The Resurrection of Jesus: Alternative Theories, part 3: The Major Challenge continued

 Paul

Often times when I read about someone trying to explain away what happened to Paul, they include a guilt complex. Paul was a severe persecutor of the church, and eventually he felt bad for being so nasty to people. 

But this idea can annoy me because there is "absolutely no hint in the epistles" that Paul felt guilty(1). While he does talk about persecuting the church (see fact #7), he never says anything of the sort, like maybe God started to vindicate him of his sin before Jesus truly turned Paul's life around.

However, Gerd Ludemann apparently once argued that such is not true, because Romans 7:7-25 could be on the pre-conversion Paul. Two responses, one by Robert H. Gundry and the other by William Lane Craig, were quite thorough and scorching. (Although I suggest you read it for yourself, and see just how clear it is that Paul was speaking of his thoughts before converting.)

"Paul's [re-Christian versus Christian experience is overwhelmingly rejected by contemporary Pauline interpreters and commentators." (2) Why? When Paul used the first person and past tense verbs, he was using a representative "I" (see also Rom. 3:7; 1 Cor 6:15; 10:29-30; 13:1-3; Gal. 2:18-19). The past tense verbs go back to the important fact for Christians to get: the world is possessively sinful (Rom. 5:12-14).  

Gundry points out that there is no indication at all of Paul feeling guilty for hurting Christians; rather, coveting is much closer to the truth (7:8. Finally, a false interpretation would largely weigh against what Paul said quite clearly in Philippians 3:6: he persecuted the church because of his zeal for Judaism! "...Paul presents his zeal in persecuting the church as a basis for past Judaistic confidence, not as a seedbed for uneasy feelings of guilt that flowered into Christian conversion." (3)  Remember, in the post on Paul I cited two very significant passages on what he was like pre-conversion, and it was anti-Christianity because they seemed horribly wrong to him. Paul never at all has anything like a parallel to suggest he would feel guilty. He was zealous, completely confident in his beliefs, not prone to doubt them. Such a man believing he was chasing down God's desires on the ginormous basis of understanding scripture was of course convinced that what he was doing was right. He would be able to "prove it" with argumentation. Seriously, when objections to Paul's conviction are shown to not be plausible, we can be more confident that the opposite is the case.

I think of the understatedly gruesome 9/11 "martyrs." Is there any evidence that any of the pilots would be prone to doubting before crashing into the Twin Towers? Did any of them swerve? No, they were so dedicated to their religion that they were utterly convinced that doing such an earth-shattering thing was right. If what Michael Goulder said in his quote last post is true, that it is easy to imagine Peter needing life-realingment which could lead to his belief in Jesus (it isn't) with no real evidence, but being a plausible outcome in that situation (which isn't true but that's not the point), it is so much easier to imagine Paul not feeling guilty before hallucinating Jesus because of good evidence, which includes a significant absence of evidence, which is further supported by the nature of religious fervor and conviction that someone like him had anyway. As Michael Martin once objected, "Why should the fact that Paul persecuted Christians and was subsequently converted to Christianity by his religious experience be given special existential significance? Whatever his past record, at the time of his report he was a zealous, religious believer and not a religious skeptic [!]" (4)

Finally, what would it even take to turn Paul around by a hallucination? When Jack Kent wrote his The Psychological Origins of the Resurrection Myth, he used the DMS-III, which is a go-to book for psychology and psychiatry. Habermas referred to both and cited then next edition, the DSM-IV. See, Paul would have to had experienced a phenonema called "conversion disorder." His brain projected something which was against his personal beliefs. 

However, Habermas points out that adolescents, people of low economic status, persons with a low IQ, and military persons in battle are the real candidates to this mind-blowing (literally) weird occurrence(5). And they also happen to a larger ratio of women than men, even up to 5:1. Does this sound like Paul? Everything but that part about the military is obviously the polar opposite of him. But Paul's work isn't significantly comparable to the military. He was a highly intelligent, articulate, religious person who knew exactly that his work was for God. Furthermore, he was working with other Jews in his day, against Christians which constituted an obvious minority in their world, and were in their hands. (See also the part about Christians being persecuted in the bottom of fact #6.) That's basically the polar opposite side of the brutal ballpark from sitting in trenches and shooting at those who are shooting back at you.

