to lead the Jerusalem church after the death of James, the son of Zebedee. The earliest account of James’s martyrdom, the brother of Jesus, comes from Josephus. He writes, “The Roman procurator, Festus, was now dead and Albinus, his replacement, was but upon the road. So he, the high priest, Ananas, assembled the Sanhedrin of judges and brought before them the brother of Jesus who was called Christ, whose name was James and some others or some of his companions. And when he had formed an accusation against them as breakers of the law, he delivered them to be stoned.”
James would’ve known that the same Jewish leaders who killed Jesus and punished Peter and John and probably arranged the death of James, the son of Zebedee, will be willing to do the same to him. James’ commitment to preaching Jesus in the face of these verifiable threats make the account of his martyrdom historically reliable and provide good evidence of his religious sincerity. Paul also tells us that Jesus appeared to James in First Corinthians 15. And Galatians 1:19 says that Paul met James. So James, we know, was someone who was a witness of the resurrection and he chose to live a life that ended in martyrdom instead of denying that miracle.
Finally, we have the martyrdoms of Peter and Paul. Though they’re not explicitly recorded in the New Testament, we do have explicit mentions of them from several early sources. And the church fathers who do discuss them unanimously place them both in Rome and say that they were killed there. The New Testament, as I said, does not explicitly record Peter and Paul’s deaths, but it does strongly imply their deaths and martyrdom. Second Timothy 4:6 through eight says, “For I’m already on the point of being sacrificed, the time of my departure has come. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will award to me on that day.”
If Paul wrote Second Timothy, then he’s describing his impending martyrdom. If a later disciple wrote the letter and attributed it to Paul, as many critical scholars think, then he is reflecting back on Paul’s martyrdom. Peter’s martyrdom can also be seen in John 21:18 through 19 where Jesus tells Peter, “Truly, truly I say to you, when you were young, you girded yourself and walked where you would, but when you are old, you’ll stretch out your hands and another will gird you and carry you where you do not wish to go. This he said to show by what death he was to glorify God.” Critical scholars say this shows John was written after Peter’s death and so it’d be about 20 years later in the nineties. Other scholars who date John’s gospel before the year 70 say that the verb rendered he was to glorify is future tense. It actually says he will glorify God, which would mean John had not yet heard Peter had been martyred.
Now, the first non-biblical reference would be First Clement, which many scholars date to the end of the first century. But other scholars, including secular critics, have dated it as early as the sixties. After talking about how envy led to the persecution of Abel, Joseph, and Moses in the Old Testament, Clement says the following, “But not to dwell upon ancient examples, let us come to the most recent spiritual heroes. Let us take the noble examples furnished in our own generation. Through envy and jealousy, the greatest and most righteous pillars of the church had been persecuted and put to death. Let us set before our eyes the illustrious apostles, Peter, through unrighteous envy, endured not one or two but numerous labors and when he had at length suffered martyrdom departed to the place of glory due to him.
Owing to envy, Paul also obtained the reward of patient endurance. After being seven times thrown into captivity, compelled to flee and stoned, after preaching both in the east and west, he gained the illustrious reputation due to his faith, having taught righteousness to the whole world and come to the extreme limit of the west and suffered martyrdom under the prefects. Thus was he removed from the world and went into the holy place having proved himself a striking example of patience.”
Some scholars are critical of Clement’s account of Peter because the phrase often rendered, suffered martyrdom, is actually born his witness. Mythicist Robert Price makes hay of this for example.
In First Clement, an anonymous actually a text from the end of the first century where it says that Paul and Peter gave witness in Rome. We assume they’re talking about their death, but we really have no evidence, except for like apocryphal books and third century traditions about how any of the apostles died.
However, Price overlooks the early sources we have beyond the acts of Paul as well as the details are martyrdom we actually can find in First Clement. St. Polycarp, a disciple of St. John, says of Paul and the other apostles that, “They are now in their due place in the presence of the Lord with whom also they suffered for they loved not this present world but Him who died for us.”
The agnostic scholar Bart Ehrman’s translation of the Apostolic Fathers agrees that, “Polycarp shows that he knows that, like Paul and the other apostles, Ignatius had already been martyred for his faith.” Ehrman says of the passage in Clement that, “We do not have any contemporary accounts of Paul’s death, although traditions from several decades afterward indicate that he was martyred. He was put on trial and evidently executed for his faith.”
