I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist (50 page)

So here’s the contrast: in the early days of Christianity, you might be killed for becoming Christian; in the early days of Islam’s growth, you might be killed for
not
becoming a Muslim! In other words, the spread of these two great monotheistic faiths couldn’t have been more different: Islam spread by use of the sword on others; Christianity spread when others used the sword on it.

“What about the Crusades?” the skeptic will interject. Take a history course—the Crusades did not begin until nearly 1100, more than 1,000 years after the origin of Christianity. And the initial rationale for the Crusades was to take back the land the Muslims previously had seized by military conquest from the Christians. So it was Islam, not Christianity, that initially spread by military crusade.

Now, one can understand why a religion spreads when it takes over militarily. But why does a religion spread when its adherents are persecuted, tortured, and killed during its first 280 years? (Those are
not
good selling points.) Perhaps there’s some very reliable testimony about miraculous events that proves the religion is true. How else can you explain why scared, scattered, skeptical cowards suddenly become the most dedicated, determined, self-sacrificing, and peaceful missionary force the world has ever known?

S
UMMARY AND
C
ONCLUSION

In the last two chapters we saw that we have an accurate copy of the early and eyewitness testimony found in the New Testament documents. Our central question in this chapter involves invention, embellishment, and exaggeration. Namely, did the New Testament writers make up, embellish, or exaggerate elements of the story? Did they play fast and loose with the facts?

No. As we have seen, there are at least ten good reasons to believe that they were honest men who meticulously and faithfully recorded what they saw. The New Testament writers:

1. include numerous embarrassing details about themselves

2. include numerous embarrassing details and difficult sayings of Jesus

3. include the demanding sayings of Jesus

4. carefully distinguish Jesus’ words from their own

5. include events about the Resurrection that they would not have invented

6. include at least thirty historically confirmed public figures in their writings

7. include divergent details

8. challenge their readers to check out verifiable facts, even facts about miracles

9. describe miracles like other historical events: with simple, unembellished accounts

10. abandoned their long-held sacred beliefs and practices, adopted new ones, and did not deny their testimony under persecution or threat of death

So we have all these reasons to support the idea that the New Testament writers relentlessly stuck to the truth. And why wouldn’t they? What would motivate them to lie, embellish, or exaggerate anyway? What did they possibly have to gain? They only gained persecution and death for testifying as they did. In other words, the New Testament writers had every motive to
deny
New Testament events, not to invent, embellish, or exaggerate them. Again, it wasn’t as if they needed a new religion! When Jesus arrived, most of the New Testament writers were devout Jews who thought that Judaism was the one true religion and they were God’s chosen people. Something dramatic must have happened to jolt them out of their dogmatic slumbers and into a new belief system that promised them nothing but earthly trouble.
In light of all this, we don’t have enough faith
to be skeptics concerning the New Testament.

But despite all of this evidence against them, the skeptics still have faith. Since the evidence makes it virtually impossible to conclude that Jesus was a legend or that the New Testament writers were liars, some skeptics cling to their only remaining possibility: the New Testament writers were deceived. They sincerely thought Jesus had risen from the dead, but they were wrong. That’s the possibility we’ll address in the next chapter.

12

Did Jesus Really Rise
from the Dead?

“Skeptics must provide more than alternative theories
to the Resurrection; they must provide first-century
evidence for those theories.”

—GARY HABERMAS

T
HE
R
ESURRECTION
: W
HAT
D
O
S
CHOLARS
S
AY
?

Gary Habermas has completed the most comprehensive investigation to date on what scholars believe about the Resurrection. Habermas collected more than 1,400 of the most critical scholarly works on the Resurrection written from 1975 to 2003. In
The Risen Jesus and Future
Hope,
¹
Habermas reports that virtually all scholars from across the ideological spectrum—from ultra-liberals to Bible-thumping conservatives—agree that the following points concerning Jesus and Christianity are actual historical facts:

1. Jesus died by Roman crucifixion.

2. He was buried, most likely in a private tomb.

3. Soon afterwards the disciples were discouraged, bereaved, and despondent, having lost hope.

4. Jesus’ tomb was found empty very soon after his interment.
²

5. The disciples had experiences that they believed were actual appearances of the risen Jesus.

6. Due to these experiences, the disciples’ lives were thoroughly transformed. They were even willing to die for their belief.

7. The proclamation of the Resurrection took place very early, from the beginning of church history.

8. The disciples’ public testimony and preaching of the Resurrection took place in the city of Jerusalem, where Jesus had been crucified and buried shortly before.

9. The gospel message centered on the preaching of the death and resurrection of Jesus.

10. Sunday was the primary day for gathering and worshiping.

11. James, the brother of Jesus and a skeptic before this time, was converted when he believed he also saw the risen Jesus.

12. Just a few years later, Saul of Tarsus (Paul) became a Christian believer, due to an experience that he also believed was an appearance of the risen Jesus.
³

The acceptance of these facts makes sense in light of what we’ve seen so far. The evidence shows:

The New Testament Story Is Not a Legend—
The New Testament documents were written well within two generations of the events by eyewitnesses or their contemporaries, and the New Testament storyline is corroborated by non-Christian writers. In addition, the New Testament mentions at least 30 historical figures who have been confirmed by sources outside the New Testament. Therefore, the New Testament story cannot be a legend.