Furthermore, they are not hallucinatory in nature, nor religious. Generally it is "a short-lived change of mind, and it often subsides." (5) Finally, I'm assuming that conversion disorders are significantly less common than just, say, people having some sort of hallucination (think of the statistics cited from Ehrman's sources last post). I had heard of hallucinations all my life, but not about conversion disorders until I read The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus. I mean, it seems that they would take more than what could cause just any old vision. 

So Paul was something like the least likely candidate to experience the least likely result of the least likely type of a phenomena which is comparatively rare compared to its cousin of general hallucinations, which is comparatively rare to the world.

But here Goulder might protest because he says Paul was susceptible to visions (2 Cor 12:7; Gal 1:16)(6). I'm not going to bother looking at the context of what he's referring to (are these from the Christian God or not?), but let's assume for a moment Paul did report having visions, which would have to be of, say, people like Moses, which he reports to his fellow Jews. 

So, if Paul were to have a conversion disorder, it at least very well could come out as a hallucination. And I thought of something else: if Paul thought he saw Jesus, he would have unmistakable proof of the resurrection, and so this would convince him to sacrifice his life.

However, it still could be argued that since specifically a conversion disorder is not hallucinatory in nature, it wouldn't matter. I don't know how the science would work there. But that second part clearly fails. First off, hallucinations often last seconds. Furthermore, recall from last post that the more someone is in a culture, the more likely they are to fail to source monitor -- that is, to be able to tell it was just a mental phenomena of some sort. A week or two ago, I saw an episode on ALF, where a women was drinking late at night and thought Alf was Sammy, whom she identified as a being which dresses up in different costumes each time the tequila comes out. In the morning, when Alf appeared to her to convince her she shouldn't drink, the woman was shocked and realized she had a real problem.  So remembering that conversion disorders often subside, Paul most likely would be able to figure out that it was a hallucination. 

At any rate, Paul wasn't prone to a conversion disorder, especially one which would convert him his whole life.  

James

If I remember correctly (and I'm confident I do), the hallucination to James wasn't dealt with at all until Craig's final response in the Fact or Figment? debate. Why? James is an awkward person for skeptics to deal with. He wasn't in the Christian culture, nor is there any record of him being hateful to them. Ehrman thinks that James "possibly" had a vision of him, "but it is hard to tell." (7)

Jack Kent said that a bereavement vision covered James with a naturalistic perspective. I haven't read his bit on that, but imagine that James felt really bad for his Brother (even somewhat guilty about how he treated Him), was impressed by the Christian church ("How did this ever come out of His crucifixion? Could it be true?", and even went to meet some Christians (he would probably seek out one of the original Disciples). Afterward, he had a vision of Jesus, and this converted him.

However, if John is any indication (7:1-10), he would even go so far as to be indifferent about his death. Back in fact #8 I said how it was striking that there is a passage in the Gospels where James practically tells His brother to commit suicide. 

But even if that didn't happen, we can know other things. Historians know that Jesus was not only rejected by His family, He was rejected by His hometown Nazareth! (Both are very embarrassing; see, for one Gospel's report, Mark 6:1-6 on Nazareth.) In a conversation between Christian former journalist Lee Strobel and apologist on the resurrection Michael Licona, Licona brought up when a somewhat skeptical had said about James: "It doesn't bother me at all. If I had a brother who was perfect, even if he had been born of a virgin, I'd hate him, and I just wouldn't follow him." (8) Lee Strobel than had the idea that a brother who your hometown disbelieved would be very embarrassing for the family. 

