"The Resurrection of Jesus: A Jewish Perspective" Critical Book Review -- Part 2: Arbitrary Arguments
Is Christianity Based on Pagan Myth?
Maybe you've heard something like that before. Nothing in Christianity is original. This idea has many names, the ones I prefer being the Christ-myth theory or the copycat theory.
Lapide topped on this argument to his others: "If we add to all these disturbing factors the statement that in the ancient world there were not less than a round dozen of nature deities, heroes, philosophers, and rulers who, all long before Jesus, suffered, died, and rose again on the third day, then the skepticism of most non-Christians can easily be understood." He cites the supposed suffering and martyrdom, sometimes on a cross, of Osiris, Dionysos, Adonis, and Attis, and the "resurrections" of them all along with Isis, Heracles, Pythagoras, Apollonius of Tyana, Alexander the Great, and Emperor Augustus. (pages 40-41)
When I read that, my eyebrows raised. I was surprised and dismayed that he actually believed what he was writing.
Famous apologist Josh McDowell's Evidence That Demands a Verdict cites philosopher Ronald Nash: "During a period of time running roughly from about 1890-1940, scholars often alleged that primitive Christianity had been heavily influenced by Platonism, Stoicism, the pagan mystery religions, or other movements in the Hellenistic world. Largely as a result of a series of scholarly books and articles written in rebuttal, allegations of early Christianity's dependence on its Hellenistic environment began to appear much less frequently in the publications of Bible scholars and classical authors. Today most Bible scholars regard the question as a dead issue." (1)
Exactly. As I have learned, the Christ-myth theory was formed, tested, and then laid to rest in the scholarly world, when virtually everyone, including the skeptics, realized how false it is. But it still lives on through the internet and uncredible books seeking attention, and to spread lies.
My best source is Bart Ehrman, which of course is the case if he is for something I agree with. If you haven't already read, he is a world-class agnostic New Testament scholar with atheist leanings.
His book Did Jesus Exist? is dedicated to debunking mythicist views, so there is no way of ignoring the Christ-myth theory. The introduction focuses on Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy's The Jesus Mysteries: Was the 'Original Jesus' a Pagan God?
"At the heart of all the various pagan mysteries, Freke and Gandy aver, was a myth of a godman who died and rose from the dead. This divine figure was called by various names in the pagan mysteries: Osiris, Dionysus, Attis, Adonis, Baccus, Mithras. ... The reason that Freke and Gandy think so is that supposedly all these figures share the same mythology: their father was God; their mother was a mortal virgin; each was born in a cavce on December 25 before three shepherds and wise men; among their miracles they turned water to wine; they all rode into town on a donkey; they all were crucified at Eastertime as a sacrifice for the sins of the world; they descended to hell; and on the third day they rose again. Since these same things are said of Jesus as well, it is obvious that the stories believed by the Christians are all simply imitations of the pagan religions."
Ehrman goes on:
"Real historians of antiquity are scandalized by such assertions -- or they would be if they bothered to read Freke and Gandy's book. The authors provide no evidence for their claims concerning the standard mythology of the godmen. They cite no sources from the ancient world that can be checked. It is not that they have provided an alternative interpretation of the available evidence. They have not even cited the available evidence. And for good reason. No such evidence exists.
"What, for example, is the proof that Osiris was born on December 25 before three shepherds? Or that he was crucified? And that his death brought atonement for sin? Or that he returned to life on earth by being raised from the dead? In fact, no ancient source says any such thing about Osiris (or about the other gods). But Freke and Gandy claim that this is common knowledge. And they 'prove' it by quoting other writers from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who said so. But these writers too do not cite any historical evidence. This is all based on assertion, believed by Freke and Gandy simply because they read it somewhere. This is not serious historical scholarship. It is sensationalist writing driven by a desire to sell books." (2)
Bart Ehrman later discusses more "sensationalist writing," and keeps pointing out: "It's the same answer. There is no evidence. This is made up." (page 212)
Apollonius was really a Pythagorean philosopher from 50-some years after Jesus, and his made-up story was created by one of his later followers named Philostratus. (page 208-209) The debate between Christians and this cult was over copying that had been done to compete with the story of Christ, not the other way around.
