"The Resurrection of Jesus: A Jewish Perspective" Critical Book Review -- Conclusion and Part 4: A Proper Theology

Religious Beliefs about Faith and Facticity
1. Pinchas Lapide's View(s?)
Throughout the book, I was confused. I seemed at one time to come across a subject like proving the resurrection from historical evidence, and soon afterward run into "faith, not proof"; the Gospels should be completely ignored post-crucifixion, but then their core story can be defended. Here are some examples I can recall so you can know the picture of confusion I endured. If some of these quotes sound familiar, it's probably because you read them in an earlier post.

• "Christianity as a historical religion of revelation is based on two fundamental events -- the death of Jesus of Nazareth on the cross and his resurrection. While the first event may be considered historically certain, both according to statements of the evangelists which are basically in agreement, and also from non-Christian sources, the latter event is still controversial, cannot be conceived historically, and has led from the beginning to doubt, discord, and dissension." (page 32)
• "If science and religion could be identified, where would the risk of faith remain? Faith is basically a 'believing-in-spite-of'; it involves the courage to endure and conquer all doubts. By faith we entrust ourselves to the truth which is willing to forego all guarantees of tangibility. Neither the mystery of God nor of love, faith and hope can be solved by equations -- an impossibility that believing people affirm with their whole heart. For the desire to make faith secure is nothing but unbelief which is clinging to earthly materiality. The God in whom Jews and Christians believe can neither be couched in words nor defined by visible realities, for according to Karl Jaspers, 'a proven God is no God,' and this is true also of many of his deeds of salvation." (page 118)
• "I can believe in such a real Something which in a purely rational way can neither be proved nor refuted -- a Something that does not rest on the wish as the father of the thought, nor is it a mirage. I cannot believe in the empty tomb nor in the angels in white garments nor in the opening of the heaven nor in the absurd miraculousness of the so-called Gospel of Peter. All that belongs to the pious fraud of later generations which themselves no longer felt the direct impact -- but tried to whip up enthusiasm by means of embellishing the truth." (page 128)

On the contrast:

• "I am completely convinced that the Twelve from Galilee, who were all farmers, shepherds, and fishermen -- there was not a single theology professor to be found among them -- were totally unimpressed by scholarly theologoumena, as Karl Rahner or Rudolf Bultmann write them. If they, through such a concrete historical event as the crucifixion, were so totally in despair and crushed, as all the four evangelists report to us, then no less concrete a historical event was needed in order to bring them out of the deep valley of their despair and within a short time to transform them into a community of salvation rejoicing in the heavens." (pages 13-14)
• "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." (page 95)
• "It is different with the disciples of Jesus on that Easter Sunday. Despite all the legendary embellishments, in the oldest records there remains a recognizable historical kernel which cannot simply be demythologized. When this scared, frightened band of apostles which was just about to throw away everything in order to flee in despair to Galilee; when these peasants, shepherds, and fishermen, who betrayed and denied their master and then failed him miserably, suddenly could be changed overnight into a confident mission society, convinced of salvation and able to work with much more success after Easter than before Easter, then no vision or hallucination is sufficient to explain such a revolutionary transformation." (page 125)
• "When the life history of Jesus ends, the history of Christianity begins. But this is not enough. The death of a martyr can indeed cause admiration and emulation, but it never has had a religious meaning in itself -- least of all in Judaism which puts such a positive value on life and has never glorified suffering and death." (page 145)

Now, call me crazy, but I'm not going to say anywhere here Lapide made a mistake, even though sometimes he appears to flat out contradict himself. Lapide is a highly intelligent man, a Jewish rabbi -- and I as a Christian am very impressed with his willingness to admit error in prior disbelief of the resurrection and ability to recognize it cannot be denied on historical terms. Come on, I am prone to error as well. I'm a human, and so might want to read something over if it has me befuddled. Since here my purpose is not to show I am 100% right, I didn't bother to do so with any amount of vigor. But still, I'm not an unskilled reader, and am confident about being at least often correct in my multiple analysis's of apparent contradictions.

