Did Jesus Really Rise From the Dead? A Historian, an Atheist, a Skeptic, a Theologian, and an Ex-Con Weigh In

I recently completed an overview of more than 1,400 sources on the resurrection of Jesus published since 1975. I studied and catalogued about 650 of these texts in English, German, and French. Some of the results of this study are certainly intriguing. For example, perhaps no fact is more widely recognized than that early Christian believers had real experiences that they thought were appearances of the risen Jesus. A critic may claim that what they saw were hallucinations or visions, but he does not deny that they actually experienced something. (1)
​         
There is a virtual consensus among scholars who study Jesus’ resurrection that, subsequent to Jesus’ death by crucifixion, his disciples really believed that he appeared to them risen from the dead. (2)
​

Louis

4/11/2017 09:14:19 pm

David Siems

4/14/2017 02:29:45 pm

barry

4/20/2017 07:24:08 pm

Hello Ms. Childers,

I found your blog via one of your amazon.com posts.

I would be willing to have separate dialogues with you on the identity, testimony and credibility of each individual resurrection “eyewitness” mentioned in the NT. Or we can discuss whatever bible or apologetics topic you wish (I’m an atheist).

It is my contention that all such witnesses have identity, testimony and credibility problems more than sufficient to justify skepticism of their claims. Skeptics hardly need to hide behind David Hume’s experiential argument against miracles. The resurrection of Jesus fails on the merits, even assuming supernaturalism is more justified than naturalism.

Here are my beliefs:

1 – good old fashioned lying and embellishment not only better account for the stories of disciples experiencing something, than does the theory that they actually experienced a genuinely resurrected Jesus, but the skeptical theory would seem virtually certain in light of statements made in the gospel of John. Therefore Habermas’ minimal facts argument is nowhere near as persuasive as he thinks it is.

2 – Generously assuming no problems with apostolic authorship of NT books, there are only 3 resurrection witnesses named in the NT, whose testimony comes down to us today in first-hand form; Matthew, John and Paul. All other resurrection testimony in the NT is either hearsay, or doesn’t come down to us today in first-hand form.

3 – Neither Mark nor Peter had much interest in producing a written gospel, and it was peer pressure, not inspiration of God, that caused Mark to reluctantly to write out this gospel.

4 – Mark is the earliest gospel.

5 – Mark’s most likely original ending was the place we now call 16:8, so the earliest gospel did not tell of any resurrection appearances, while the contrary view simply mires the apologist in a world of scholarly hurt.

6 – The author of Matthew is likely not an eyewitness of Jesus, because said author borrows far more heavily from non-eyewitness Mark than can be reasonably allowed for. This cannot be changed by pretentious apologists who can conjure up scenarios in which an eyewitness chooses to speak through a non-eyewitness.

7 – Canonical Matthew might preserve snippets of genuinely Matthian testimony, but what exactly originates from him and what originates from the anonymous scribes, can no more be determined than can the sayings of the historical Jesus be disentangled with any confidence from the inauthentic sayings.

8 – Luke gave false impressions of history to his readers, and he probably got the idea from his mentor, Paul.

9 – John’s gospel was intended to be “spiritual” in a way distinguishable from “historical”, and the idea that Matthew, Luke and Mark knew Jesus said all these high-christological things, but “chose to exclude them” anyway, is highly unlikely given how the deity of Jesus was the doctrine unbelievers would find the most intolerable. It is more likely that John, assuredly the last produced of the 4 canonical gospels, invented most of the Jesus-sayings now found in only his gospel.

9a – If the Muratorian Fragment’s testimony be admitted, John’s gospel does not originate in John’s own personal eyewitness recollections, but in the visions experienced by the other 10 disciples, so that who said what, and what level of credibility each source had, will be impossible to determine, thus mooting John’s gospel for purposes of resurrection argumentation.

10 – Apostle Paul approved of giving a false impression of his beliefs to whoever he was with, if he felt doing so would help him gain more converts. Since apologists are quick to leap upon any bit of dishonesty in skeptics and pretend that this is more than sufficient to rationally justify ignoring or banning them from discussions, fairness requires that you also ban Paul from your discussions.