Adonis, actually, was competed for by two goddesses, Aphrodite of heaven and Persephone of the underworld, and so Zeus sentenced him to divide his year evenly between the two females and their realms. Osiris was killed, his body parts removed and scattered, and Isis puts him back together to resuscitate her dead husband as god of the underworld. (page 227-208) Dionysus was a god of wine - period(3).
These ancient religions also don't necessarily just have one story. For instance, one tale says Isis impregnated herself with Osiris's male parts and gave birth to Horus, who had the head of a falcon and the body of a man. The "most characteristic" story of Attis has him going mad and killing himself, and his lover the goddess Cybele manages to preserve his body, his hair keeps growing, and his little finger still moves(4).
Now there are vague similarities between Jesus and these bogus myths, but actually, that's a point in the Christian side. The differences always greatly outweigh the similarities.
Interestingly enough, one idea that this issue has given me is how humans have limited subjects to invent, because there is limited answers to our major problems. Even if there were narratives of a suffering god rising from the dead in a glorified state prior to Christ, what would that prove? Pagans, like all people, face death, and you can't deal with that by saying one day in the future it will be possible to teleport. But how about a hero who will defeat death for us? That makes sense.
Furthermore, Evidence That Demands a Verdict mentions a British ocean liner about eight hundred feet long, weighing more than sixty thousand tons, and able to carry about three thousand passengers. It was sunk by an iceberg. But it's not the Titanic, it's the Titan, a fictional book from 1898 written fourteen years before the disaster and several years before the Titanic was being constructed(5). So striking parallels don't necessarily prove copying.
Finally, Lapide's response is quite interesting (keep in mind that even though he is not a Christian, he still believes in the resurrection). It is what he calls the "pedagogy of God" -- that God allowed myths to happen so He could appeal to people with a real story that fits their understanding. He says, "In view of this 'pedagogy of God,' would it not be possible that the Lord of the universe used the myth of the resurrection (which was well known to all pagans) in order 'to eliminate idolatory in the pagan world' through the true resurrection of a just person and to carry 'the knowledge of God' to the four corners of the earth by means of the Easter faith?" (page 122)
Similarly, Evidence That Demands a Verdict cites C.S. Lewis, who realized that we should expect to find in human invention some "glimpse" of what God has actually created people to experience -- "the theme of incarnation, death, and rebirth."
He explains: "The Christian story is about a historical personage, whose execution can be dated pretty accurately, under a named Roman magistrate, and with whom the society that He founded is in a continuous relation down to the present day. It is not the difference between falsehood and truth. It is the difference between a real event on the one hand and dim dreams or premonitions of that same event on the other." (6)
Pinchas Lapide and C.S. Lewis both make the best point. Whether or not Christianity is a mythical story woven from imagination must be determined by the evidence.
Why Didn't Jesus Appear to More People?
The objection was explained this way, in a citation of Hermann Samuel Reimarus's essay "The Goal of Jesus and His Disciples," which was edited by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in 1778, where Reimarus tried to debunk the Easter faith as a deceptive lie of His followers: "Even if we had no other scruples concerning the resurrection of Jesus, the one that he did not appear publicly would be sufficient in itself to overthrow any plausibility; for it can never be reconciled with the purpose for which Jesus is supposed to have come into the world." (page 42)
Lapide has an interesting answer: "This objection, however, is not bothersome to any scholar of religion. The fact that this resurrection had only a few witnesses is no obstacle but rather a further proof of its genuineness. That which the prophet Daniel reports concerning his revelation is basically valid for all prophets of Israel, 'And I, Daniel, alone saw the vision, for the men who were with me did not see the vision' (Dan. 10:7)." (page 117)
This got me thinking about how the resurrection is a religious event. And as such, if a religion is true, so is its theology. So how do one know that God would have considered it ethical to appear to multiple people? Sure, it definitely could make sense and seems to -- that is the point Reimarus is trying to get at because Christian doctrine is Jesus wants the whole world to know Him -- but that's just at surface value.
