The Jesus Seminar on the Resurrection of Jesus A Critique Part Two

This is the second of a series of posts which examine the views of the controversial Jesus Seminar on the resurrection of Jesus. Part One can be found here. Unless otherwise indicated, all page references are from Bernard Brandon Scott (editor), The Resurrection of Jesus, A Sourcebook, Jesus Seminar Guides, Polebridge Press, California, 2008.

The fourth century Christian historian Eusebius recorded that around 200AD, Serapion, Bishop of Antioch, heard about a Gospel of Peter. However, when Serapion read it, he decided that it was heretical and had been written by Docetists who denied the physical side of Jesus’ nature and claimed that he only seemed (dokein in Greek) to be human (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, 6:12).

In 1886 fragments of a Gospel of Peter, which can be read here, were discovered in Akhmim, Egypt. Because there does not appear to be anything Docetic about the Akhmim Gospel of Peter, we cannot be completely sure if this is the same Gospel of Peter which Serapion read.

Compared to the rather straightforward New Testament Gospel accounts, the resurrection in the Gospel of Peter contains fanciful and legendary details. A crowd had gathered on Sunday to see the tomb. A giant Jesus comes out of the toms, accompanied by a talking cross. This was all witnessed by the Roman soldiers who told Pilate. Mary Magdalene and the other women came later (Gospel of Peter 9-12).

Jeremiah Johnston has suggested that the “Gospel of Peter” was not meant to be a Gospel at all, but is a second century Christian novel (Jeremiah Johnston, The Resurrection of Jesus in the Gospel of Peter, T. and T. Clark, London, 2018, pp. 178, 189).

Most Bible scholars, conservative or liberal, agree that the Gospel of Peter is a late document which has been embellished and has little, if any, historical value. Nevertheless, the Jesus Seminar Sourcebook devotes a whole chapter to it, “Resurrection Texts in the Gospel of Peter” by Arthur Dewey. The Jesus Seminar, which apparently prefers the unconventional over the conventional, seems to devote more attention to the Gospel of Peter than any of the New Testament Gospels.

Like John Dominic Crossan in The Cross That Spoke (1988), Dewey suggests that parts of the Gospel of Peter are very early and have been built around and embellished. However, his attempt to reconstruct the supposed original text is largely speculative and unprovable (pp. 64-72).

Dewey suggests there was an original version of the empty tomb story which predated both the Gospels of Mark and Peter (p. 72) and involved women going to the tomb and finding it empty (p. 74). This contradicts other Jesus Seminar contributors who say that Mark invented the story of the empty tomb (pp. 46, 82, 98). If Dewey is correct, it would mean there is more early evidence for the empty tomb than most scholars assume.

In Chapter Five, “Was Jesus’ Resurrection an Historical Event?’, which was based on a 2008 debate with William Lane Craig, Roy Hoover seeks to explain the origin of Christian belief in the resurrection and “what early Christians meant when they claimed that God raised Jesus from the dead.” (pp. 75-76)

Hoover says that because the Jews had faith that they would be resurrected, Christian belief in Jesus’ resurrection “began as an affirmation of faith” (p. 78), “an affirmation of faith and hope in the face of the stark, disconfirming fact of his crucifixion, when in spite of his confident message about the Empire of God, Jesus of Nazareth was eliminated by the Empire of Rome.” (p. 78)

The Jews believed they would be resurrected in the future at the end of the age. It is plausible that Jesus’ Jewish disciples would have believed that Jesus would be resurrected in the future along with everyone else. That does not explain why Jesus’s disciples came to believe that his resurrection had already happened, if nothing had happened to encourage this belief, such as an empty tomb and the risen Jesus appearing to them.

There were other Jewish martyrs, messianic pretenders, prophets and crucifixion victims. None of their followers inspired by Jewish hope in the future resurrection, had an affirmation of faith which produced a belief that they had already risen from the dead. The early Christians alone had faith that Jesus rose from the dead. Something must happened to encourage this belief, such as Jesus actually rose from the dead.

Hoover says that “the faith that God raised Jesus from the dead generated the empty tomb stories, the empty tomb stories did not generate that faith.” (p. 80) This is the opposite of the historical evidence says happened. They found the tomb empty, saw the risen Jesus and then believed or had faith that he had risen from the dead. There was a reason, a cause for their belief. This makes more sense than Hoover’s hypothesis that the disciples decided to believe that Jesus had risen from the dead and then decided to make up stories about the empty tomb and his resurrection appearances. Does your mind work like this? if not, why would you think other people’s minds do?

The faith came first hypothesis is not plausible because not everybody who came to believe Jesus rose from the dead had faith in Jesus before they believed he rose from the dead. Jesus’ brother James did not believe in him during his ministry (John 7:5). The risen Jesus appeared to James (1 Corinthians 15:7). He them believed and became a leader in the Jerusalem church (Galatians 1:19). Likewise, Saul did not have any faith in Jesus, but persecuted his followers until the risen Jesus appeared to him (Acts 9:1-9). Again, the evidence says the opposite of what Hoover clams happened.

Hoover inadvertently acknowledges this and contradicts himself. He says some became believers after seeing the risen Jesus when he says the resurrection was a private event, not a public one,

“In the Easter narratives, on the other hand, Jesus appears nowhere in public. the risen Jesus appears only to a select few, all of whom had been his followers or became believers. So the gospel authors themselves indicate in the way they tell the Easter stories that the resurrection of Jesus was not an historical event in the ordinary sense of the term: it was not something open to public observation or verification”(p. 80).

Private events are still historical events. However, not all the resurrection appearances were private. Jesus appearing to 500 people at one time sounds like a public event (1 Corinthians 15:6). Other people saw the light when Jesus appeared to Paul on the road to Damascus (Acts 22:9). It was not a subjective inner experience.

The fact that some unbelievers “became believers” after seeing the risen Jesus does not suggest that the resurrection was not a historical event. It only shows how persuasive the evidence was.

