Bart Ehrman takes on DCP’s empty tomb

[drumdude]

DCP, like William Lane Craig, makes an argument that the historical Jesus can be demonstrated by evidence and argument to have actually risen from the dead. Because contemporaries claim to have seen the empty tomb and the resurrected Jesus.

https://youtu.be/IuM_RKyyMrA

Ehrman agrees that Jesus lived and was crucified. He even agrees that people claim to have seen Jesus after the crucifixion. But Ehrman disagrees with the empty tomb.

Ehrman argues that Romans left bodies on the cross to further the humiliation. He doesn’t know any instance of anybody from that time being crucified and buried in a tomb on the same day.

How likely is it that the Romans made an exception for someone they were torturing? How likely is it the gospels are reliable when they claim Pilate turned over Jesus to be crucified by the Jews? The real Pilate wouldn’t have given the historical Jesus more than a few minutes thought and would have crucified him like he had everyone else.

[yellowstone123]

Ehrmans interviews are interesting and important but if someone writes that the disciples ran and John got to the empty tomb before Simon-Peter. That is an interesting detail. Did God bring Jesus back to life. Did Jesus bring himself back to life. I don’t know.

[Res Ipsa]

I’ve never been impressed with Craig’s argument. “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” is a pretty handy standard for evaluating evidence. A dead body coming back to life after a couple of days is about as extraordinary as claims get. And, at best, the New Testament is about as ordinary as evidence gets.

[drumdude]

I’ve never been impressed with Craig’s argument. “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” is a pretty handy standard for evaluating evidence. A dead body coming back to life after a couple of days is about as extraordinary as claims get. And, at best, the New Testament is about as ordinary as evidence gets.

DCP mentioned recently that he thinks the gospels were written earlier than commonly thought. A lot of the apologetics now is trying to get the gospels as close to eyewitness testimony as possible to shore up the fact that it’s the only piece of evidence we have for the vast majority of Christian truth claims.

[Physics Guy]

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but on the other hand weird things do happen occasionally, and some amount of weirdness is inescapable in early Christianity. Whatever happened to Jesus's body, his movement really did recover from his death. It may seem easy enough in hindsight, knowing what actually happened, to nod and say that of course the time was ripe for just this kind of Neo-Jewish mystery cult or whatever it was to spread through the Roman Empire yada yada yada world religion. Thinking that things like that just happen by default seems naïve to me, though.

The most likely explanation for Christianity would seem to me to include some kind of unlikely event around Jesus's death. That unusual thing would have given super-charged confidence and enthusiasm to the dead leader's followers. If the time isn't ripe for something to grow, a core of committed supporters won't be enough to make it grow in spite of conditions, but without that committed group of people, I don't think anything as abstract as a religious movement is going to just spread by itself like a virus, no matter how ripe the conditions. Put a hot spark in dry tinder, though, and things can take off. Something weird about Jesus's death would be the kind of thing one should expect, I would say, given what happened next.

By no means would this unusual thing have to have been a literal, bodily resurrection. It could have been something as gruesomely banal as Jesus's body getting devoured by stray dogs. Or it could have been just a bizarre confusion, too cockeyed to affect anyone but stunned and terrified people, about what was supposed to have happened to Jesus's body. It could have been all kinds of things, that would have given Jesus's followers some real if misleading experience on which their faith could be based. That's the bad news for attempts to support the Resurrection with reason. Even wildly implausible flukes, that no historian would consider seriously even though they might be technically possible, are bound to be more probable, a priori, than a real Resurrection.

Trying to make out that nothing at all unusual happened with Jesus's death is also dubious, though. It makes the subsequent growth of Christianity more of a weird fluke than even quite weird flukes would be. It plays into the hands of the apologetic arguments, in fact, by accepting a false dilemma between a world religion just springing up for no adequate reason and a real Resurrection. "Something kind of weird happened" is the third alternative, embracing all kinds of somewhat weird but non-supernatural possibilities. It's not a very satisfyingly concrete hypothesis, but I think it's the most likely class of scenarios, given the evidence.

[Rivendale]

I’ve never been impressed with Craig’s argument. “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” is a pretty handy standard for evaluating evidence. A dead body coming back to life after a couple of days is about as extraordinary as claims get. And, at best, the New Testament is about as ordinary as evidence gets.

He does get a lot of milage out of properly basic beliefs dosen't he?

[drumdude]

Trying to make out that nothing at all unusual happened with Jesus's death is also dubious, though. It makes the subsequent growth of Christianity more of a weird fluke than even quite weird flukes would be.

This is why Mormonism appeals so much to me. It’s an insight into how these flukes and movements that spring out of them happen. I think we can extrapolate much of what happened in early Mormonism on to Early Christianity.