It's not plausible that James would have such a vivid hallucination as to prove to him forever that His Brother Jesus was the risen Lord of life. Remember back in fact #8, critical scholar Fuller said that a vision to him would have to be invented after the crucifixion. So, sure, James very well might mourn. But he would know the truth, right? He had grown up with Jesus and heard his message -- he would think he knew the truth. Even had James hallucinated him at one point, this wouldn't reasonably lead to the conclusion that He had risen from the dead and should be followed until death by stoning. James could source-monitor. When Strobel brought up Marshall Applewhite of the Church of Venus (a cult that has now died), Licona said, "Listen--you weren't sucked in by the church of Venus, were you, Lee? Most people weren't. Paul, who's opposing the church, wasn't going to get sucked into believing Jesus returned from the dead, and neither was James." (9) Something else unappealing about the church of Venus was that a large handful of people committed suicide, which is exactly what it looked like the earliest Christian church was doing. 

So what did convince James that his Brother, born from the same woman as he was, his own blood, was the risen Lord?

Mary Magdalene

I don't like to say it, but I have to to be intellectually honest: I think Mary Magdalene is the one most likely to have a vision of Jesus. 

I mean, she is a women, and as I mentioned regarding Paul, they have a higher percentage of experiencing conversion disorder. Also, in one of the case studies Ehrman cited, women reported more hallucinations. Furthermore, as I've had first-hand experience with, women can just tend to be more emotional. Finally, the empty tomb might place the idea in her head.

Well, that last point might be true, but I highly doubt it. Remember when I cited Ehrman back in the first post on the empty tomb. A person's first response is not "Resurrection!" It's "Someone stole the body!" or something else. I mean, as presented in fact #5 about her, there were angelic beings in the tomb. None of the women believed until they told them about what happened. Interestingly enough, in John, the supposedly most legend Gospel, she stuck to the idea that His body had been moved (John 20:13). 

The women knew what happened to Jesus. They didn't suffer like the Disciples. And I believe that they were healthfully dealing with the loss of Jesus. They came to His tomb to anoint the body. This looks like they had accepted His death and were not denying it happened.

So I want to make it clear that I don't at all think Mary was likely to have a vision she would interpret as the risen Jesus. I don't think her or any of the other women would hallucinate, at least before the Disciples. I don't even believe women generally are really likely to hallucinate, especially one that would result in something like a conversion disorder! I mean, definitely some could be because of how they specifically are (which is also true for men), but I have an interesting piece of evidence which points to that not being so for Mary Magdalene.

Did the idea come from somewhere else?

Women influence theory: It stuck out to me, when I was researching Mary Magadene, an idea I came up with myself. "But it could be argued that she was the most important person in the early history of Christianity, that without her declaration of Jesus' empty tomb, the male disciples themselves may never have been inspired to proclaim the new religion." (10) I specifically thought of her claim that Jesus had risen.

However, this theory has no good grounds. All the way back in fact #4 part 1 I presented how Luke 24:11 fits both contextual credibility and is embarrassing. It says, "But they did not believe the women, because their words to them seemed like nonsense." Exactly! The Disciples heard this and were like, "What? Crazy women. There's no way Jesus was glorified by God. He just cursed Him, for pete's -- but definitely not Peter's -- sake! If Jesus was alive again, He would tell us, His closest followers, not some women apparently prone to hysteria."

Then they started seeing Jesus.

Other people influence theory: Interestingly, in Luke 24, two lesser known Disciples, Cleopas and an unnamed one, see Jesus, at least before all eleven of Jesus's primary Disciples did. Christians can't balk at this theory. 

What's even more interesting is that Lapide drew a parallel between them and Jesus and another group of people who thought their messiah had failed. A man named Bar-Kohbha failed to save Israel, and his followers separated. Some called him "the son of the lie" (this I mentioned last post), and others "Bar Kokbha." (11) That means "the son of the star." It comes from Numbers 24:17, and refers to a hero of Israel. 

See, as I also said about Mary in the post on her, just because a messiah was proven false doesn't mean everyone was like Jesus's closest followers (makes sense because they're the closest) -- thought He was someone who unjustly made them live for a lie. But they did know when the person had been defeated. Bar-Kohbha was the son of the star, not any star himself. Cleopas and his friend were "downcast" (Luke 24:17), because they "had hoped he was the one who was going to redeem Israel." (24:21) Although "Jesus of Nazareth" was "a prophet, powerful in word and deed before God and all the people," they were convinced He was gone, which of course would be the order of things. What room, then, to have a vision of Jesus and interpret it as His resurrection and proof of Messiahship?