Hoover claims that the differences in the Gospels’ accounts of the resurrection “show there is no common tradition between them. Each gospel author was therefore free to compose his own imaginary tale about how it must have been.” (p. 81)

As I have discussed in other posts here and here for nearly 30 years the consensus among New Testament scholars has been that the Gospels are ancient biographies of Jesus. Biographers did not “compose their own imaginary tales”. They recorded what they believed happened in the life of their subject.

The differences in the Gospel accounts show that the writers were not copying a single account. New Testament historians call this the criterion of multiple attestations, which means that the more independent sources there are for an event, the more more historically reliable it is likely to be. The five independent sources for the resurrection (the four Gospels and 1 Corinthians 15), suggest it is very historically reliable.

Another criterion of authenticity is embarrassment, which means that the text contains something embarrassing, it is unlikely that the early Christians would have made it up and it must have happened, i.e., why was the sinless Jesus baptised for the forgiveness of sins (Mark 1:4)? The four Gospels say that the first witnesses to the empty tomb were women. The authors would not have made this up because it is so embarrassing. Women had little credibility as witnesses in the ancient world. If they were going to make up the empty tomb, they would have naturally said the witnesses were men.

The Jesus Seminar think they are so smart and progressive, yet they do not sound like they are up to date with the trends in historical Jesus scholarship. This is evident when one consults the bibliography in The Resurrection of Jesus, A Sourcebook. It contains The Resurrection of Jesus by Gary Habermas which is for the physical resurrection, The Resurrection of Jesus, History, Experience, Theology by Gerd Ludemann which is against the physical resurrection, and The Cross That Spoke by John Dominic Crossan which promotes the dubious theory that the Gospel of Peter is early (pp. 117-118). The other listed books do not deal directly with the historicity of the resurrection. Scholarly works defending the historicity of the resurrection, such as Assessing the New Testament Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus (1989) by William Lane Craig, The Resurrection of the Son of God, Christian Origins and the Question of God, Vol. 3 (2003), by N. T. Wright and The Resurrection of God Incarnate (2003) by Richard Swinburne, do not get a mention. To be blunt, members of the Jesus Seminar need to read more books.

Hoover says that the supposed contradictions in the resurrection accounts indicate that “they are nor based on eyewitness accounts of things that actually happened on that Sunday morning.” (p. 83)

Everyone, who deals in eyewitness testimony, historians, journalists, lawyers, knows that eyewitness contradict each other. They are not lying. They just remember things differently. When critics of the resurrection say the differences in the Gospels mean they are not eyewitness accounts or they did not happen at all, they are only exposing how little they understand about history and eyewitness testimony and how unqualified they are to speak on whether or not an event really happened.

Any contradictions in the Gospels would not necessarily mean they are historically unreliable. It would have implications for the doctrines of inspiration and inerrancy. However, the supposed contradictions in the resurrection accounts are not irreconcilable contradictions. Two people can describe the same event differently and both can still be true. I will discuss the supposed contradictions in more detail in Part Three.

Hoover says that Paul was the only New Testament author who claimed to have seen the risen Jesus (p. 82), even though the author of John clearly says that he did too (John 21:24). He agrees that 1 Corinthians 15 shows that Paul heard about the resurrection from Peter in Jerusalem a few years after Jesus’ death. However, because 1 Corinthians 15 does not mention the empty tomb, Hoover claims that Paul and Peter did not know about it and the accounts of the empty tomb and the appearances in the Gospels were made up later (pp. 82-83).

This is the argument from silence. Hoover is assuming that what Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 15 is everything he knew about Jesus’ resurrection. He does not know how much Paul knew. Do we really think 1 Corinthians 15:3-7 was everything Peter told Paul about Jesus’ resurrection? Paul could have met Mary Magdalene and visited the empty tomb, but he did not mention it.

In fact, if there had not been heretical beliefs about the resurrection among the Corinthian Christians, which he was addressing in 1 Corinthians 15, Paul would not have mentioned what Peter told him at all, and Hoover and other critics would be claiming that Paul knew even less.

Hoover argues, “If the “appearance” stories in the other gospels are factual reports, Mark would have surely mentioned them.” (p. 64) As already mentioned in Part One, this is based on the unsound suggestion that Mark intentionally ended his Gospel at verse 8, when like many ancient manuscripts, the original ending, which probably included a resurrection appearance in Galilee, was lost.

Hoover claims that Matthew and Luke could not have copied Mark, but made up their own resurrection appearances, based on the appearances in 1 Corinthians 15 (p. 85). Huh? 1 Corinthians 15 does not mention the appearances to the women or to the two disciples on the road to Emmaus. It mentions appearances to James and the 500 (1 Corinthians 15:6-7), which are not described in Matthew or Luke. The resurrection accounts in Matthew and Luke are not based on 1 Corinthians 15. We are dealing with multiple independent accounts.

Hoover writes that Paul had “a visionary confirmation of his faith.”(p. 85) This does not make sense. Paul did not have any faith in Jesus to confirm before the risen Jesus appeared to him. He believed Jesus was a deceiver who got what he deserved so he persecuted his followers. His encounter with the risen Jesus changed his mind.

Paul was a member of the Pharisees who believed in physical resurrection. He would have understood that seeing a vision of someone in Heaven does not mean they have physically risen from the dead. Paul understood his experience as an appearance of the resurrected Jesus although he acknowledged that it was different from others’ appearances (1 Corinthians 15:8).

Hoover claims that Matthew and Luke took the visions of Paul, Stephen and others of the risen Jesus in Heaven and “literalized and materialized the idea of such “appearances” [so] they depict a risen Jesus still on earth.” (p. 85) Most scholars would agree that Matthew and Luke were writing independently of each other, yet, according to Hoover, they both decided on their own to turn visions of Jesus in Heaven into accounts of the risen Jesus walking around on Earth. Why would they bother to do this? What was wrong with visions of Jesus in Heaven? Visions of Jesus in Heaven would have been much more acceptable to the pagans which the early church was increasingly trying to win, who found the idea of physical resurrection offensive.

