Audio only:
Alex O’Connor gives an excellent breakdown of the historicity of the Resurrection account, but STILL denies that it happened. Why? Joe pushes back and points out where Alex is excellent and where he needs some help.
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer and I want to wish you a joyous Easter as we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. Why is it that Christians are convinced that Jesus really did rise from the dead? Do we just blindly believe it because this book full of neat stories told us so? Or can we use evidence and reason to conclude that the resurrection really did happen to make that case? I want to turn to who else, the atheist Alex O’Connor. In an interview he gave last year, O’Connor looks at all the major arguments against resurrection and shows really one by one why they don’t work and he does admirable steel manning of the Christian Case in the process. Now he’s going to leave a couple of doors for atheism half open, and I’ll explain later in the video why those don’t work either and why The only plausible explanation for the historical evidence is that unlikely, as it may sound, Jesus really did rise from the debt.
But first I want you to take a moment. I want you to try to come up with every plausible argument that you can for Jesus not rising from the debt. Do that and by the end of the video let’s see if any of those arguments are left standing. Now, while you’re doing that, I want to take a moment to express my gratitude for all of you who support this channel over@shamelessjoe.com. It’s been amazing interacting with all of you, walking with you throughout Lent and I’m excited for the new phase of the Patreon as I’m doing two livestream q and a hours each week. It’s a great way of supporting the show and hopefully you are enjoying the extra hours of content. Alright, so let’s run through the major arguments that you might make against Jesus rising from the dead. They generally fall into three major categories. Jesus didn’t really die on the cross. He only seemed to die. He did die, but the apostles made up the resurrection or last he did die and the apostles weren’t lying but they were somehow deluded about the resurrection, something like a group hallucination. So let’s see how these theories stack up by going through the data, I want to draw out five obvious factual conclusions from the evidence. First, Jesus really did die on the cross. How do we know? Because the Romans were really good at killing people.
CLIP:
Something very strange happened on Easter morning because how do we explain the fact that this man gets crucified by the Romans and then people claim to see him after he died and were willing to be put to death for that belief. Now, okay, maybe he didn’t die. Unlikely, as they say, the Romans knew how to kill people and supposedly they check this was a very effective method of killing people and they knew how to do it, so it’s unlikely that he just somehow survived this. It’s not the guy that stabbed him with the spear and supposedly the split on the spear or was this, did he get stabbed? Yeah, someone stabbed him with the spear after the right after he’s on the cross and it’s essentially to check he’s dead.
Joe:
As far as I know, there’s only one instance in which we know of somebody surviving crucifixion and even that case actually bolstered a Christian claim. The first century Jewish Josephus was a collaborator with the Romans and he mentions a time that he came into a village and he saw a mass crucifixion. Now he knew three of the men who were being crucified, and since he was serving as a delegate of the emperor, he was able to intervene on their behalf to Caesar directly and have them taken down from the cross while they were still alive. Caesar immediately commanded them to be taken down and to have the greatest care taken of them, and yet still two of them died under the physician’s hands while the third recovered. I’ve seen atheist point to this as proof that somebody could survive crucifixion, but it actually proves the opposite.
It wasn’t like the Romans thought that these guys were dead and one somehow survived. They had to receive a last minute reprieve to even have a chance of survival, and even after that, two of them died anyway, crucifixion was a lengthy and a barbaric wave killing somebody, and Joseph Fish shows us that even if you could intervene to try to save the person midway through, there’s a good chance that they were still going to die from their wounds. So let’s pretend that Jesus was the one man in history who the Romans somehow made a mistake with and he did somehow survive a full crucifixion. If that were the case, do you seriously think he’d be casually eating bread with strangers he met on the road or showing his puncture wounds off to his friends? A few days later he’d be in such critical condition that he would need the kind of immediate medical attention that Josephus talks about, and even if he somehow survived, we wouldn’t imagine he’d be up on his feet immediately after.