 Furthermore, I have never read a book by a Jewish rabbi before this one, and so for all I know a Jewish rabbi might write a book which doesn't totally explain everything said. For example, at first I thought when Lapide talked about defining faith as opposed to science (second quote), he meant one can be logically vindicated and the other not. But later on, I caught this:

"In a purely logical analysis, the resurrection of Jesus is 'the lesser of two evils' for all those who seek a rational explanation of the worldwide consequences of that Easter faith. The true miracle is the fact that this Jewish group of Jesus' followers came to faith, a miracle which, like all miracles, escapes any exact description of scientific proof." (page 126)

So science here means a natural explanation, not solely a reasonable one.

2. Gary Habermas and Historical Certainty 
When I came across this quote, it irked me, even though the words are clearly aimed only at some anonymous Christians. The thing is, my nature as a human felt that Christianity was being attacked by Judaism, using our own belief system against us. Also, religious people are often viewed as unreasonable, by being interested in subjective experience and opinion, and always waving away potential problems in their faith one raises to cast doubt. So I'm going to defend my position as if this quote here does threaten me, even though it doesn't.

"I cannot rid myself of the impression that some modern Christian theologians are ashamed of the material facticity of the resurrection. Their varying attempts at dehistoricizing the Easter experience which give the lie to all four evangelists are simply not understandable to me in any other way. Indeed, the four authors of the Gospels definitely compete with one another in illustrating the tangible, substantial dimension of this resurrection explicitly. Often it seems as if renowned New Testament scholars in our days want to insert a kind of ideological or dogmatic curtain between the pre-Easter and the risen Jesus in order to protect the latter against any kind of contamination by earthly three-dimensionality. ... For all these Christians who believe in the incarnation (something which I am unable to do) but have difficulty with the historically understood resurrection, the word of Jesus of the 'blind guides, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel' (Matt. 23:24) probably applies." (pages 130-131)

Well, if you've read any of my posts under the label "Gospels", you have probably gotten the feeling that I'm not interested in "dehistoricizing" Jesus by any means. Instead, the aim there is to defend and support Christianity as reasonably true.

Leading resurrection scholar Gary R. Habermas and his apologist partner Michael R. Licona have a book which I really appreciated reading a year or so ago, and still love today. It's called The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus. They say that "proof does not aim at 'absolute historical certainty.'" (1) This is the case -- you can't prove 100%, being as sure that you exist, that Abraham Lincoln was ever a president. Instead, historians look at evidence and try to come to a conclusion which tops all others -- "proof beyond rational doubt."

(If you want to see how they support their argument, consult the google doc here.)

Interestingly enough, not only are they a counterexample to who Lapide was talking about and modern views toward Christianity, but they also deal with the incarnation, as is shown below.

What Claim does Jesus make which the Resurrection would Prove?
"Before Professor Lapide tackled the most controversial problem of christology, namely, the resurrection of Jesus, he had already become deeply engaged in a historical-critical reconstruction of the life and teachings of Jesus, so far as they can be known from the Gospel sources. The historical Jesus is not, purely and simply, identical with the One that any of the four evangelists portray. He is a 'fifth Jesus,' the Galilean rabbi whose true-to-life image is reconstructed from the sources, minus the christological overlay of believing interpretations which the post-Easter communities of faith wove into their memories of his earthly ministry." (page 8)

Unfortunately for Lapide, using historical-criticism to paint a portrait of Jesus leaves him with a catch-22: either Jesus rose from the dead and claimed to be God, or Jesus never rose from the dead.

Habermas and Licona present three pieces of evidence that Jesus used the title "Son of Man." (2) It is His favorite title, from supposedly least-myth Mark to supposedly most-myth John. But, Paul's epistles never mention the title; as a matter of fact, in the New Testament it is only used three times outside the Gospels (Acts 7:56; Revelation 1:13; 14:14) and the same amount in other Christian writings during the first 120 years after His death. Of those other examples, twice -- in early church father Ignatius of Antioch's To the Ephesians 19 and the anonymous Epistle of Barnabas 12 -- it is used for his earthly self. This is the third reason, which might be why "Son of Man" is so ignored: it appears to emphasize His humanity, not Divinity.