Hoover argues that the “idea of resurrection in Bible’s ancient worldview” (p. 87) in which the Earth was believed to be at the centre of the cosmos and God was believed to be up there above the sky in Heaven. Hoover says this worldview has been disproved by science and “The risen Jesus could not ascend to heaven” because “There is no heaven.” (p. 88) If you see someone who was dead come back to life, it does not matter how big you think the universe is. If God reveals Himself to a pre-scientific culture, that revelation does not necessarily become invalid in a scientific culture.

Nevertheless, Hoover is accurate in that the debate over the resurrection is founded on a clash of worldviews. The Jesus Seminar have a worldview which is not open to the idea that God would intervene in the natural world, so they do not believe God rose Jesus physically from the dead. If the historical evidence conflicts with their worldview, they do not modify their worldview to fit the evidence, they modify or deny the evidence to fit their worldview. This is the sort of dogmatism they are quick to accuse “fundamentalists” of.

Hoover says that although “the idea of resurrection has lost its literal meaning” (p. 89), it is still possible to have resurrection faith or hope which Hoover describes as a continuing belief in justice, virtue and transformation even when they are not apparent in the world (p. 90).

Belief in the physical resurrection of Jesus and in this kind of resurrection hope in this world are not incompatible. It is not an either/or choice. We can believe in both. Because God rose Jesus from the dead, we know this hope is not futile or in vain. It will come true when the risen Jesus returns, sin, suffering and death are defeated and the kingdom of God encompasses everything.

To be concluded on Part Three

The Jesus Seminar on the Resurrection of Jesus A Critique Part One

The Jesus Seminar was founded by Robert Funk in 1985. It consisted of about 50 Biblical scholars from the more liberal end of the theological spectrum and about 100 laypeople. They are arguably best known for their use of coloured beads to vote on whether or not they believed the words and actions of Jesus were authentic. As expected, they concluded that Jesus did not say he was the Son of God and the supernatural elements of the Gospels did not happen. This series of posts will examine their views on the resurrection of Jesus as they are presented in Bernard Brandon Scott (editor), The Resurrection of Jesus: A Sourcebook, Jesus Seminar Guides, Volume 4, Polesbridge Press, California, 2008, which consists of seven chapters by six contributors and an introduction by Bernard Brandon Scott.

The first chapter is “The Resurrection of Jesus, Reports and Stories” by Robert Funk who says that there three types of statements about the resurrection of Jesus, (1) lists of those Jesus appeared to, (2) reports that Jesus appeared to people, which are not described, and (3) the appearances of Jesus which are described and which Funk calls stories (p. 7). This is fair enough, except Funk’s use of the word “stories” seems to imply they are writing fiction, rather than describing actual events.

Funk’s list of resurrection appearances include the martyrdom of Stephen (Acts 7 :55-56) and the appearance of Jesus to John on Patmos (Revelation 1) which many Christians would not classify as resurrection appearances (p. 8). He also includes the apocryphal Gospel of Peter and Gospel of the Hebrews (p. 8) even though these are later writings and are less likely to be historically accurate than the earlier New Testament writings.

Funk writes that the actual resurrection of Jesus is not described in the New Testament Gospels, only in the Gospel of Peter (p. 7). He does not explore the implications of this. Even though critics accuse the Gospel writers of making up the empty tomb and other details in the resurrection story, they did not make up accounts of the most important part, the actual resurrection of Jesus, which we would expect them to do if they really were in the habit of inventing stories. This suggests that they only wrote what they knew about. They were not making it up. Only the later Gospel of Peter provides a fanciful account of Jesus coming out of the tomb with a talking cross.

Funk writes, “The Gospel of Mark originally ended with 16:8 – with the empty tomb but without the narration of an appearance of the risen Jesus.”(p. 10) Other contributors Richard Price (p. 49), Roy Hoover (p. 84), Thomas Sheehan (p. 98) claim this was intentional, how Mark intended to end his Gospel, and he did not know about any resurrection appearances of Jesus.

This is silly. The most logical reason why Mark ends abruptly in the middle of a sentence is that the back page fell off an ancient codex of Mark and the original ending was lost. There are numerous incomplete manuscripts from the ancient world. No one would suggest this was intentional by the author. The Jesus Seminar’s argument only exposes how little they know about ancient history and ancient texts.

Mark records Jesus saying he would appear to his disciples in Galilee after his resurrection (Mark 14:28). The original ending of Mark presumably recounted this Galilee appearance.

Funk says, “Some scholars think that the Pentecost story in Acts may have originally been the appearance to 500 believers all at once mentioned by Paul.”(p. 10) Pentecost in Acts was not a resurrection appearance. They did not see Jesus, only tongues of fire coming down upon them (Acts 2:3). Funk does not explain why Luke would turn an appearance of Jesus to 500 people into tongues of fire coming down on 120 people. Maybe they think that 120 and 500 are big numbers and all big numbers are the same, so they must refer to the same event.

Chapter Two “The Jesus Seminar Spring Meeting 1995” is a summary of a meeting of the Jesus Seminar which discussed Jesus’ resurrection. In a lecture Gerd Ludemann said that “the body of Jesus undoubtedly decayed in the usual way” and the Jesus Seminar agreed “that Jesus’ corpse probably rotted in some unknown grave.”(p. 45) They ignored the statements in the Gospels that the early Christians knew where Jesus was buried (Matthew 27:57-61, Mark 15:46-47, Luke 23:50-55, John 19:38-42). This is presumably because if they accept that Jesus’ body was put in a tomb, like the Gospels say, they cannot explain what happened to the body if Jesus was not resurrected, so they deny he was put in a tomb.