11 – The NT contains a significant amount of information indicating that seeing the resurrected Jesus was something far less than the “mightily transforming experience” today’s apologists ceaselessly exalt it to be.

12 – It is perfectly irrational to encourage the average unbeliever on the street to check out the historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus.

13 – The gospels and Paul give us good reasons to think several different hallucinations by several different people, combined with a good bit of ability to embellish history, accounts for the gospel resurrection narratives.

14 – In Deut. 28, Moses not only threatens that God will send the most horrible imaginable curses on those who disobey, such as rape (v. 30), kidnapping (v. 41) and parental cannibalism (v. 53), but he also says God will “delight” to inflict these atrocities on Israel no less than He delights to prosper those who obey (v. 63). Getting a “thrill” out of such horrors represents the very heart of sadistic lunacy. You have the option, of course, to assert that God is imperfect, especially in light of the inability of classic

Krisztián

3/28/2021 02:53:21 am

Gary

3/28/2021 10:50:01 am

Theresa

4/16/2022 05:55:14 pm

Barry

4/24/2017 04:03:34 pm

“Even the atheists and skeptics confirm that Jesus’ disciples claimed and believed that they had seen Jesus risen from the dead.”
———-Barry: we also confirm that Mary-fanatics in Fatima and elsewhere “claimed and believed” that they had seen divine visions of the virgin Mary. I don’t see how our admitting to this plank in the minimal facts argument of Habermas/Craig bestows any significant advantage to the apologist.

We could just as easily argue that because Paul denies that his gospel rests on any man’s tradition or authority (Galatians 1:1, 11-12), then the gospel references he makes in 1st Cor. 15:3-4 (which Habermas tries to get dated all the way back to 35 a.d.,) only refers to a gospel version that Paul says doesn’t rest on any human tradition or authority.

That is, when Paul says Jesus rose again the third day according to the Scripture, he is only saying that God revealed this fact to him through scripture without the aid of any human tradition or authority, and he then supplements this entirely mental revelation gospel with historical traditions about Peter and others seeing the resurrected Jesus.

The historical evidence that the apostles were presented by secular authorities with death or denial of Christ, and chose death, is ambiguous and slight, and one’s ability to get carried away in extreme fits of nearly indescribable religious ecstasy plausibly account for a person who didn’t physically see a resurrected Jesus, to become so convinced of it anyway, that they were willing to die for such belief.

(See Acts 2, unbelievers interpreted the apostles as being drunk; 1st Cor. 14:23, Paul thinks the way the Corinthians exercise spiritual gifts motivates unbelievers to conclude they are crazy; 2nd Cor. 12:1-4, Paul cannot tell, even some 14 years after the fact, if his trip to heaven was physical or an out-of-body experience, and he confuses this absurdity with his infamous telling the story in the third-person, as if the man he was talking about was somebody else, when most scholars think he’s talking about himself nonetheless; Acts 9, 22, 26, the men with Paul couldn’t see the Jesus Paul was allegedly speaking with, so this too was likely a completely mental vision story, as confirmed by Paul characterizing this experience as an optasia in 26:19, the same Greek word he used in 2nd Cor. 12:1 to describe an even more esoteric experience)

Alisa Childers

4/24/2017 09:32:40 pm

Hi Barry, I believe there are a couple of problems with your Mary analogy. First, the people claiming to have seen a vision of her weren’t eyewitnesses of her actual life. Also, to my knowledge, they weren’t claiming that Mary had come back to life, risen from the dead—they were visions. Even if they actually did have visions, it wouldn’t prove anything about Mary’s life. However, in the case of Jesus, those who knew him and walked with him claimed he came back to life, was seen by over 500 witnesses and stayed with them for forty days. That is a much bigger claim than to simply have seen a vision—and one that could have been easily disproven if it wasn’t true.

Regarding the creed in 1 Corinthians 15, you are mis-characterizing the scholarship on that. Habermas isn’t “trying” to date it early—it is widely accepted that this creed originated 3-7 years after Jesus’ death. Even far-left liberal theologian Dominic Crossan dates it to the early 30’s AD.