I believe in two other doctrines:
1. People have free will and some will choose to follow Jesus and other's not
2. God won't force anyone to believe. But, He will do whatever it takes to bring someone to salvation who is/will-be willing.
Therefore, those who will always reject Him wouldn't be convinced even if He did appear to them -- although they would feel supremely bothered in the head and be bullied by others who point out how stupid they are because they don't believe their own, and everybody else's, eyes. But for those who do have hearts receptive to Jesus, God assures that He will persuade them, even if it is when they are clinically dead. So this might be a reason why.
Another logical error in this objection is saying the argument alone could debunk Christianity. But evidence is to be weighed -- we are humans, living 2,000 years after the fact, and so have to know when enough is enough, even if we don't have all the answers. No, Reimarus would have to show there is no good reason to believe He appeared to anyone at all to be dead sure.
Now, it could be argued that without proof that Jesus didn't need to appear to all of Jerusalem, these answers, ironically, wouldn't outweigh the negative conclusion of why He didn't. But I am not going to consider whether or not that argument would work, because such is not the case.
The first answer I thought of, when I first came across this charge, might have been when I learned from apologists Norman Geisler and Frank Turek that Jewish leaders came to accept Jesus. When I looked their presentation up today, I had to smile when I read how they focused in on what I was trying to answer too.
"'Why didn't the risen Jesus appear to the Pharisees?' is a popular question asked by skeptics. The answer might be that it wasn't necessary. This is often overlooked, but many priests in Jerusalem became believers." (7)
Acts 6:7 So the word of God spread. The number of disciples in Jerusalem increased rapidly, and a large number of priests became obedient to the faith.
Furthermore, Jesus did appear to His skeptical brother James, and the enemy of Christianity, Paul. And, Paul cites how He presented Himself in front of five hundred people, most of whom were still around for questioning, and all the apostles. All these characters were in Christ's earliest ministry.
1 Corinthians 15:6-8 After that, He appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all He appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.
Every first-century historian knows that Christianity spread rapidly. As a matter of fact, its rise was so significant in the first century, that Tacitus's Annals 15.44 passage reports the first state-wide persecution of Christians in the mid 60's:
"Therefore, to squelch the rumor, Nero created scapegoats and subjected and subjected to the most refined tortures those whom the common people called 'Christians,' hated for their abominable crimes. Their name comes from Christ, who, during the reign of Tiberius, had been executed by the procurator Pontius Pilate. Suppressed for the moment, the deadly superstition broke out again, not only in Judea, the land which originated this evil, but also in the city of Rome, where all sorts of horrendous and shameful practices from every part of the world converge and are fervently cultivated."
(This non-Christian record also serves to support the historical existence of Jesus. And there is no threat to the early Christian integrity here, only evidence this passage wasn't forged. Even though identified as an excellent historian, Tacitus was a pagan and writes with a heavy bias, which the historians of today have to sort through.)
My final point. Lapide argues that this, and viewing the actual resurrection of Christ -- specifically as it was happening -- not being included in any narratives actually are evidence for Christianity, not a refutation.
"Under all the multiple layers of narrative embellishments and the fiction of later generations, the Jewish New Testament scholar finds such traces of authentic Jewish experience. ...
"Even more eloquent is the silence of the evangelists concerning the resuscitation of the dead nazarene. According to all New Testament reports, no human eye saw the resurrection itself, no human being was present, and none of the disciples asserted to have apprehended, let alone understood, its manner and nature. How easy it would have been for them or their immediate successors to supplement this scandalous hole in the concatenation of events by fanciful embellishments! But precisely because none of the evangelists dared to 'improve upon' or embellish this unseen resurrection, the total picture of the Gospels also gains in trustworthiness.