They also agreed that “Jesus’ resurrection did not involve the resuscitation of his corpse” and that “belief in Jesus’ resurrection did not depend on what happened to his corpse” (p. 45) and “Jesus’ resurrection was not an event open to empirical verification” (p. 46). They quoted Marcus Borg, saying, “a video camera present at Jesus’ appearances would not have recorded anything on tape.”(p. 46)

Of course, belief in Jesus’ resurrection depends on what happened to his corpse and is historically verifiable or not. Jesus either walked out of the tomb or he did not. The Jews believed that resurrection meant a body being physically restored and coming back to life. If Jesus was still dead, his body rotted away, he could not have been resurrected.

The Jesus Seminar and other liberal scholars have basically changed the meaning of the word “resurrection” and imposed their modern meaning on the ancient New Testament texts because they do not want to believe in the original meaning. If you do not like the original meaning of the word “resurrection”, well, tough. That does not mean your new made-up definition is valid.

The Jesus Seminar believes, “Paul, Mary of Magdala, Peter and possibly others in the early Jesus movement experienced visions of a glorified Jesus, which they interpreted as evidence of his resurrection” and “The earliest reports of Jesus’ appearances were of luminous apparitions – a blinding light – accompanied by some auditory communication (real or imagined.)” (p. 46)

The appearance of Jesus to Peter is only briefly reported (Luke 24:34, 1 Corinthians 15:5). It is not described. The idea that Peter experienced a “luminous apparition” or “blinding light” exists only in the imaginations of the Jesus Seminar. The appearance of Jesus to Mary Magdalen seems pretty ordinary (John 20:11-18).

Jesus’ appearance to Paul on the road to Damascus involved a blinding light, but it was not a subjective vision because others also saw the light (Acts 22:9). The Jesus Seminar wants us to believe that all the resurrection appearances were like Paul’s. They want us to believe that Luke accurately described Paul’s experience but Luke had previously described other more physical and down to earth appearances of the risen Jesus (Luke 24). They do not explain the supposed inconsistency. This is cherry picking, selecting the evidence they want to believe because it supports their preconceptions and rejecting the rest.

The Jesus Seminar do not explain how or why the “visions of a glorified Jesus” did not stay “visions of a glorified Jesus”, but somehow got turned into a belief that Jesus had physically risen from the dead.

The Jesus Seminar believes that Jesus “may not have been buried at all, but left at the mercy of scavenging dogs – often the practice in Roman executions.” (p. 46) Wrong. Other first century Jewish writers Josephus (Jewish War 4:317) and Philo (In Flaccum 10:83-84) wrote that the Jews were allowed to take down crucifixion victims and bury them on the same day so as not to violate Deuteronomy 21:22-23 which said that the corpse of someone who had been hung on a tree should not stay there overnight, but should be taken and buried on the same day.

The Jesus Seminar “view the empty tomb story as a legend that developed three or four decades after Jesus’ death – probably in response to the rumour that Jesus’ followers had stolen the body.”(p. 46) There is nothing legendary about an empty tomb. I am also interested in Ancient Egypt and there are plenty of empty tombs there. It is only a “legend” because it is too hard for the Jesus Seminar to explain what happened to Jesus’ body. The Jesus Seminar seem a little confused. They say the legend of the empty tomb was made up because there were rumours the disciples had stolen Jesus’ body, but if there were rumours the disciples had stolen the body, the tomb must have been empty.

The Jesus Seminar believes that Joseph of Arimathea, in whose tomb Jesus was buried, “was a fictional character.” (p. 46) There are multiple attestations for the existence of Joseph of Arimathea. He is mentioned in all four Gospels (Matthew 27:57-60, Mark 15: 42-46, Luke 23:50-54, John 19: 38-42). There should be no doubt about his existence, but the Jesus Seminar do not want to believe that Jesus was buried in a tomb, so they claim the owner of the tomb did not exist. If the Gospels did not say Jesus had been buried in Joseph’s tomb, they would not question his existence. It has nothing to do with the historical evidence. It is all about their bias and preconceptions.

It is unlikely that the Gospel writers would have made up Joseph of Arimathea and claimed that he was a public figure, a member of the Sanhedrin (Luke 23:50) because the Jews could have simply responded that the Gospel accounts of the resurrection were wrong because Joseph of Arimathea never existed.

The Jesus Seminar believes that “the earliest apparitions of Jesus took place in Galilee” (p, 46) and that the appearances of the risen Jesus in Jerusalem are not historically accurate (p. 47). Nowhere do the Gospel writers refer to the appearances of the risen Jesus as “apparitions”. This is the Jesus Seminar reading their own preconceptions into the Gospel accounts, trying to make the appearances of Jesus sound like something they were not.

They claim that the appearances of the risen Jesus in both Jerusalem and Galilee is “a very unlikely sequence” (p. 47), but they do not explain why.

In a section, “How Long Did Easter Last?” the Jesus Seminar believes, “Visionary experiences of Jesus are reported to have gone on for months, perhaps even years.”(p. 47) “Visionary experiences of Jesus” are not necessarily the same as seeing Jesus’ physical body after he had risen from the dead, but the Jesus Seminar assumes they are the same. References in later Gnostic writings that Jesus appeared for 550 days and 11 years are treated as though they are just as credible as the earlier New Testament references. They even say, “And reputed sightings of Jesus continue even into twentieth century America.”(p. 47) They do not differentiate between the appearances of the risen Jesus on Earth before he ascended to Heaven (Luke 24:50-53) and visions of Jesus after his Ascension. People, who think they have had a vision of Jesus today, would not say they are having a resurrection experience on a par with Mary Magdalene.

Admittedly, Jesus appeared to Paul after his Ascension and this was regarded as a resurrection appearance, but Paul wrote “last of all He was seen by me also”(1 Corinthians 15:8). This appearance to Paul was the last resurrection appearance. Any subsequent visions of Jesus do not count as resurrection appearances.