Bart Ehrman mentioned that the order of appearances of 1 Corinthians 15:3-8 is "striking," because there are no women, yet he seems to be including every appearance he knows of(12). However, Christians have long had an answer for this: that very well could be because women wouldn't be reliable witnesses, and Paul never says the very first person Jesus appeared to out of everyone in the world was Peter.

My point is this: if a single man, and maybe a few others as well, had visions of Jesus, it would be hard to imagine them inspiring the Disciples. This would have been worse than the Disciples trying to convince each other. Remember how last post I cited that people can definitely get talked out of hallucinations. The Disciples would know better. If Jesus really was raised, why didn't He appear to them? They weren't in any position to have religious fervor, remember, because of what they witnessed, experienced, and would be well aware what risk preaching a resurrected Jesus was. They didn't believe the women, of course, but would it be really significant if a man reported something like that? I doubt it.

And then I thought of that maybe a larger group come and tell them they had seen Jesus, which perhaps would seem so unlikely to them they would think it must have happened. But if this happened, Paul would have included it. He did say that Jesus appeared to more than 500 (1 Cor. 15:6), and all the Apostles (1 Cor. 15:7). And remember, he had visited Jerusalem about 5 years later after the crucifixion. Paul would know if a big resurrection appearance event had happened before Peter saw Him. He could have said something like, "But before this, he appeared to 20 followers." 

Also, this as a hallucinatory/delusional event doesn't make sense. Because, thinking back to the attitude Cleopas had, the group without the main Disciples might talk them out of it as well, or maybe even go see the Disciples for confirmation. Of course that is exactly what they wouldn't get. 

Idea from scripture theory: A couple of years or so ago, when I first read Cold-Case Christianity, a large quote I read at the start of a chapter really hit me. I remember thinking of the argument myself sometime, probably before then. (Since it's a fairly easy hypothesis to formulate I could have dreamed it up later and momentarily forgotten the quote.) And back then I wasn't close to defending that we have a Gospel of eyewitness testimony (specifically, Peter from Mark). So it kind of bothered me.

It goes like this: "The one thing we know about the Christians after the death of Jesus is that they turned to their scriptures to try and make sense of it. ... Christians turned to their scriptures to try and understand [the crucifixion], and they found passages that refer to the Righteous One of God's suffering death. But in these passages, such as Isaiah 53 and Psalm 22 and Psalm 61, the one who is punished or who is killed is also vindicated by God. ... But if Jesus is exalted, he is no longer dead, and so Christians started circulating the story of his resurrection." (13)

I would like to start by saying we do know that the earliest Christians used the Old Testament, of course, one giant example I know of being Paul cites it. But we definitely have no record that this conclusion came before the resurrection appearances themselves. (Well, since it is their scriptures, surely the Disciples would have come to a conclusion soon before James and Paul, but we'll get to those two oddballs later.)

I don't think that's what Ehrman was trying to get at. I mean, in his two chapters on the resurrection, he talks about them having visions but scriptural inspiration isn't one of them. I think that even Ehrman holds that people had visions which were interpreted by scripture, not the other way around. 

Anyway, this objection clearly can be responded to with some of the points about the previous arguments. Why would anyone think to go to scripture? They thought they knew the scriptures. Like the cases with other messiahs, a specific example I can get my hands on being Bar Kokbha, it was time for people to go home. They did identify his name from scripture, but that doesn't give any indication to a new understanding of it. He was the son of the star, not a star himself -- such is the case with failed messiahs.

"...Christians began heated and prolonged arguments with Jews over this issue, with the Christians claiming that in fact the Hebrew Bible predicted that the future messiah would die and be raised from the dead. They pointed to passages in the Bible that talked about one who suffered and was then vindicated, passages such as Isaiah 53 and Psalm 22. Jews, though, had a ready response: these passages are not talking about the messiah. ... 