"Nowhere in the oldest testimonies is the resurrection described as an undeniable event which disclosed itself to all people. It became a reality originally only for those who had earlier been familiar with the living Jesus, who had learned from him unconditional believing -- not for everybody, least of all for unconcerned outsiders." (pages 95-97)
In my thoughts, no one seeing the resuscitation isn't too interesting, because why do the Disciples need what they will have undeniable proof of to happen (seeing Jesus alive after His death)? I mean, sure, it's plausible that someone weaving a glorified tale would add the most important event in history, but not persuasive. But that next part is much more convincing. There actually is an example in the New Testament where Luke could easily have invented that (the conversion of priests). But I don't even have to get that specific. If they were bothering to make up a story, there is more "evidence" they could offer by including skeptical witnesses in the Gospels, like when the Gnostics created a splendid story for their Gospel of Peter with so many witnesses (see part 1 of this Blog Project).
The Bible has answers to this objection. Without Jesus appearing to all of Israel, He got the job done.
Citations:
1. Josh McDowell and Sean McDowell, Evidence That Demands a Verdict: Life-Changing Truth for a Skeptical World (Thomas Nelson: 2017), 303-315. They cite The Gospel and the Greeks: Did the New Testament Borrow from Pagan Thought? (P&R Publishing: Phillipsburg, NY. 2003), 1.
2. Bart D. Ehrman, Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth (HarperOne: 2012), 25-26.
3. Rice Broocks, Man Myth Messiah: Answering History's Greatest Question (Thomas Nelson: Nashville, TN, 2016), 139. He points to Gregory A. Boyd, The Jesus Legend: A Case for the Historical Reliability of the Synoptic Jesus Tradition (Baker: Grand Rapids 2007).
4. Josh McDowell cites theologian and New Testament scholar J. Gresham Machen, The Origin of Paul's Religion (The Macmillan Company: New York 1921), 227-228.
5. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/24880/24880-h/24880-h.htm
6."Is Theology Poetry?" in The Weight of Glory, edited by Walter Hooper, 116-140. New York: HarperOne, 1980. pages 128-129
7. Frank Turek and Norman Geisler, I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist (Crossway: 2004), 282.
Maybe you've heard something like that before. Nothing in Christianity is original. This idea has many names, the ones I prefer being the Christ-myth theory or the copycat theory.
Lapide topped on this argument to his others: "If we add to all these disturbing factors the statement that in the ancient world there were not less than a round dozen of nature deities, heroes, philosophers, and rulers who, all long before Jesus, suffered, died, and rose again on the third day, then the skepticism of most non-Christians can easily be understood." He cites the supposed suffering and martyrdom, sometimes on a cross, of Osiris, Dionysos, Adonis, and Attis, and the "resurrections" of them all along with Isis, Heracles, Pythagoras, Apollonius of Tyana, Alexander the Great, and Emperor Augustus. (pages 40-41)
When I read that, my eyebrows raised. I was surprised and dismayed that he actually believed what he was writing.
Famous apologist Josh McDowell's Evidence That Demands a Verdict cites philosopher Ronald Nash: "During a period of time running roughly from about 1890-1940, scholars often alleged that primitive Christianity had been heavily influenced by Platonism, Stoicism, the pagan mystery religions, or other movements in the Hellenistic world. Largely as a result of a series of scholarly books and articles written in rebuttal, allegations of early Christianity's dependence on its Hellenistic environment began to appear much less frequently in the publications of Bible scholars and classical authors. Today most Bible scholars regard the question as a dead issue." (1)
Exactly. As I have learned, the Christ-myth theory was formed, tested, and then laid to rest in the scholarly world, when virtually everyone, including the skeptics, realized how false it is. But it still lives on through the internet and uncredible books seeking attention, and to spread lies.
My best source is Bart Ehrman, which of course is the case if he is for something I agree with. If you haven't already read, he is a world-class agnostic New Testament scholar with atheist leanings.
His book Did Jesus Exist? is dedicated to debunking mythicist views, so there is no way of ignoring the Christ-myth theory. The introduction focuses on Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy's The Jesus Mysteries: Was the 'Original Jesus' a Pagan God?