The Jesus Seminar were “fairly confident that both Peter and Paul had visions of the luminous Christ figure, as Paul reports in 1 Corinthians 15 and Luke confirms in his gospel (24:34).” (p 47) As already mentioned, there is no “luminous Christ figure” in the brief reports of Jesus’ appearance to Peter.

They suggest that Peter’s vision “is probably preserved indirectly in the story of the miraculous catch of fish in Luke 5:1-11. This may be a misplaced appearance story.”(p. 47) Or it may not. Jesus does not sound like a “luminous Christ figure” here either. There is no evidence Peter had a vision of a “luminous Christ figure”. The Jesus Seminar are making it up because it is what they want to believe.

The Jesus Seminar say that they “tended to be skeptical about the claims made on behalf of James and John (sons of Zebedee), James the brother of Jesus, “the twelve’, all the apostles, and the 500 who presumably had a simultaneous group experience (1 Corinthians 15:5-8).” (p. 47) I suppose when 500 people see something at the same time, it is a “simultaneous group experience.” Jesus’ brother was not a believer while Jesus was alive (john 7:5). Jesus appeared to James after his resurrection (1 Corinthians 15:7). As a result, James became a believer and a leader in the Jerusalem church (Galatians 1:9). The Jesus Seminar are “skeptical” about the appearance of the risen Jesus to James, but if this did not happen, they do not explain how the unbelieving James became a church leader.

Many scholars date the list of appearances in 1 Corinthians 15 to within a few years of Jesus’ death when Paul went to Jerusalem and met Peter (Galatians 1-18). A few years after Jesus was crucified, Christians in Jerusalem were saying he had risen from the dead and he had seen him. These claims could have easily been disproved if Jesus’ tomb was not empty. However, the Jesus Seminar are “skeptical” about this early historical evidence. When they say they are skeptical, they are basically saying they refuse to accept this early historical evidence because they do not like what it says.

In Chapter 3 “Brand X Easters” Robert Price looks at some of the alleged parallels between the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ resurrection and Greek and Roman mythology. Proponents of the pagan parallels theory basically search through ancient pagan literature looking for incidents which are similar to something Jesus did in the Gospels and then argue that the Gospel writers copied from the pagans.

Price does not explain why Jews and Christians with an anti-pagan worldview would copy from pagan myths and literature. Furthermore, if the Gospel writers were in the habit of making things up and calling it history, as the Jesus Seminar and other critics maintain, why did they need to copy the pagans? Couldn’t they make things up themselves?

If there really were pagan myths about a god or divine hero being crucified or killed in some other way, and then coming back to life in a physical body, then I would be concerned. However, as I have explained in The Jesus Mysteries Hoax and James Patrick Holding has shown in more detail at Tektonics, the supposed parallels are either so general as to be meaningless or they do not exist at all, and the pagan parallel theorists have been making them up. This is true in “Brand X Easters”. The pagan stories which Price claims inspired the Gospel writers bear virtually no resemblance to the death and resurrection of Jesus. There is no pagan parallel for the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. The second century Christian writer Justin Martyr, who would have known a lot more about pagan mythology than we do today, wrote that there were no myths of pagan gods being crucified (Justin Martyr, First Apology, 55).

Belief in resurrection, that our bodies would physically come back to life, was a Jewish and then a Christian belief. The pagans believed that a person’s soul or spirit would go to Hades or to pagan heaven after they died, or that special people could be taken up to be with the gods while they were still alive. They did not believe that a dead person would come back to life in a physical body and then be taken up to heaven. Most pagans would have found the idea of physical resurrection gross.

Price writes, “Many readers have wondered how Mark could have possibly been satisfied to end his gospel with no resurrection appearances.” (p. 49) As I have said, of course, Mark did not end his Gospel with no resurrection appearances. The original ending has been lost. Price must know a lot about ancient literature in order to find these obscure supposed parallels with Jesus. He must know that it is not unusual for an ancient manuscript to have a missing ending.

Nevertheless, Price builds on this error and argues that Mark had in mind pagan myths about the divine hero being taken up to heaven and his body cannot be found. He gives the example of when Heracles died, his body was cremated on a pyre, his soul was believed to have been taken up to heaven and no trace of his body could be found (p. 50). It seems pretty clear that no trace of Heracles’ body could be found because it had been cremated. There is a big difference between not finding a body because it has cremated and a tomb being empty because the dead body came back to life and walked out.

Price also mentions the myth of Aristaeus, the son of Apollo, who went missing near Mount Haemus. He was never seen again and was believed to have been taken up to the gods (pp. 50-51). They myth does not say he was killed and resurrected or there was an empty tomb. It is simply an ancient missing persons case and it is supposed to have been the inspiration for the empty tomb in Mark.

Price does not tell his readers but there are often several different versions of a myth, including how a character died. (Critics make a big deal about the differences in the Gospels, but compared to pagan myths, the Gospels are very consistent.) He quotes Dionysus of Halicarnassus who wrote that the body of Aeneas could not be found after a battle and it was believed he had taken up by the gods (p. 51). He does not mention that the Roman historian Livy wrote that Aeneas’ body was buried near the Numicus River (Livy, History of Rome, 1:2).

Price quotes Plutarch who wrote that Romulus, founder of Rome, was believed to have vanished, his body could not be found and he was believed to have been taken up to the gods (p. 51). He leaves out the bit where Plutarch also wrote that some believed the Senators had killed Romulus and cut up his body (Plutarch, Parallel Lives, Romulus, 2:27). Livy also reported that some believed Romulus had been killed and dismembered by the Senators (Livy, History of Rome, 1:16).

Price later quotes from Livy (pp. 53-54). He presumably knows that Livy contradicted the versions he quoted about the fates of Aeneas and Romulus, but he does not want his readers to know this.