Now I must say that I have been feeling subconscious lately about being one-sided. But this is because I haven't written an argument that wasn't a response to someone else's writing since March 29, and since school started this month of course people have mentioned the weakness of not including the opposing position. Actually, even though I want people to post comments if they have an objection of their own, the times where I did come up with my own subject I did include opposing views I have either read or just dreamed up (except for possibly "My Personal Thoughts on the Implications of Jesus-God and No-God," depending on how you want to view it; my position comes from evidence I wrote about in two other posts and point viewers towards). That's because I believe it sounds more convincing if a case-maker considers and points out flaws with the evidence used against his views. And now, here I am not responding to one of Lapide's specific claims, so I should try to debunk myself again. Here I go:

Maybe the reason the early church had Jesus use the title "Son of Man" so prominently was because it makes sense for Him to appeal to Jews who would understand, but the rest of the church isn't Judaism-focused and largely aimed at Gentiles, for example Paul's letters.

But this assumes that all the Gospels, or at least the first three, were made to ignore everybody but Jews. Why would the early church make their biographies of Jesus so exclusive? John, the last book written, dated by skeptical scholars sometime just before AD 100, does explicitly claim that Jesus is God (8:58; 10:30;14:7-9, 11). And that is a reason why it is considered most legendary, because the "high christology" isn't present in the Synoptics (other three). But interesting how Luke explicitly denies being an eyewitness (Luke 1:1-4), but instead, he was a Gentile writing to the Gentiles.

A major predicament which the early church would have in blending "Son of Man" and clear Divinized statements is that the former would be very embarrassing when presenting the latter to non-Jews. Jesus didn't always put His title along with something that holds Him in a glorified light (compare Matthew 25:31-32 and Luke 9:58), and so why must He favor what seems to make Him out as less then a regular man when He also claims to have made the universe? Why risk creating doubt by having God be the "Son of Man?" Clearly, no other author ever saw it important to repeat, so it doesn't need to be consistently claimed. If this was being invented, some Gospels -- probably at most one because there are more Gentiles than Jews -- should use it, and the others not.

Finally, we have nothing substantial by any standards to show that early Christians were trying to teach anybody what "Son of Man" meant. Which is interesting -- the epistles and early church fathers quote scripture, so why not about Jesus's favorite title if it was so important? Most importantly, in the early speeches of Acts 1-7 which are solely Jewish, "Son of Man" is only used once, at the very end.

So to summarize: if the early church was placing the title "Son of Man" in Jesus's mouth,
1. Luke should be John
2. There should be more Johns
3. John shouldn't favor "Son of Man"
4. Other authors should mention it more,
5. especially in Acts.

The objection I made here is creative and clever, but also goofy, and so I succeeded in debunking myself (don't think too hard about those last five words). Supposing the early church must insist on using "Son of Man" just gives the Gospels credibility. No wonder there are a lot of skeptical scholars who believe Jesus used the title.

But there is a simpler reason for us to know this. Bart Ehrman says that only when Jesus seems to refer to someone else as the "Son of Man" does it pass the criterion of dissimilarity -- that is, evidence it wasn't made up because it's against a Christian motive(3). However, he seems to have ignored certain passages like this one (see also Mark 8:31-32; Matthew 16:21-22; John 2:18-22):

Mark 9:31-32 He said to them, "The Son of Man is going to be delivered into the hands of men. They will kill Him, and after three days He will rise." But they did not understand what he meant and were afraid to ask him about it.

Not only do the foremost leaders of the church not understand -- the ones Jesus chose and left behind --  it makes sense that they wouldn't. On pages 159-163 of his book, Bart Ehrman explains how Jews of the first century had all these ideas about messiahs: an earthly human king to overthrow the enemies of the Jews, an angelic cosmic being who would overthrow the enemy, or a powerful priest with another messiah. But a crucified Messiah would sound like the Waco Branch Dividian David Koresh, who stockpiled guns and was killed by the FBI. Sure, this verse doesn't specifically say crucifixion, but a messiah dying by any means would be unheard of and considered self-defeating. So the Disciples' response makes sense. This is called contextual crediblity, where a story includes something affirmed outside the Bible.

 Then, on page 293 Ehrman says, "Since Nazareth was a tiny hamlet riddled with poverty [confirmed by extra-biblical evidence], it is unlikely that anyone would invent the story that the messiah came from there. Given that the story of Jesus coming from Nazareth is widely attested in our sources, it is probable that Jesus came from Nazareth."