"At the heart of all the various pagan mysteries, Freke and Gandy aver, was a myth of a godman who died and rose from the dead. This divine figure was called by various names in the pagan mysteries: Osiris, Dionysus, Attis, Adonis, Baccus, Mithras. ... The reason that Freke and Gandy think so is that supposedly all these figures share the same mythology: their father was God; their mother was a mortal virgin; each was born in a cavce on December 25 before three shepherds and wise men; among their miracles they turned water to wine; they all rode into town on a donkey; they all were crucified at Eastertime as a sacrifice for the sins of the world; they descended to hell; and on the third day they rose again. Since these same things are said of Jesus as well, it is obvious that the stories believed by the Christians are all simply imitations of the pagan religions."
Ehrman goes on:
"Real historians of antiquity are scandalized by such assertions -- or they would be if they bothered to read Freke and Gandy's book. The authors provide no evidence for their claims concerning the standard mythology of the godmen. They cite no sources from the ancient world that can be checked. It is not that they have provided an alternative interpretation of the available evidence. They have not even cited the available evidence. And for good reason. No such evidence exists.
"What, for example, is the proof that Osiris was born on December 25 before three shepherds? Or that he was crucified? And that his death brought atonement for sin? Or that he returned to life on earth by being raised from the dead? In fact, no ancient source says any such thing about Osiris (or about the other gods). But Freke and Gandy claim that this is common knowledge. And they 'prove' it by quoting other writers from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who said so. But these writers too do not cite any historical evidence. This is all based on assertion, believed by Freke and Gandy simply because they read it somewhere. This is not serious historical scholarship. It is sensationalist writing driven by a desire to sell books." (2)
Bart Ehrman later discusses more "sensationalist writing," and keeps pointing out: "It's the same answer. There is no evidence. This is made up." (page 212)
Apollonius was really a Pythagorean philosopher from 50-some years after Jesus, and his made-up story was created by one of his later followers named Philostratus. (page 208-209) The debate between Christians and this cult was over copying that had been done to compete with the story of Christ, not the other way around.
Adonis, actually, was competed for by two goddesses, Aphrodite of heaven and Persephone of the underworld, and so Zeus sentenced him to divide his year evenly between the two females and their realms. Osiris was killed, his body parts removed and scattered, and Isis puts him back together to resuscitate her dead husband as god of the underworld. (page 227-208) Dionysus was a god of wine - period(3).
These ancient religions also don't necessarily just have one story. For instance, one tale says Isis impregnated herself with Osiris's male parts and gave birth to Horus, who had the head of a falcon and the body of a man. The "most characteristic" story of Attis has him going mad and killing himself, and his lover the goddess Cybele manages to preserve his body, his hair keeps growing, and his little finger still moves(4).
Now there are vague similarities between Jesus and these bogus myths, but actually, that's a point in the Christian side. The differences always greatly outweigh the similarities.
Interestingly enough, one idea that this issue has given me is how humans have limited subjects to invent, because there is limited answers to our major problems. Even if there were narratives of a suffering god rising from the dead in a glorified state prior to Christ, what would that prove? Pagans, like all people, face death, and you can't deal with that by saying one day in the future it will be possible to teleport. But how about a hero who will defeat death for us? That makes sense.
Furthermore, Evidence That Demands a Verdict mentions a British ocean liner about eight hundred feet long, weighing more than sixty thousand tons, and able to carry about three thousand passengers. It was sunk by an iceberg. But it's not the Titanic, it's the Titan, a fictional book from 1898 written fourteen years before the disaster and several years before the Titanic was being constructed(5). So striking parallels don't necessarily prove copying.