Several hundred years later Julius Caesar was also killed by members of the Senate. This does not mean that the assassination of Julius Caesar did not happen and Roman historians copied the idea from the story of Romulus. Roman leaders got assassinated.

Price quotes from Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius of Tyana which says that after Apollonius was arrested, he escaped, hid in a temple and vanished, and was believed to have been take up to heaven (p. 52). It sounds like he miraculously vanished and did not die, however an inscription in the Adana Archaeological Museum in Turkey says he was buried in Tyana.

Building even more on his flawed assumption about the ending of Mark, Price writes, “Matthew and Luke were not satisfied with Mark’s teasing announcement of the Risen Jesus without any appearances so they added appearances in which the vanished Jesus appears and delivers his own eulogy – summing up his mission and giving the disciples their marching orders.”(p. 53) He says this was a Hellenistic literary device and gives an example from Livy (now he acknowledges Livy) of a Roman Senator who claimed to have seen a vision of Romulus from heaven (pp. 53-54).

Stories about heavenly visions of someone, who may not have died according to some versions, are not the same as the resurrection accounts in Matthew and Luke who wrote that Jesus had died and had been physically resurrected, walked around on earth and was seen before he ascended to heaven. The Jesus Seminar appears to believe that the early Christians with a Jewish worldview which included physical resurrection, initially had a pagan-like belief that Jesus had been taken up to heaven and he appeared to them in visions. Then, Matthew and Luke, who had inspired by pagan myths, wrote accounts of physical appearances of Jesus which more resembled their Jewish worldview.

Yes, this does not make sense. It is more plausible that the early Christians with a Jewish worldview including physical resurrection believed that resurrection meant resurrection and always believed that Jesus had physically risen from the dead.

Price compares Luke’s account of the two disciples not recognizing the risen Jesus on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24:13-35). with an account written in a tablet in the shrine of the god Asclepius in Epidaurus, Greece, in which a woman has a dream about a man who later revealed himself to the god Asclepius (pp. 54-55). This is not even a myth. Somebody had a dream. Does Price expect us to believe that Luke somehow knew about this tablet in a shrine in Greece and decided to use it as the basis for the story of the road to Emmaus? Or maybe it is just a coincidence and not a very good one at that.

Price suggests that the miracle accounts, in which after of a night of catching no fish, Jesus tells the disciples to try again and their nets are filled with fish (Luke 5:1-11, John 21:1-13), are based on a story of how the Greek philosopher Pythagoras was able to guess the number of fish some fisherman had in their nets (pp. 55-56).

If Pythagoras had also told the fisherman to put their nets in again or the number of fish had been the same (John 21:11 says 153, but we do not know what Pythagoras’ right answer was), then there might be some connection. The only thing these two miracle stories have in common is that fish were involved. It would be more accurate to suggest that Jaws is based on Jonah because both involve people being swallowed by big fish.

Sometimes fictional events can come true. In 1985 Uncanny X-Men #189 predicted the destruction of the World Trade Centre in the early 21st century.

However, none of the desperate examples, which Robert Price has found, are anywhere as close. If this is the best he can find, all he has proved is that the Gospels were not influenced by pagan myths.

To be continued in Part Two

Zealot by Reza Aslan A Critique Part Two

This is the second part of my critique of the 2013 book Zealot by Reza Aslan who argued that the historical Jesus was really a revolutionary zealot. This post will discuss the trial, crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus and the supposed development of beliefs about Jesus in the early church. Part One can be read here. All page references are from Reza Aslan, Zealot, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 2017, unless otherwise indicated.

Aslan says that the Gospel’s portrait of a weak-willed Pilate who was pressured into crucifying Jesus by the Jewish leaders is “pure fiction”. The historical Plate was a crueller, harsher person who would not hesitate to crucify a Jew (p. 47). In fact, there is a possible explanation for Pilate’s apparently wimpish behaviour in the Gospels. About the time Pilate became governor of Judea in 26 AD, the Roman emperor Tiberius went into semi-retirement and Sejanus, commander of the Praetorian Guard, assumed a lot of the emperor’s responsibilities. In 31 AD Sejanus was accused of conspiring to overthrow Tiberius and was executed, along with many of his followers. We cannot be sure but Sejanus may have actually appointed Pilate who was now in a very vulnerable position. He had to keep his head down and not waves, such as keeping the massacres of Jews to a minimum. This would be true even if Sejanus had not appointed Pilate. You do not draw attention to yourself in the middle of a political purge. When the crowd told Pilate that if he released Jesus who they were accusing of sedition, even if Pilate thought Jesus was harmless, that he was no friend of Caesar (John 19:12), it was basically a threat that they would accuse him of disloyalty to Tiberius.

A young Patrick Stewart with hair as Sejanus in the 1976 BBC production of I, Claudius

The Gospels’ account of Jesus’ trial before Pilate is historically accurate (A.N. Sherwin-White, Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, London, 1963, pp. 24-47). Nevertheless, Aslan says that Jesus’ trial before Pilate is a fabrication. Pilate would have probably just signed his execution without a trial or Jesus being in the room (p. 148). Of course, Aslan does not know this. It is what he wants to believe happened.

In spite of the multiple attestation of the four Gospels, Aslan doubts there was a custom to release a prisoner at Passover because it was not mentioned outside the Gospels (p 149). In the light of how little we really know about the ancient world, the fact that this custom was not mentioned in other surviving sources proves nothing. Aslan suggests that Mark made it up because he was writing to a Roman audience who could not tell it was made up (p. 149), but that does not explain why he would make it up. Matthew, who was apparently writing to a Jewish audience, still mentions it.