Jesus predicted His resurrection as the Son of Man multiple times, even when it isn't recorded that the Disciples misunderstood (Mark 14:58; 10:33; Matthew 12:38-40; 16:1-4, 21; Luke 9:22; 11:29-30). And if contextual credibility, dissimilarity, and robust mention in the Gospels are enough to convince a great skeptic like Ehrman that something is historically true, we should be satisfied if Jesus calling Himself "Son of Man" is the same way -- although the embarrassing testimony alone is enough to prove it.

Finally, the Gospel of Mark is the eyewitness testimony of Peter, see one of my first posts here. And Peter followed Jesus to the place (Mark 14:53-54, 66) where He said this (see also Matthew 26:64 and Luke 22:69):

Mark 14:62 "I am," said Jesus. "And you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of heaven."

Doesn't that sound a lot like...

Daniel 7:13-14 In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a Son of Man [Aramaic phrase meaning "human being"], coming with the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into His presence. He was given authority, glory, and sovereign power; all nations and peoples of every language worshiped Him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and His kingdom is one that will never be destroyed.

Now, no Jew can claim to deserve worship; by the law of Moses that belongs to God alone! (Exodus 20:4-5; 34:14; Deuteronomy 5:8-9)

 If Jesus wasn't resurrected, no Jew should bother with His words, because He is a liar and blasphemer. But if Lapide is right that Jesus really did rise from the dead, He proved Himself as God, and the Divine Jesus of all four Gospels are really who He was -- is! And, since Yahweh's incarnation is only recorded in the New Testament, it clearly should be seen as Divinely authoritative. With that in mind, this here is refutable:

"When Jesus said, 'No one comes to the Father, but by me' (John 14:6), he meant no one except those who are already with the Father, and they are the Jews." (page 18)

Yet the context of Jesus's words is speaking to Jews. He said in verse 7, "If you really know Me, you will know my Father as well." Jesus clearly was revolutionizing -- or at least trying to revolutionize -- Judaism.

Putting Away "The Resurrection of Jesus: A Jewish Perspective" 
In the great debate Does God Exist?, ambitious atheist Keith Parsons said of J.P. Moreland's case, "None of his arguments has the slightest force for those not already strongly inclined towards theistic belief." (4) (If you want to test that, I suggest you just read Moreland's response yourself.)

Now that's exactly how I feel toward the many "problems" with Christianity one could draw from Lapide's book. I have a hard time believing that any expert could advance those arguments if they haven't already rejected Christ. The objections would be funny if no one actually believed them.

The closest argument to being persuasive would have to be the apparent contradictions with the post-Easter stories from part three, but as a historical objection they are inappropriate. Hermann Samuel Reimarus's essay from part two clearly shows that he is biased against Christianity. Lapide seems to doubt all Gospel resurrection stories, but then points out unembellished testimony in them all.

This Blog Project was mainly a defense, although there are some nuggets of evidence hidden in the first two parts. Now that I am finished and satisfied, this book is going back in my bookshelf, where I won't take it out again until I want to use evidence from Pinchas Lapide.

I suppose it would be honorable to end with a quote from the Psalms in the New Testament, as the Jewish rabbi author bothered to mention them with passion. Hopefully one day, Lapide will come to see Jesus as the actual Messiah, God Himself who came down to earth to save and to fulfill the prophecies of Jews.

Acts 2:34-36 For David did not ascend to heaven, and yet he said, "The Lord said to my Lord, 'Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet.'" Therefore let all Israel be assured of this: God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Messiah."

Citations:
1. Gary R. Habermas and Micheal R. Licona, The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus (Kregel Publications: Grand Rapids, MI. 2004), 30. 
2. Gary R. Habermas and Micheal R. Licona, The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus (Kregel Publications: Grand Rapids, MI. 2004), 166-167; cf. 29-30. 
3.  Bart D. Ehrman, Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth (HarperOne: 2012), 306.
4. J.P. Moreland and Kai Nielsen, Does God Exist? The Debate Between Theists and Atheists (Prometheus Books, 1993), 192.