Finally, Lapide's response is quite interesting (keep in mind that even though he is not a Christian, he still believes in the resurrection). It is what he calls the "pedagogy of God" -- that God allowed myths to happen so He could appeal to people with a real story that fits their understanding. He says, "In view of this 'pedagogy of God,' would it not be possible that the Lord of the universe used the myth of the resurrection (which was well known to all pagans) in order 'to eliminate idolatory in the pagan world' through the true resurrection of a just person and to carry 'the knowledge of God' to the four corners of the earth by means of the Easter faith?" (page 122)
Similarly, Evidence That Demands a Verdict cites C.S. Lewis, who realized that we should expect to find in human invention some "glimpse" of what God has actually created people to experience -- "the theme of incarnation, death, and rebirth."
He explains: "The Christian story is about a historical personage, whose execution can be dated pretty accurately, under a named Roman magistrate, and with whom the society that He founded is in a continuous relation down to the present day. It is not the difference between falsehood and truth. It is the difference between a real event on the one hand and dim dreams or premonitions of that same event on the other." (6)
Pinchas Lapide and C.S. Lewis both make the best point. Whether or not Christianity is a mythical story woven from imagination must be determined by the evidence.
Why Didn't Jesus Appear to More People?
The objection was explained this way, in a citation of Hermann Samuel Reimarus's essay "The Goal of Jesus and His Disciples," which was edited by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in 1778, where Reimarus tried to debunk the Easter faith as a deceptive lie of His followers: "Even if we had no other scruples concerning the resurrection of Jesus, the one that he did not appear publicly would be sufficient in itself to overthrow any plausibility; for it can never be reconciled with the purpose for which Jesus is supposed to have come into the world." (page 42)
Lapide has an interesting answer: "This objection, however, is not bothersome to any scholar of religion. The fact that this resurrection had only a few witnesses is no obstacle but rather a further proof of its genuineness. That which the prophet Daniel reports concerning his revelation is basically valid for all prophets of Israel, 'And I, Daniel, alone saw the vision, for the men who were with me did not see the vision' (Dan. 10:7)." (page 117)
This got me thinking about how the resurrection is a religious event. And as such, if a religion is true, so is its theology. So how do one know that God would have considered it ethical to appear to multiple people? Sure, it definitely could make sense and seems to -- that is the point Reimarus is trying to get at because Christian doctrine is Jesus wants the whole world to know Him -- but that's just at surface value.
I believe in two other doctrines:
1. People have free will and some will choose to follow Jesus and other's not
2. God won't force anyone to believe. But, He will do whatever it takes to bring someone to salvation who is/will-be willing.
Therefore, those who will always reject Him wouldn't be convinced even if He did appear to them -- although they would feel supremely bothered in the head and be bullied by others who point out how stupid they are because they don't believe their own, and everybody else's, eyes. But for those who do have hearts receptive to Jesus, God assures that He will persuade them, even if it is when they are clinically dead. So this might be a reason why.
Another logical error in this objection is saying the argument alone could debunk Christianity. But evidence is to be weighed -- we are humans, living 2,000 years after the fact, and so have to know when enough is enough, even if we don't have all the answers. No, Reimarus would have to show there is no good reason to believe He appeared to anyone at all to be dead sure.
Now, it could be argued that without proof that Jesus didn't need to appear to all of Jerusalem, these answers, ironically, wouldn't outweigh the negative conclusion of why He didn't. But I am not going to consider whether or not that argument would work, because such is not the case.
The first answer I thought of, when I first came across this charge, might have been when I learned from apologists Norman Geisler and Frank Turek that Jewish leaders came to accept Jesus. When I looked their presentation up today, I had to smile when I read how they focused in on what I was trying to answer too.
"'Why didn't the risen Jesus appear to the Pharisees?' is a popular question asked by skeptics. The answer might be that it wasn't necessary. This is often overlooked, but many priests in Jerusalem became believers." (7)
Acts 6:7 So the word of God spread. The number of disciples in Jerusalem increased rapidly, and a large number of priests became obedient to the faith.
Furthermore, Jesus did appear to His skeptical brother James, and the enemy of Christianity, Paul. And, Paul cites how He presented Himself in front of five hundred people, most of whom were still around for questioning, and all the apostles. All these characters were in Christ's earliest ministry.