Aslan writes about Jesus’ trial, crucifixion and death, “The sequence of events did not contain a narrative, but was strictly for liturgical purposes. It was a means for the early Christians to relive the last days of their messiah, through ritual by, for instance, sharing the same meal he shared with the disciples, praying the same prayers he offered in Gethsemane, and so on.” (pp. 153-154)

It sure looks like narrative to me. In what way are they not narrative? Other ancient biographies also tended to focus on the deaths of their subjects. That does not mean they were written for liturgical purposes. If the early church used the Gospel accounts to “relive” Jesus’ passion, then it must have happened. Just because the early Christians “relived” events from Jesus’ passion in their services does not mean that they were not historical events.

Then, there is the reference to the young man who ran away naked after Jesus was arrested (Mark 14:51-52). Was this written “strictly for liturgical purposes”? I have never seen it relived or re-enacted in an Easter service.

Aslan adds, “As with everything else in the gospels, the story of Jesus’s arrest, trial and execution was written for one reason and one reason only, to prove that he was the promised messiah. Factual accuracy was irrelevant.” (p. 154)

Yes, the Gospels were meant to show that Jesus was the Messiah, but this belief that Jesus was the Messiah was a result of what Jesus did, so factual accuracy was very relevant. If Jesus did not do and say what the Gospels say he did, the early church, which would not have existed, would not have believed he was the Messiah. It is cause and effect.

Like many historical Jesus searchers, Jesus’ resurrection is a stumbling block for Aslan. He writes, “Then something extraordinary happened. What exactly that something was is impossible to know. Jesus’ resurrection is an exceedingly difficult topic for the historian to discuss, not least because it falls beyond the scope of any examination of the historical Jesus. Obviously, the notion of a man dying a gruesome death and returning to life three days late defies all logic, reason, and sense. One could simply drop the argument there, dismiss the resurrection as a lie, and declare belief in the risen Jesus to be the product of a deluded mind.” (p. 174)

Aslan acknowledges that Christian belief in Jesus’ resurrection was very early and the early Christians were persecuted for their belief so there must be something to it (p. 174-175). However, he writes,

“Nevertheless, the fact remains that the resurrection is not a historical event. It may have historical ripples, but the event itself falls outside the scope of history and into the realm of faith.” (p. 176)

So “something extraordinary happened” (p. 174), but it was “not a historical event.” (p. 176) Huh?

To say that the resurrection is “not a historical event” does not mean that it did not happen. Rather, Aslan has a worldview which does not accept that a historical event could have a supernatural cause. When he says belief in the resurrection “defies all logic, reason, and sense” (p. 174), this is because it conflicts with is worldview which does not allow for the possibility that God could raise someone from the dead. There is no law of history which says that an event cannot have a supernatural cause. Many historians do believe an event could have a supernatural cause. It has to do with the historian’s worldview, rather than what the historical evidence suggests happened.

Aslan and other historians only make this argument because they cannot explain the resurrection by appealing to natural historical causes. If it were obvious from reading between the lines in the Gospels that the disciples must have stolen Jesus’ body, they would not be saying that the resurrection “falls outside the scope of history” (p. 176). They would say that the cause of Christian belief in the resurrection was that the disciples stole the body. However, these explanations do not make sense. If the disciples stole the body, they would have probably recanted when they were persecuted and a missing body does not explain the appearances of the resurrected Jesus. Rather than acknowledge that a supernatural explanation for the resurrection of Jesus makes the most sense, they say it was not a historical event and is outside the scope of history and in the realm of faith, which means nothing.

Aslam claims that the Gospel accounts of the resurrection were “not meant to be accounts of historical events; they are carefully crafted rebuttals to an argument that is taking place offscreen.” (p. 177) For example, Jesus could not have been a ghost or an incorporeal spirit because he ate food and could be touched and the disciples could not have stolen the body because there were guards (p. 177).

This is an anachronistic argument. Just because modern Christians use the resurrection accounts to argue that Jesus rose from the dead, does not mean that the Gospel made up these accounts to argue that Jesus rose from the dead. It does not explain where this belief came from in the first place, and Aslan admits he cannot explain it, he just does not believe it.

If Luke and John wanted to show that Jesus had a physical body and was not a spirit, they would not have said that he just appeared in the room, which is not the thing a physical body would do (Luke 24:36, John 20:26). They also said that Mary Magdalene and some disciples did not recognize the risen Jesus (Luke 24:16, John 20;15). Matthew says that some doubted when they saw Jesus (Matthew 28:17). The Gospel writers would not make up stories like this if they were trying to prove Jesus physically rose from the dead, since they could be used to argue against it.

Furthermore, the first witnesses to the resurrection were women. In the ancient world women were usually not regarded as being credible witnesses, as good as men. If the Gospel were going to make up the resurrection story, they would not say the first witnesses were women, because they would not be taken seriously. Celsus, a second century pagan critic of Christianity, did just this and ridiculed the resurrection story because the witnesses were women (Origen, Contra Celsum, 2:55). If the Gospel were going to risk saying the witnesses were women, then it must have happened that way.

Aslan writes that Jesus did not fulfil the requirements to be the Messiah, the Jews had not been liberated from the Romans, so the early Christians went through the Jewish Bible to formulate a new version of the Messiah who suffered and died (p. 166). This is implausible if Aslan is right and the apostles could not read (p. 171). There were other messianic claimants who came to nasty ends. Their followers did not reinvent the idea of the Messiah after they died. None of Bar Kochba’s followers claimed that he was the Son of God after they had been defeated. They gave up and moved on. There must have been something different about Jesus, i.e., he rose from the dead.

In fact, Luke says that it was the resurrected Jesus who gave them the new understanding of the Messiah’s purpose (Luke 24:27).