So any theory that Jesus somehow survived Good Friday, the torture, the carrying of the cross, the crucifixion itself, the piercing of his side, it simply isn’t grappling with the historical evidence in a serious way. Okay, so Jesus really did die good Friday and yet on Easter Sunday and in various points over the 40 days following Easter, people claimed to see Jesus. The earliest historical evidence we have of this older even than the gospels is recorded in one Corinthians 15 in which St. Paul says, for I’ve delivered to you as of first importance. What I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures and that he appeared to ke us then to the 12. Then he appeared to more than 500 brethren at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep.
Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. Now I’ve done another episode all about this so-called Corinthian creed that I’ve linked to in the description, but here’s what you need to know. St. Paul is describing what he was taught when he became a Christian a few years after Easter. And while Paul is clearly adding his own commentary on this creed, pointing out that most of the 500 are still alive and adding Jesus’s resurrection appearance to Paul, even radical skeptics like Richard Carrier have to admit that the core of this creed goes all the way back in carrier’s words. The evidence for this creed dating to the very origin of the religion is amply strong and there is no reasonable basis for claiming otherwise. So then a very short span of time, we have a lot of people independently claiming that they’ve personally seen the resurrected Christ, all of the 12 but many, many more people as well.
And significantly the stories about what people recount are quite detailed. We have eyewitness accounts of people not only speaking with Jesus but doing things like in St. Matthew’s gospel, people touching Christ and worshiping him. St. Luke tells how people walked the seven mile journey to Emmaus with Jesus only to invite him into their home where he revealed himself to them and then disappeared in order to prove that he’s not a ghost. Jesus even says to the apostles later in Luke’s gospel, see my hands and my feet that it is I myself handle me and see for a spirit has not flesh and bones as you see that I have. St. John described Jesus appearing in a locked room where he breathed upon the apostles and then a week later invited Thomas to touch his hands inside. In other words, these aren’t just cases where believers said, I saw a man standing a far off and I think it might’ve been Jesus. And significantly these are encounters with Christ that involve sight, sound, touch, and even taste. What do we make of the eyewitnesses? Many of whom knew Jesus quite well, who then went on to say that they saw him risen from the dead. Now, one solution would be to say, well, obviously they’re lying, but as Alex O’Connor points out, that’s actually a rather silly objection.
CLIP:
Then a few days later, people are claiming to see him, maybe they’re lying, but then you don’t tend to go to death for something to be a lie. You’re willing to be put to death for things that you think are true, that are false. But very rarely are people willing to die for beliefs that they don’t actually believe themselves. That doesn’t really happen.
Joe:
Notice the claim here isn’t that alleged. Eyewitnesses are always telling the truth. It’s that people have some kind of motive when they lie. That motive could be something like fear, but more often it’s because they’re trying to gain something, money, power, material, comfort and so on. But Christianity is striking and that it’s not clear what would possibly motivate the apostles to lie. They didn’t become wealthy, they didn’t live a life of ease on the contrary their whole life from the time that they chose to follow Jesus to the time that they were in all. But one case for the 12 tortured and killed was a life that seems considerably harder, not easier than if they didn’t believe in the gospel. And Jesus had actually warned them about this ahead of time. In Matthew 10, Jesus warned them that his message would even divide families and that he who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me.
In Matthew 19, there’s this conversation between Jesus and St. Peter, which Peter says, we have left everything and followed you. What then shall we have? And Jesus responds by promising eternal life and heavenly glory. But notice that’s only going to be enticing to the apostles if they really believe in Jesus’s message and his ability to deliver on those promises. Now, Babylon B pointed all this out in a funny video a few years ago, imagining how ridiculous the conversation would have to be of the apostles conspiring to steal Jesus’s body and lie about the resurrection, all in an elaborate plot to get themselves murdered.