The New Testament Story Is Not a Lie—
The New Testament writers included divergent and embarrassing details, difficult and demanding sayings, and they carefully distinguished Jesus’ words from their own. They also referenced facts and eyewitnesses that their readers either already knew or could verify. In fact, the New Testament writers provoked their readers and prominent first-century enemies to check out what they said. If that’s not enough to confirm their truthfulness, then their martyrdom should remove any doubt. These eyewitnesses endured persecution and death for the empirical claim that they had seen, heard, and touched the risen Jesus, yet they could have saved themselves by simply denying their testimony.

The New Testament Story Is Not an Embellishment—
The New Testament writers were meticulously accurate, as evidenced by well over 140 historically confirmed details. They recorded miracles in those same historically confirmed narratives, and they did so without apparent embellishment or significant theological comment.

So Is the New Testament True?
—If most scholars agree with the twelve facts stated above because the evidence shows that the New Testament story is not a legend, a lie, or an embellishment, then we know beyond a reasonable doubt that the New Testament writers accurately recorded what they saw. Does this mean that all of the events of the New Testament are true? Not necessarily. The skeptic still has one last out.

The last possible out for the skeptic is that the New Testament writers
were deceived.
In other words, perhaps the New Testament writers simply were wrong about what they thought they saw.

Given the characteristics of the New Testament that we have already reviewed, it does not seem plausible that the New Testament writers were deceived about everyday, non-miraculous events. They have been proven right about so many historical details. Why doubt their observations about everyday events?

But were they deceived about miraculous events like the Resurrection? Perhaps they really believed that Jesus had risen from the dead—and that’s why they paid with their lives—but they were mistaken or fooled. Perhaps there are natural explanations for all the miracles they think they saw.

Critical scholars leave themselves this out. Consider fact number 5 from the dozen facts that nearly all scholars believe: “The disciples had experiences
that they believed
were actual appearances of the risen Jesus.” In other words, scholars are
not
necessarily saying that Jesus actually rose from the dead (although some think he did). The minimal consensus of nearly all scholars is that the disciples
believed
that Jesus rose from the dead.

For the eyewitnesses and contemporaries of the events to be wrong, there must be some other explanation for the Resurrection and the other miracles recorded in the New Testament. Since the Resurrection is the central event in Christianity, let’s begin there. How do skeptics explain away the Resurrection?

S
KEPTICAL
A
BOUT
S
KEPTICAL
T
HEORIES

Here are the explanations for the Resurrection most frequently offered by skeptics:

Hallucination Theory—
Were the disciples deceived by hallucina- tions? Perhaps they sincerely thought they had seen the risen Christ but instead were really experiencing hallucinations. This theory has a number of fatal flaws. We’ll address two of them.

First, hallucinations are not experienced by groups but only by individuals. In that regard, they are a lot like dreams. That’s why if a friend says to you one morning, “Wow! That was a great dream
we
had night, eh?” You don’t say, “Yeah, it was fabulous! Should we continue it tonight?” No, you think your friend has gone mad or is just cracking a joke. You don’t take him seriously because dreams are not collective experiences. Individuals have dreams—groups do not. Hallucinations work the same way. If
rare
psychological conditions exist, an individual may have a hallucination, but his friends will not. And even if they do, they will not have the same hallucination.

The hallucination theory doesn’t work because Jesus did not appear once to just one person—he appeared on a dozen separate occasions, in a variety of settings to different people over a
forty-day
period. He was seen by men and women. He was seen walking, talking, and eating. He was seen inside and outside. He was seen by many and by a few. A total of more than 500 people saw this risen Jesus. And they were not seeing a hallucination or a ghost because on six of the twelve appearances Jesus was physically touched and/or he ate real food (see table 12.1 on next page).

The existence of the empty tomb is the second fatal flaw with the hallucination theory. If the 500-plus eyewitnesses did have the unprecedented experience of seeing the same hallucination at twelve different times, then why didn’t the Jewish or Roman authorities simply parade Jesus’ body around the city? That would have ended Christianity once and forever. They would have loved to do so, but apparently they couldn’t because the tomb really was empty.

The Witnesses Went to the Wrong Tomb
—Maybe the disciples went to the wrong tomb and then assumed that Jesus had risen. This theory also has two fatal flaws.

First, if the disciples had gone to the wrong tomb, the Jewish or Roman authorities would have gone to the right one and paraded Jesus’ body around the city. The tomb was known by the Jews because it was
their
tomb (it belonged to Joseph of Arimathea, a member of the Jewish Sanhedrin). And the tomb was known by the Romans because they placed guards there. As William Lane Craig notes, the wrong tomb theory assumes that the all of the Jews (and the Romans) had a permanent kind of “collective amnesia” about what they had done with the body of Jesus.
⁴

Second, even if the disciples did go to the wrong tomb, the theory does not explain how the risen Jesus appeared twelve different times. In other words, the appearances must be explained, not just the empty tomb.

Notice that the empty tomb did not convince most of the disciples (with the possible exception of John) that Jesus had risen from the dead. It was the
appearances
of Jesus that turned them from scared, scattered, skeptical cowards into the greatest peaceful missionary force in history. This is especially true of the devout enemy of Christianity, Saul (Paul). He was not only unconvinced by the empty tomb; he was persecuting Christians very soon after the Resurrection. It took an appearance of Jesus himself to turn Paul around. It seems that James, the skeptical brother of Jesus, also was converted after an appearance of Jesus. As we have seen, James’s conversion was so dramatic that he became the leader of the Jerusalem church and was later martyred at the hands of the high priest.