I don’t agree with your characterization of Paul—he was an eyewitness to the resurrected Christ.

barry

4/25/2017 04:50:12 pm

Hi Alisa,

“Feel free to contact me with any questions or subjects you would like me to write about. ”
Could you please state how and when you trained in apologetics to become a teacher of that subject, and from what institution you gained your diploma or degree or certificate of completion?

In answer to your reply here: Why would a modern Catholic have to have been a witness to Mary’s life, before they could be deemed credible in their story of having seen Mary in modern times? Daniel never personally knew the Jesus of the first century, but you have no problems believing that 600 years before Jesus, Daniel still had a vision of him, right? Most conservatives think Joshua was looking at Jesus in Joshua 5:13, yet because the text says Joshua “lifted up his eyes”, it is presenting his viewing of Christ as a vision. Cf. 1st Chronicles 21:16, where David is able to see angels he wasn’t able to see before. Joshua shows in 5:13 that he wasn’t previously familiar with this particular “captain of the Lords’s host”

Then you assert that Jesus coming back from the dead is a significant difference from the Fatima miracles where Mary is not said to have resurrected from death but only to have ‘appeared’. Again, I find this difference to be irrelevant. Apologists are constantly reminding us that it is the credibility of the eyewitness that is most important, so I simply ask that you follow suit, and ask what was reported in Fatima and whether the witnesses were credible. How different that stuff was from what happened in Jesus’ case is immaterial.

You say if Catholics had true visions of Mary this wouldn’t prove anything about her life. Again, I don’t see the point: if the visions are true, they would justify Catholicism’s devotion to Mary, which you currently regard as idolatry. The fact that the visions wouldn’t say anything about her earthly life 2,000 years ago would be irrelevant to the problems the truth of said visions would create for non-Catholic Christians like you.

You assert that 500 people saw a risen Jesus. Surely you are aware that this claimed exact figure “500” depends on the credibility of the apostle Paul? Did you know that Paul honestly admitted that he would give a false impression of this true beliefs to whatever crowd he was talking to, if he thought such lies would win him more converts?

I did not misrepresent anything about Habermas or “scholarship”. Because we have no record outside Galatians 1 of Paul ever doing anything in Arabia , we are forced to conclude, assuming Paul is telling the truth, that he didn’t preach to the Corinthians until at least 14 years after his conversion (Gal. 1:16-17). If he converted in 35 a.d., then his first passing of the gospel to the Corinthians would have occurred around 50 a.d.

So when Paul says in 1st Cor. 15:3 that he had previously passed on to them what he “received”, he means that in 50 a.d., he passed on to them a revelatory gospel that God gave him 14 years earlier, i.e., a gospel that he learned completely apart from the authority of other men (Gal. 1:1, 11-12). ALL scholars engage in error when they try to source this creed in people other than Paul. Hence, those who make up the “wide range of acceptance” of this creed dating to 35 a.d., are simply ignorng Paul’s own statements.

Then you say Paul was an eyewitness of the risen Jesus, but a) that’s not a scholarly way to address my argument from optasia in Acts 26:19, and

b) I was only allowing Luke’s hearsay there for the sake of argument, Luke’s story of Paul’s Damascus-road-conversion is not the best evidence the NT gives us for Paul’s conversion, because it is hearsay, and a common rule of historiography is that historians should use only their best evidence, and most people would agree that 2,000 year old hearsay is a rather sad basis upon which to justify one’s choice to give up naturalism and espouse supernaturalism;

c) forgetting the hearsay objection, Acts 9 includes details that justify suspicion toward the theory that Paul’s “seeing” was in the classic typical sense of seeing with his physical eyes (i.e., the “eye” in eyewitness), such as the admission that the men standing there with him “saw no one” (9:27).

J. Warner Wallace quickly conjured up a commentary on Paul not being an eyewitness, after I pointed this out to him some months ago, and he asserted that Paul could still be a legitimate witness even if he didn’t see the risen Christ with his physical eyes. Wallace was apparently afraid that Paul’s eyewitness status was sufficiently shaky that a backup apologetic needed to be at the read just in case the standard view buckled.