CLIP:
We are going to steal his body. Okay? Okay, I’m tracking with you what’s next? And then we are going to tell the whole world that you rose from the dead. Oh, you know why, man? I love it already. Alright, classic. Classic. Then what? And then we’re all going to get brutally murdered. Wait, wait, wait. Come again, come again. Could you go over that last part real quick? Oh, what we get murdered. What’s the problem? I like it. I like it. I mean, don’t get me wrong, peach. I love me a good hoax as much as the next guy, right? What’s in it for us? Do we all get riches, fame, and fortune first, right? No, no. Get this. You’re going to be hated, hated, persecuted and reviled for the rest
Joe:
Of your life. So Connor framed the question the right way. It’s not that eyewitnesses always tell the truth. It’s not even that nobody dies for a lie. Since people can and do die for falsehoods that they’ve been duped into believing. It’s that very rarely are people willing to die for beliefs that they don’t actually believe in themselves. Whatever else you think of the story of Easter. If your explanation involves hundreds of eyewitnesses lying even under threat of torture and death, that’s not a particularly plausible explanation. But of course it’s not enough to say that the apostles think that they’re telling the truth. How can we be sure that they weren’t diluted? The question of the apostles being diluted is an obvious one which Alex handles by pointing out some of the equally obvious problems with it.
CLIP:
Imagine spending every single day with this person, living with this person, eating with this person, and then you’ve only seen him a few days ago and somehow imagine somebody managed to convince you that they were me. Even if I had a twin brother, they probably wouldn’t be able to convince you that it was me or maybe they were hallucinating in groups. One of the earliest gospel New Testament sources is the letters of Paul the earliest. And in one of those letters, Paul refers to Jesus having appeared to 500 people at once. And in some of the gospels you get at least some group of appearances, at least more than one person, and sometimes groups of disciple, the 12 all seeing Jesus all at once. You don’t get group hallucinations like that. And so it doesn’t seem like they were mistaken either. And so if they’re not mistaken, they’re not making it up. What explains the fact that these people claim to see him after he had died? And the Christian apologists will say that the only real plausible explanation is that he really did rise from the dead.
Joe:
You can’t credibly believe that Jesus’s resurrection was the result of either an imposter or a hallucination. Alex lays out why it’s implausible that any of them, much less all of them would fall for an imposter, but doesn’t even mention the glaring detail that Jesus shows them his wounds, that the more common theory is that there is some kind of group hallucination. The problem is what skeptics are proposing here isn’t a real thing. You won’t find a group hallucination experience that looks and sounds anything like what’s being proposed to explain the way Jesus’ resurrection. But Alex seems to think it’s plausible. So let’s see what he has to say about it.
CLIP:
It’s, it’s a interesting argument and it’s quite powerful. However, my response has always been that this sort of process of elimination is very clever and that’s how it’s usually run, but it can go the other way. I mean, imagine I were trying to prove that there was such thing as a group hallucination. I know it’s extraordinary, but that was a group hallucination and I tried to prove it by saying, well, what are the other explanations? Or maybe they lied. Well, they wouldn’t do that because they wouldn’t go to death or maybe a man rose from the dead. But come on, that doesn’t happen. That breaks all the laws of physics. So the only remaining option is this. It kind of depends where you
Joe:
Start. So let’s address both halves of that argument. You’ll notice that in Alex’s counter, he makes the argument that Jesus couldn’t have risen from the dead since that would violate the laws of physics. Now that’s a good summary of much of the skeptical case against the resurrection. It couldn’t have happened because such an event would be impossible naturally, and that argument is circular and quite bad. A huge part of the significance of the resurrection was to demonstrate that Jesus is God, that the laws of nature don’t constrain him, the author of nature, that not even death can constrain him. So somebody making the argument that the resurrection violates the laws of nature would be like an accountant saying bank fraud couldn’t have happened here. Fraud is against the law. The whole point, whether you’re looking for someone defying financial regulations or death itself is that we’re looking for an event out of the ordinary, out of what you would normally expect.