1 Corinthians 15:6-8 After that, He appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all He appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.
Every first-century historian knows that Christianity spread rapidly. As a matter of fact, its rise was so significant in the first century, that Tacitus's Annals 15.44 passage reports the first state-wide persecution of Christians in the mid 60's:
"Therefore, to squelch the rumor, Nero created scapegoats and subjected and subjected to the most refined tortures those whom the common people called 'Christians,' hated for their abominable crimes. Their name comes from Christ, who, during the reign of Tiberius, had been executed by the procurator Pontius Pilate. Suppressed for the moment, the deadly superstition broke out again, not only in Judea, the land which originated this evil, but also in the city of Rome, where all sorts of horrendous and shameful practices from every part of the world converge and are fervently cultivated."
(This non-Christian record also serves to support the historical existence of Jesus. And there is no threat to the early Christian integrity here, only evidence this passage wasn't forged. Even though identified as an excellent historian, Tacitus was a pagan and writes with a heavy bias, which the historians of today have to sort through.)
My final point. Lapide argues that this, and viewing the actual resurrection of Christ -- specifically as it was happening -- not being included in any narratives actually are evidence for Christianity, not a refutation.
"Under all the multiple layers of narrative embellishments and the fiction of later generations, the Jewish New Testament scholar finds such traces of authentic Jewish experience. ...
"Even more eloquent is the silence of the evangelists concerning the resuscitation of the dead nazarene. According to all New Testament reports, no human eye saw the resurrection itself, no human being was present, and none of the disciples asserted to have apprehended, let alone understood, its manner and nature. How easy it would have been for them or their immediate successors to supplement this scandalous hole in the concatenation of events by fanciful embellishments! But precisely because none of the evangelists dared to 'improve upon' or embellish this unseen resurrection, the total picture of the Gospels also gains in trustworthiness.
"Nowhere in the oldest testimonies is the resurrection described as an undeniable event which disclosed itself to all people. It became a reality originally only for those who had earlier been familiar with the living Jesus, who had learned from him unconditional believing -- not for everybody, least of all for unconcerned outsiders." (pages 95-97)
In my thoughts, no one seeing the resuscitation isn't too interesting, because why do the Disciples need what they will have undeniable proof of to happen (seeing Jesus alive after His death)? I mean, sure, it's plausible that someone weaving a glorified tale would add the most important event in history, but not persuasive. But that next part is much more convincing. There actually is an example in the New Testament where Luke could easily have invented that (the conversion of priests). But I don't even have to get that specific. If they were bothering to make up a story, there is more "evidence" they could offer by including skeptical witnesses in the Gospels, like when the Gnostics created a splendid story for their Gospel of Peter with so many witnesses (see part 1 of this Blog Project).
The Bible has answers to this objection. Without Jesus appearing to all of Israel, He got the job done.
Citations:
1. Josh McDowell and Sean McDowell, Evidence That Demands a Verdict: Life-Changing Truth for a Skeptical World (Thomas Nelson: 2017), 303-315. They cite The Gospel and the Greeks: Did the New Testament Borrow from Pagan Thought? (P&R Publishing: Phillipsburg, NY. 2003), 1.
2. Bart D. Ehrman, Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth (HarperOne: 2012), 25-26.
3. Rice Broocks, Man Myth Messiah: Answering History's Greatest Question (Thomas Nelson: Nashville, TN, 2016), 139. He points to Gregory A. Boyd, The Jesus Legend: A Case for the Historical Reliability of the Synoptic Jesus Tradition (Baker: Grand Rapids 2007).
4. Josh McDowell cites theologian and New Testament scholar J. Gresham Machen, The Origin of Paul's Religion (The Macmillan Company: New York 1921), 227-228.
5. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/24880/24880-h/24880-h.htm
6."Is Theology Poetry?" in The Weight of Glory, edited by Walter Hooper, 116-140. New York: HarperOne, 1980. pages 128-129
7. Frank Turek and Norman Geisler, I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist (Crossway: 2004), 282.
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