Aslan claims that after the defeat of the Jewish revolt in 70 AD, the early Christians distanced themselves from the Jewish revolutionary movement and “all traces of revolutionary zeal [had] to be removed from the life of Jesus” (p. 150) and Jesus was transformed “from a fierce Jewish nationalist into a pacifistic preacher of good works whose kingdom was not of this world. ” (p. 150)

Even though all traces of revolutionary zeal were supposedly removed, Aslan still purports to find evidence of Jesus’ revolutionary zeal in the Gospels. It looks like the early Christians did not do such a good job after all. There is no historical evidence this is what happened. The New Testament and other first century Christian writings, such as the Didache or I Clement, do not warn Christians to distance themselves from the Jewish revolutionary movement. This is just speculation on Aslan’s part. He believes Jesus was a revolutionary zealot but the New Testament does not say he was, so he claims the New Testament tried to remove the evidence that he was a zealot. It borders on a conspiracy theory in which the conspiracy theorist explains that there is no evidence for his theory because the conspiracy covered it up.

Aslan claims that these changes were made to make Jesus and Christianity into “a thoroughly Romanized religion” (p. 190) which was more acceptable to Rome and the Gentiles. He writes, “This was a Jesus which the Romans could accept, and in fact did accept three centuries later when the Roman emperor Flavius Theodosius (d. 385) made the itinerant preacher’s movement the official religion of the state.” (p. xxx)

This is not supported by history. Christianity was not acceptable to the pagan Romans. The Christians believed Jesus was the only God so they refused to sacrifice to the pagan gods. The pagans believed their refusal dishonoured the gods and risked brining their punishment down on the whole society. hey persecuted the Christians and threatened to kill them if they refused to sacrifice to to their gods. If the Christians had said that Jesus was only a man and not the only way to reach God, they would not have been persecuted. If they wanted to make Jesus more acceptable to the pagan Gentiles, making him the Son of the only true God was the worst thing they could have done.

I found Aslan’s hypothesis somewhat inconsistent as he also writes that Jesus’ supposed transformation began before 70 AD. He believes that the apostles were illiterate, so educated Greek-speaking Jews from the Diaspora “gradually transformed Jesus from a revolutionary zealot to a Romanized demigod, from a man who tried and failed to free the Jews from Roman oppression to a celestial being uninterested in earthly matters.” (p. 171)

However, Jews living in the Diaspora outside Israel were still Jews. They resisted paganism. They still had a Jewish worldview and believed in the one true God. they did not believe in the pagan demigods. Why would they compromise their beliefs and turn Jesus into one?

The words of Jesus in the Gospels were written in Greek, but they were not made up by Greek-speaking Christians or Jews. If we translate Jesus’ words, which were written in Greek in the Synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, back into Aramaic which Jesus spoke, as much as 80% of it is poetic or rhythmic (Craig Keener, The Historical Jesus of the Gospels, Eerdmans, Michigan, 2009, p. 158). The words of Jesus were not made up by later Greek-speaking Christians. They are Greek translations of the original Aramaic which Jesus spoke.

Aslan writes that Paul “displays an extraordinary lack of interest in the historical Jesus” (p, xxvi) and “had no idea who the living Jesus was, nor did he care.” (p. 187) This is the logical fallacy of the argument from silence. Paul’s letters do not a lot of biographical information about Jesus, but that does not mean he did not know or was not interested. He was writing theology, not biography. Paul could have known more about the life of Jesus than Luke. He just did not mention it.

On the other hand, Paul, Follower of Jesus or Founder of Christianity by David Wenham shows that Paul knew quite a bit about the historical Jesus and his teachings.

Aslan says that after the Apostolic Council meeting in Jerusalem around 50 AD, Jesus’ brother James “Began sending his own missionaries to Paul’s congregations in Galatia, Corinth, Philippi, and most other places where Paul had built a following, in order to correct Paul’s unorthodox teachings about Jesus.” (p. 192) As Aslan has mentioned (pp. 186, 191-192), the tension between Paul and James was over whether or not Gentile Christians had to sill follow the Law of Moses (Acts 15, Galatians 1-2). There is nothing to suggest, apart from Alsan’s imagination, that they disagreed over who Jesus was.

James was the leader of the Jerusalem church. He was not a follower of Jesus before his crucifixion (John 7:5). He probably regarded Jesus as an embarrassment to his family. Jesus appeared to James after his resurrection ( 1 Corinthians 15:7). As a result of this encounter, James apparently changed his mind about Jesus and joined the early church. If Jesus did not appear to James, there is no reason why he would have joined the church. Aslan gets around this by simply denying the evidence and saying James was always a follower (p 94).

Aslan describes James as “a zealous devotee of the law” (p. 198) and “a faithful follower of Jesus” (p. 198) and “the living link to the messiah” (p. 197). James was apparently the true follower of Jesus with correct understanding of his teachings, in contrast to Paul and the Gentile Christians. Aslan appears to be contradicting himself because he does not portray James as a revolutionary zealot like Jesus was supposed to have been. He got along with the Jewish authorities (p. 187). The Romans did not crucify James because even in the heightened tension of the 50s and 60s, the Romans did not consider the supposed true follower and successor of Jesus to be a political threat.

As I mentioned in Part One, Aslan is now a moderate Muslim. His version of Jesus, a religious zealot who believes he is God’s messenger and is prepared to resort to violence to achieve his religious goals, reminds me of Muhammed, founder of Islam. Aslan writes, “The great Christian theologian Rudolf Bultmann liked to say that the quest for the historical Jesus is ultimately an internal quest. Scholars tend to see the Jesus they want to see. Too often they see themselves – their own reflection – in the image of Jesus the have constructed.” (p. xxxi) I do not now if Bultmann said it or not, but Albert Schweitzer said much the same thing before Bultmann (Albert Schweitzer, The Quest for the Historical Jesus, A.C. Black, London, 1910, p 4). (Of course, it is not just scholars who do this. Many evangelical Christians are guilty of remaking Jesus into their own image as a defender of conservative middle class family values.) In spite of what he has written, Aslan also writes, “I was drawn to him” (p. xix), the version of the historical Jesus which he has come up with. This suggests that he is making the same mistake which he warned against and by his own criteria, his conclusions about Jesus are dubious.