So an objection that amounts to it would take a miracle to rise from the dead is hardly an argument against Christianity. We agree it would take a miracle. That’s the whole point. And if you add, well, miracles don’t happen. You’re dogmatically assuming your conclusion rather than reasoning to a conclusion based upon the actual evidence and that stops the discussion before it can start because your standards of proof are perfectly contradictory to the definition of a miracle. But okay, fine. What should we make of the group hallucination theory if we’re not going to just dismiss it out of hand? Well, frankly, what’s being proposed is not how hallucinations work. Broadly speaking, there are four groups of people associated with hallucinations that suffering from schizophrenia, affective psychosis, eye disease, and certain neurological diseases like Parkinson’s amongst the rest, the so-called general population, about 7% of us report having experienced visual hallucinations before.
But the research seems to suggest that a lot of that is drug induced. So remember the point I made earlier that the resurrection appearances are actually multisensory. They involve sight, sound, touch and taste that makes them what’s called multimodal hallucinations. And that sort of hallucination is quite rare even amongst those suffering from hallucinations with the exception of those dealing with literal psychosis. So unless your claim is that the hundreds of eyewitnesses all happened to be undiagnosed psychotics who happen to see and hear the exact same multimodal hallucinations, this just isn’t a plausible theory. Now, occasionally people who advance this will point to what are called mass psychogenic illnesses where a group of people convince themselves that they’re sick and they start exhibiting similar symptoms even though they’re not really sick. So you can convince a group of people that the water they’re drinking is contaminated and some of them are going to start complaining about feeling sick even if the water is actually fine.
But that is a different category. Psychogenic illness is just not the same thing as multimodal hallucination and you can’t jump from one to the other. So no, you can’t plausibly explain away what the apostles witnessed as a psychotic break from reality. If you think you can, I didn’t invite you to go find one medically documented instance of hundreds of people suffering from something like this and including multim modalities like eating and conversing and so on, and we can see how similar the two events really are. I’d be willing to bet that the odds of you finding evidence like that would be miraculous.
Finally, I think it’s important to add one more detail that Alex didn’t mention. The evidence is quite clear that Jesus’s tomb is empty. Remember Josephus, the first century historian I mentioned earlier, he mentions another detail. It’s going to be relevant for our understanding of the resurrection. Namely, the Jews used to take so much care of the burial of men that they took down those who were condemned and crucified and buried them before the going down of the sun. Now in context, Josephus is not talking about Jesus, he’s talking about the general practice of burying those killed by crucifixion, but that gives additional support to the gospel. Writer’s claim that Jesus was taken down and was buried before sunset and the tomb owned by Joseph of Arimathea. And yet 52 days later on Pentecost, Peter can stand up before a crowd of people in Jerusalem itself and give a speech contrasting how David’s body is still in the tomb and Jesus’s body isn’t.
Now both the followers and the opponents of Jesus knew where his tomb was. The evangelists even mentioned that a small station of guards had been placed there outside the tomb for fear. The apostles might steal the body. So if Jesus’s body was still in the tomb, you could end Christianity in a moment by walking over and pointing to it. What’s more the earliest argument against the resurrection, namely that the apostles had stolen the body is an argument that presupposes that the tomb is in fact empty. So if you’re somebody who goes in for the idea, this was all a mass hallucination. Isn’t it kind of a weird coincidence that they should all hallucinate Jesus rose from the dead at just the same time that his body goes missing? It’s sometimes alleged against Christians that we believe in the resurrection on the basis of blind faith just because the Bible tells you.
But I think that the reality is near the opposite. The disbelief and the historical fact of Jesus’ rising from the dead, he’s often born out of a blind opposition to the possibility of the miraculous. Once the permit that the resurrection could happen is clearly the strongest and cleanest and clearest argument for the historical facts that we have at our disposal. That Jesus foretold his death and resurrection, that he then died and was buried, that he was subsequently seen, resurrected, and glorified by hundreds of people. This is our faith, but this is also historical fact and it’s in light of such facts that I want to wish you a joyous Easter for Shameless Popery. Joe Heschmeyer God bless you.