Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] A Legal Case for Jesus Resurrection Written by Bart Ehrman Read by Ken Teutoich I wasn't sure what to expect when I was going into the debate on Jesus Resurrection with Jonathan Sheffield last week, March 2. You can see it on YouTube. I suspected that since he works in the legal field, I'm not sure in what capacity. He would probably be mounting a kind of court case marshaling proof that Jesus had been raised from the dead that would be compelling to a fair minded jury today.
[00:00:35] I was completely wrong about that. As I indicated in my previous post, Jonathan went a different and rather unexpected direction. But because I suspected a legal approach, it did make me think in legal terms about the evidence that apologists often produce to demonstrate the truth of the resurrection on purely historical, not religious or theological grounds.
[00:00:59] I don't think I've ever thought about it that way before, and it was interesting to give it a try. In my head I came up with a comparable hypothetical modern legal case, thinking Jonathan would be appealing to modern legal standards of proof to reflect on what a jury would decide based on the kinds of evidence apologists use for Jesus. Let me repeat, this is a hypothetical and analogous case, not strictly the same as the case of Jesus.
[00:01:27] The names have been changed to protect the innocent Suppose there was a Baptist preacher named Jesse Christensen who was murdered in Jersey City in 1930 by a close friend and member of the board of elders at his church named Jude Priestley.
[00:01:44] There wasn't much ambiguity about the case. The murder happened in public, in broad daylight with eyewitnesses present, and Priestley was quickly convicted of his crime.
[00:01:53] But before he served any jail time, he hanged himself.
[00:01:58] Many years later, Priestley's descendants pushed for a retrial to have him exonerated for the crime. They acknowledged that there had been a public confrontation between him and Jesse in which he killed his pastor, and that there was an actual funeral. The funeral director was Joe Armitage, but they had proof that Jesse came back to life he soon afterward. That would be adequate grounds for dismissing the case and exonerating their relative. Priestley could not be convicted for taking the life of a man who was later known still to be living.
[00:02:33] In court, their lawyers argued that Jesse was known to be alive. After his funeral, they acknowledged he really had been buried, but he returned to life.
[00:02:43] Their principal piece of evidence was a letter from someone named Paul, no last name provided, written in 1955, so 25 years after the murder, who claimed he had seen Jesse face to face in 1933 and had exchanged a few words with Him. The letter itself was presented as evidence to the court. As the facts came to light in the cross examination, it turned out this Paul had never met Jesse when he was alive, had never seen him before this one encounter, and had never seen a photo of him. Paul himself was not from Jersey City and in fact was not an American. He was from Turkey, and his alleged brief encounter with Jesse had taken place on a trip in Syria. But in this letter, Paul swore that he had seen him 25 years earlier, just three years after Jesse's funeral, Jesse identified himself to him.
[00:03:36] From a legal perspective, would that be enough evidence to prove that Jesse had returned to life so that Priestley could not be found guilty of murder, technically not having ended his life because Paul said he saw him?
[00:03:52] Probably not, but the family's attorneys had corroborating evidence. There were three anonymous accounts written by different authors in 1970, 1985 and 1996, known to have been circulating around different parts of Europe. All of them indicating that a few days after Jesse's funeral, some of his women friends, it's unclear how many, had gone to lay flowers on his grave. But when they arrived, they found it dug up with the coffin lying on the ground open. It had been pried open and was empty. A stranger or two approached the women to tell them that Jesse had come back to life and would meet them and others of his friends up in New Hampshire. These friends themselves said they had seen Jesse, according to these accounts, which differed on where the meetings occurred, and talked with him before he disappeared again.
[00:04:45] A close reading of these three accounts showed that the two later ones had gotten a good deal of their information from the one written in 1970, copied directly, but had other details added and a number of details changed as a result. The accounts were contradictory in numerous facts. How many women had gone to the grave, what their names were, what the state of the grave was, how many strangers spoke to them, what they were told, and whether they actually informed the other friends or not, whether they went to New Hampshire or not. In one of the accounts, Jesse met up with them in Jersey City, and so on.
[00:05:21] The family's lawyers could not produce either the women or the other friends as witnesses. Presumably, they had all died. They, the women and friends of Jesse had not written anything to corroborate these later anonymous accounts about what they allegedly said and did.
[00:05:37] No living person on record had ever met with the women to talk to them about it or with Paul from Turkey.
[00:05:44] There were no other independent records of the event. And finally, neither the family nor anyone else knew which cemetery it was.
[00:05:53] With this evidence, would a jury decide that? Yes. Jesse must have come back from the dead. Would they overturn the conviction and exonerate Priestley?
[00:06:03] I'd be happy to hear your views.