"... My point here is that no Jew before Christianity was on the scene ever interpreted such passages as referring to the messiah. The messiah was to be [a powerful conqueror]; but Jesus was squashed by the enemy. For most Jews, this was decisive enough." (14)

So how would this work on the Disciples? They were the closest followers of Jesus. It's not plausible that they would take these passages to refer to Jesus when Jesus himself never used them (refer to last post where Ehrman thinks he never predicted his resurrection because it doesn't make sense for him). Would they go sacrifice their lives because of some new radical interpretation of scripture? Furthermore, if He hadn't appeared to them, that's all the more reason to think that's incorrect.

And of course this objection wouldn't work on James, and especially Paul (see fact #7). They were not Christian Jews.

In Jesus' Resurrection: Fact or Figment?, "psychoanalyzing" was criticized for working on ancient people. But historians obviously can determine accurately at least somewhat closely what Jesus's earliest followers were experiencing internally. As has been shown, the more evidence, the more certainty (we have much better information on the Disciples and Paul than for James and Mary). At any evidential rate, conversion visions are not necessary or even likely. I also think back to the highly comprehensive survey of the general population, taken by A.Y. Tien. Only a minority of  13 percent reported having had at least one hallucination which was vivid. And how many of those could convince someone if they were to die for it, they would go to Heaven? How many were visions which didn't come from their beliefs?

To drive a nail through natural hypotheses even more, combination theories (that's pretty self-explanatory) suffer from a great problem. Imagine a scenario that Mary hallucinated, the body was stolen by magicians, Peter hallucinated, then talked the others into it, Paul had a hallucinator conversion disorder, and James had a bereavement hallucination. Even granting a .8 probability to all those considerations, that's .8 x .8 x .8 x .8 x .8 x .8 -- about a 26% chance. So there is a 73% chance it's false. 

But what I really like is assigning a .5 probability for everything. That seems kind of fair, because it's not weighing the table (of the specific event) toward a conclusion of an actual resurrection (and also is closer to whatever the real probability is). .5 to the sixth power is .015625! That's less than a 2 percent chance Jesus did not rise from the dead.

When Flew, Ankerberg, and Habermas were bringing up Jack Kent's The Psychological Origins of the Resurrection Myth, I realized something. It's easy to just say something like "The Disciples hallucinated because they were feeling guilty and grieving Jesus, James also had a grief hallucination, and Paul had a conversion disorder." It is quite another to back that up. That's what I would call "psychological probability gymnastics." It's very unscientific. 

Citations:

1. Gary R. Habermas and Antony Flew, Resurrected? An Atheist and Theist in Dialogue, John F. Ankerberg edition (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, inc: 2005), 11, emphasis original.

2. Paul Copan and Ronald K. Tacelli, Jesus' Resurrection: Fact or Figment? A Debate Between William Lane Craig and Gerd Ludemann (InterVarsity Press: Downers Grove, IL. 2000), 195.

3. Ibid., 112. 

4. Michael Martin, The Case Against Christianity (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), 84. Cited in Gary R. Habermas and Micheal R. Licona, The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus (Kregel Publications: Grand Rapids, MI. 2004), 282.

5. Habermas and Flew, Resurrected?, 9. Habermas cited Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM-IV, 4th ed. (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association, 1994).

6. Copan and Tacelli, Jesus' Resurrection, 94.

7. Bart D. Ehrman, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee (HarperOne: 2014), 192.

8. Lee Strobel, In Defense of Jesus: Investigating Attacks on the Identity of Christ (Zondervan: Grand Rapids, MI. 2007), 129.

9. Ibid., 129.

10. Bart Ehrman, Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene: The Followers of Jesus in History and Legend (Oxford University Press: Oxford, NY. 2006), 229.

11. Pinchas Lapide, The Resurrection of Jesus: A Jewish Perspective (Augsburg Fortress Publishing House, 1982), 134.

12. Ehrman, How Jesus Became God, 142.

13. Bart Ehrman, from his closing statement at a debate with William Lane Craig, "Is There Historical Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus?" held at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, on March 28, 2006, accessed April 13, 2012, www.philvaz.com/apologetics/p96.htm. Cited in J. Warner Wallace, Cold-Case Christianity: A Homicide Detective Investigates the Claims of the Gospels (David C Cook: Colorado Springs, CO. 2013), 239.

14. Ehrman, How Jesus Became God, 116-17.