Finally, you will likely assert that the other men with Paul at least saw a light (Acts 22:9), but I do not believe that every single detail included in biblical stories is the historical truth, and since most Christian scholars deny biblical inerrancy, you cannot blame my denial of biblical inerrancy on my spiritual deadness or al

Alisa Childers

4/25/2017 09:17:04 pm

Barry, you seem well-versed in Christian apologetics, as I am in the common atheist objections that you have written at-length on many of my posts. Since you are familiar with the arguments, I simply don’t have time to re-hash each one of them here.

Do you have a blog site? If so, I’d be happy to engage in a more formal 5 or 6 part back and forth debate on an agreed upon topic if you’d like. Regarding comments you leave here, I’m happy to dialogue, but I’ll only be able to interact with objections that are relevant to the particular post. I won’t have time to answer the different unrelated topics you introduce in many of your comments. Thanks for your comments and I’ll consider some of your thoughts for future blog posts.

barry

4/27/2017 01:09:31 pm

I have no blog yet, but will set one up.

My first argument would be that “formal” written debates allow the participants to avoid whatever they wish to avoid, while contraqwise, proceeding in regular conversational dialogue will more likely root out hidden areas of disagreement.

In other words, the process of dialoguing back and forth in normal conversation has greater probability of exposing shortcomings in somebody’s presuppositions, than would be the case if all they had to do was answer the other girl’s 2,000 word speech. I got far more out of watching scholars debate each other in this “point-to-point” way on John Ankerberg, than I ever did in watching live oral debates where each speaker gets to talk/rebut for several minutes at a time, uninterrupted.

Several reasons to view the conversation-approach to be better would be a) most people are not intellectuals, and “tune out” if they are hit with too much evidence for one side; b) most people are social, and tend to favor the conversational approach more than reading a 10 page speech; c) dialoguing on a narrowly-defined topic is absolutely necessary when atheists debate Christians on apologetics issues, since, as I’m sure you and other apologists know, we don’t agree on too much anyway. ANYTHING you say will probably be the subject of disagreement, so keeping it simple and making sure to start at a legitimate beginning point is paramount. While more people would likely attend a debate entitled “Did Jesus rise from the dead?”, it remains clear that a debate entitled “Can distrust of Papias’ general credibility be rationally justified?” would probably bite into the controlling presuppositions of the speakers far more.

Finally, d) the key to resolving disagreements is to find common ground. The more common ground we have, the more likely we will resolve our disagreement on something.

It is the “cross-examination” part of the debate where the truly acid test of a person’s beliefs/presuppositions legitimately begins.

Since you acknowledge my familiarity with apologetics (and I certainly acknowledge yours!), I deem it unnecessary to wrote any further “long” responses at your blog. It will probably be better if I ask direct questions about narrowly defined apologetics topics related to the subject of the particular blog that I respond to.

This has the advantaged of enabling you to post a reply without needing to have an hour of free time just to do it (yes, I’m guilty of the exact “long-speech-reply” that I just said cause people to tune out, but I’m trying to change my ways).

So since this blog is about Jesus rising from the dead, I would like to know under what circumstances you first drew the conclusion that Jesus rose from the dead.

Alisa Childers

4/27/2017 10:55:43 pm

Jacob

4/14/2019 07:48:03 pm

Richard Jude Woerner

4/22/2019 10:37:21 am

One of the most common arguments about the resurrection is that no historian ever wrote about the resurrection or even the life of Christ. One question I ask is, when the letters of the N.T. were in circulation and were known where the churches were founded, more specifically Rome, why isn’t there any writings by anyone in the 1st or 2nd centuries that refute the writings of the N.T.? Reason is simple, there aren’t any. But then along comes Richard Carrier and he writes as if he has some insight that no one before ever had.

Besides, the Parable of the Sower explains much about why people don’t believe. Goes all the way to Genesis 3 when Satan asked Eve, Hath God said… That doubt has robbed many of the truths in Scripture.

ralph

6/7/2020 10:12:17 am

Since Jesus “resurrection” is the only which allegededly happen in human history it is difficult to accept such claim.
Moreover to discuss about this possibility is absurd 2000 years after based only on “witnesses”.

I prefer to rely on scientific evidence and not on sayings.

Sorry for the believers.

Karen

4/1/2021 12:54:30 pm