A New Proof of the Resurrection. What Do YOU Think?

[00:00:01] A new proof of the Resurrection. What do you think? [00:00:06] Written by Bart Ehrman, read by Ken Teutsch. [00:00:11] Last night, March 2nd, I did a two and a half hour debate on whether Jesus was raised from the dead with Jonathan Sheffield, who is not a scholar but a self professed Anglican autodidact. He works in some kind of legal field, but I don't believe he's a lawyer. He debates a lot of people. Someone provides funding for it, I suppose, Mark Goodacre, Richard Carrier and others. I debated him some months ago on whether Matthew, Mark, Luke and John actually wrote the Gospels. You can find the debate on YouTube. You can find last night's as well. I'm afraid that I was a bit forceful at times and I hope he didn't find me somewhat belligerent or rude, but. Well, I can see why he might have. He's a good guy and we have some laughs together. But I don't find his argument convincing. But it certainly was unusual. [00:01:02] I'd never heard that one before. It took me about 15 minutes before I understood what it was. [00:01:08] Here I'll describe it. I'd love to know what you make of it and how you yourself would respond. If you listen to the debate, maybe do it after you think the issue over first. And if you do listen to it and think I'm misrepresenting the argument here, let me and everyone else know. [00:01:26] The question we were asking was the historical one. Is there compelling historical evidence to show that Jesus really came back from the dead? [00:01:35] The line I took in my opening remarks was nothing unusual, pretty much what I've said for years. Historians can only establish what most likely happened in the past based on the material and literary evidence we have. We don't have any material evidence for the resurrection, but we do have early Christian accounts, comments of Paul, and the narratives of the Gospels. We have later Christian accounts too, but they are all dependent on one way or another, these canonical versions. [00:02:06] Regrettably, these canonical accounts came out many years, decades after the events described and are written by people who were not there, who lived in different parts of the world and did not speak Aramaic. They based their stories on oral reports that had been in circulation for all that time, principally among people who lived in different places and spoke different languages. The New Testament accounts, of course, are not disinterested. The authors are deeply committed to the belief that Jesus was raised, and even though they agree with much of the gist of the story, they contradict each other repeatedly in detail after detail. [00:02:45] These are not the kinds of sources that historians normally find reliable. [00:02:50] But the bigger problem is that to say that the historical evidence shows Jesus was probably raised from the dead means all other historical explanations are less probable. Is that really the case not for belief, but for straight up regular old historical investigation? [00:03:08] Is a one time act of God more probable than the possibility that people made up parts of the stories? Or that other people who said they saw Jesus were mistaken? Or that rumors were started and then widely spread, exaggerated in one way or the other? [00:03:25] Just in terms of probability, is there anything inherently improbable about people making up stories, misunderstanding what they saw, repeating rumors? [00:03:36] Not really. It happens all the time. [00:03:39] On the other hand, how often does it happen that someone who is truly dead, not in a coma, etc. Is actually restored to life days later? [00:03:50] Well, of the 115 billion Homo sapiens who have lived over the past 300 millennia of our spec, if it did happen this time, it was the only time. Is that more likely than that someone like Paul mistook what he saw when he thought he saw Jesus? Or that someone who claimed to be Jesus introduced himself to Paul? Paul, of course, would have had no idea what Jesus even looked like. Or that. [00:04:16] Pick your other option. Weird things happen, yes, but weird things do happen all the time. Laws of nature do not get broken all the time. Or as a bumper sticker I once saw said with reference to highway signs, 186,000 miles per second is not a good idea. It's the law. [00:04:37] At the outset, I stated that I was not arguing Jesus was not raised from the dead. I was arguing that believing he was is a matter of faith, not of historical demonstration. If you could demonstrate it the way you could establish what happened at the last UNC Duke basketball game, for example, then it's not a matter of faith. [00:04:58] Okay, that was my position. [00:05:01] I expected Jonathan to appeal to legal proof since he's trained in something connected with the law and set up a court case scenario with the kind of evidence you'd find in a criminal procedure. Eyewitnesses, empty tomb, impact of Christianity on the world, etc. [00:05:17] Nope. His argument came right out of left field. [00:05:21] Jonathan began by arguing that Romans and Greeks were very good at exposing religious hoaxes and excesses. He cited the case of the Roman exposure and suppression of an allegedly insidious bacchanalia cult in 125 BC, as described by the historian Livy, and the exposure and attack of Alexander the False Prophet by Lucian of samosata in the 2nd century CE, etc. [00:05:49] Whenever there were wild and socially threatening Religious claims, Jonathan argued, the Greeks and Romans would dig in to reveal its fallacy, expose it and suppress it. That didn't happen with early Christianity. The Christian Church, he argued, was growing at a fantastic rate in Judea after Jesus death and burial. The Roman governor Pilate must have been concerned and he would have been required to report the problem to his emperor Tiberius. [00:06:16] More importantly, he would have been obliged to investigate the Christian claim that Jesus had been raised from the dead. For example, by checking to see if the tomb really was empty. Pilate would then also have been obliged to report his findings to the Roman Emperor. We do have indications that Pilate communicated with his Emperor about Jesus as found in Justin Martyr and Tertullian, along with a set of non canonical writings. [00:06:42] Even so, there is no indication that he had uncovered the hoax that he had shown it was false that he therefore went after the Christians. Since he must have investigated but didn't report a hoax, that must mean Pilate realized the claims were true. Jesus was raised from the dead. Moreover, since he reported his findings to Tiberius back in Rome, and since the Emperor also didn't take any further action, he too must have believed it. [00:07:09] Yet more. The Jewish historian Josephus as well as such Roman authors as Tacitus, Suetonius, Plutarch would also have felt compelled to investigate and uncover the hoax. But they too make no report on it. Their investigations must have convinced them too that the tomb was empty and that there was no hoax. If there was no hoax, as obvious from the fact that we hear of no counter demonstration, then it must have been historically true. [00:07:36] These authors all agreed Jesus really was raised from the dead. Pilate believed it, Tiberius believed it, Josephus, Suetonius, Tacitus and Plutarch believed it. It must be historical then. [00:07:49] That was the view I had to address in my rebuttal and cross examination. [00:07:54] We had two how would you respond?