[Res Ipsa]

PG, I agree that there are a near infinite number of possible explanations between a dead man coming back to life and nothing unusual. Including, I suppose, that Christianity is just one of those weird things that happen from time to time.

[Manetho]

The most likely explanation for Christianity would seem to me to include some kind of unlikely event around Jesus's death. That unusual thing would have given super-charged confidence and enthusiasm to the dead leader's followers. If the time isn't ripe for something to grow, a core of committed supporters won't be enough to make it grow in spite of conditions, but without that committed group of people, I don't think anything as abstract as a religious movement is going to just spread by itself like a virus, no matter how ripe the conditions. Put a hot spark in dry tinder, though, and things can take off. Something weird about Jesus's death would be the kind of thing one should expect, I would say, given what happened next.

By no means would this unusual thing have to have been a literal, bodily resurrection. It could have been something as gruesomely banal as Jesus's body getting devoured by stray dogs. Or it could have been just a bizarre confusion, too cockeyed to affect anyone but stunned and terrified people, about what was supposed to have happened to Jesus's body. It could have been all kinds of things, that would have given Jesus's followers some real if misleading experience on which their faith could be based. That's the bad news for attempts to support the Resurrection with reason. Even wildly implausible flukes, that no historian would consider seriously even though they might be technically possible, are bound to be more probable, a priori, than a real Resurrection.

As I recall, Ehrman's hypothesis for the origin of the belief in the resurrection is that the early followers had visions of him after his death, which led them to think he had been raised up into heaven (which is the only type of resurrection belief that can be unambiguously seen in Paul's letters, our earliest source). Only later, Ehrman thinks, did that belief evolve into the earthly post-mortem appearances that we find in Matthew, Luke, and John. Maybe that was it. Maybe there was an Elvis-style Jesus sighting, where a disciple saw some guy who kind of looked like Jesus from a distance down the road. An obsessed mind doesn't need much of a peg to hang its obsession on.

For a long time, I've felt that cognitive dissonance is a key part of the explanation for the emergence of Christianity. There are many instances where fervent religious expectations were dashed, in which many followers fell away while the ones who had invested the most in the expectation ended up redefining their beliefs to fit the new reality and emerging just as committed as before. I think the early disciples' interpretation of Jesus' death as part of God's plan, and as a substitute for animal sacrifice, fits this pattern very well; they clearly didn't follow him around expecting him to be executed. And in those other, better-documented examples, there doesn't seem to be a particular unusual event that catalyzes the change, beyond the failure of the expectation. Menachem Mendel Schneerson died in about the most mundane circumstances you can think of for somebody in the United States in the late 20th century (cardiac arrest in the hospital at the age of 92). The key thing that distinguished him was that a large number of people revered him, and some thought he was the Messiah. Apparently, that was all that was needed for some to believe that he was not dead.

It may seem easy enough in hindsight, knowing what actually happened, to nod and say that of course the time was ripe for just this kind of Neo-Jewish mystery cult or whatever it was to spread through the Roman Empire yada yada yada world religion. Thinking that things like that just happen by default seems naïve to me, though...

Trying to make out that nothing at all unusual happened with Jesus's death is also dubious, though. It makes the subsequent growth of Christianity more of a weird fluke than even quite weird flukes would be. It plays into the hands of the apologetic arguments, in fact, by accepting a false dilemma between a world religion just springing up for no adequate reason and a real Resurrection.

This wording strikes me as weird, and seems (perhaps unintentionally) to conflate separate stages in Christianity's evolution. Obviously, Christianity wouldn't be a world religion if Jesus' followers had abandoned their belief in his importance after his death, because it wouldn't exist at all. But the vast majority of Christianity's growth into a major religion took place after everyone who knew him had died. Even during the disciples' lifetimes, much of the Christian evangelism that took place, and quite possibly most of it, was carried out by people who never witnessed Jesus' death or its immediate aftermath (Paul and his converts, and almost certainly others who we don't hear as much about). So the success of Christianity was possible because its message — i.e., the sayings attributed to Jesus plus the beliefs formulated in the wake of his death — clicked with a small but significant subset of the Roman populace. Whatever events inspired the resurrection stories were only important insofar as they caused those beliefs to be formulated.

[Moksha]

PG, I agree that there are a near infinite number of possible explanations between a dead man coming back to life and nothing unusual. Including, I suppose, that Christianity is just one of those weird things that happen from time to time.

Stories were passed around and adjusted before they were codified. Some pretty sophisticated theology sprang up as an explanatory backdrop. That all changed when Mormons entered the picture. They made their own stories.