Oscar Cullmann, in his study on Peter provides a good reason to accept that the context is about Peter’s martyrdom. “The context of First Clement five reveals that the examples of Peter and Paul are constructed in a quite similar way, even though the account of Paul is much longer. The account reveals that they both witnessed to their faith and then provides a euphemistic portrayal of their deaths, went to the place of glory for Peter and up to the holy place for Paul. Parallelism in the account makes it clear that if one was martyred, the other must have been as well. Since it is universally recognized that Clement speaks of Paul’s death, he must also speak of the death of Peter.” What’s interesting is that Paulogia agrees that Paul and Peter were sincere in their faith.
If they were sincere, which I’ve now come to believe, those two were probably sincere.
However, he says their martyrdom doesn’t prove their sincerity because Peter and Paul may not have been given an opportunity to deny being Christians and so they’re just caught up in persecution they couldn’t avoid. A true martyr must be able to say no and have a chance to escape execution by denying their faith. Otherwise, he’s just a victim of circumstance like someone who dies in a church bombing, for example. Paulogia just cites Christian apologist, Jonathan McLatchie making this objection.
And when it comes to the most certain, Peter, Paul and James, the brother of Jesus, even the Christian apologists acknowledge that the circumstances make their deaths of virtually no evidential value.
Peter and Paul, as you rightly said, seem to have got caught up in that persecution and it seems that Nero’s motivations for persecuting the Christians was not so much theological precision, but rather it was political. He needed a scapegoat. So I do think that that does reduce the evidential value of the specific fact that they’re martyred. There’s no reason at all, in fact, there’s no reason to think otherwise that the apostles that were persecuted under Nero, Peter or Paul, et cetera were given no opportunity to recant there. There’s reason to think that they probably weren’t.
Right.
Even if the apostles couldn’t recant, their actions show they didn’t fear death being a consequence of preaching the message of Jesus’ resurrection. However, we do have evidence that the Romans allowed those accused of Christianity to recant in order to avoid punishment. At the end of the first century. Pliny the Younger, a governor of Bithynia asked Emperor Trajan what he should do with Christians who suspiciously gathered in groups early in the morning, which is something rebels often did. In response, Emperor Trajan sent the following letter to Pliny. “You observed proper procedure, my dear Pliny, in sifting the cases of those who have been denounced to you as Christians, for it is not possible to lay down any general rule to serve as a kind of fixed standard.
They are not to be sought out. If they are denounced and proved guilty, they are to be punished with this reservation that whoever denies that he’s a Christian and really proves it. That is, by worshiping our gods, even though he was under suspicion in the past, shall obtain pardon through repentance. But anonymously posted accusations ought to have no place in any prosecution, for this is both a dangerous kind of precedent and out of keeping with the spirit of our age.”
This shows that by the end of the first century and beginning of the second century, there was no empire-wide policy of exterminating people simply accused of being Christian, and there was a precedent of allowing those who were accused to deny the accusations. And this is in keeping with Roman legal traditions. Paulogia might say, we don’t know if Nero offered the same thing as Trajan did, but given that we at least have one example of Christians being allowed to recant and no similar examples of indiscriminate extermination or people not being allowed to recant, this tips the scale towards Nero having a similar policy to Trajan.
So to summarize, the who would die for a lie argument is a good one, but it has to be used precisely. The argument is that the apostles who originally testified to Jesus’s resurrection were willing to endure persecution and even death in order to proclaim that message and we have ample evidence they were willing to endure the suffering and death from the writings of Paul, the letters of the New Testament, from the Acts of the Apostles and also from non-biblical sources like the Roman historian Tacitus and the Jewish historian Josephus. And some of them, like the James’s and Peter and Paul were, according to the best historical evidence, martyred for their willingness to preach the Christian message. They’d rather accept death than deny Jesus. This shows that the apostles sincerely believed in Jesus’s resurrection. So fraud is a bad explanation for the explanation of why they started to say Jesus rose from the dead in the first place.
Other explanations besides an actual resurrection, like hallucination or being sincerely mistaken, have been offered and I hope to address those in a future episode. I’m also happy to chat with Paulogia if he has disagreements about my assessment or maybe have a general chat about the resurrection or a debate. In recent videos, he said he doesn’t prefer live debates and dialogues, but I’m open to maybe a written debate that we could share through video or something like that.
All right, well thank you, guys, very much. I hope you learned a lot from this episode. And if you want to deep dive on the subject of the Apostles’ martyrdom, definitely check out Sean McDowell’s book, The Fate of the 12 Apostles. Thank you, guys, so much and I hope you have a very blessed day.
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