Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Questions on Proving the Resurrection and Sundry Other Things Answered by Bart D. Ehrman Read by John Paul Middlesworth Readers have given me some tough nuts to crack problems with proving the resurrection and with knowing if books of the New Testament may have been scissored and pasted together. Here are some intriguing and important questions I've received with my attempts to answer them.
[00:00:23] Question When I first began to read Bart's blog, he was just pointing out textual errors.
[00:00:29] Now it seems he is trying to destroy Christianity. Christianity lives or dies by the resurrection. That is our hope. Without the resurrection of Jesus Christ, we have no hope.
[00:00:40] In those days, history and events were passed down verbally and by the written word. What was the incentive to pass down a bunch of hoaxes? I can't think of any. Maybe some of the readers can.
[00:00:53] I'm afraid you misunderstand me. I'm not saying Jesus was or was not raised from the dead.
[00:00:59] I'm saying that the Christian claim that he was raised from the dead is a matter of faith, not historical demonstration.
[00:01:06] That's very different from trying to disprove the resurrection. I firmly believe that it cannot be proved, but the necessary corollary of that is that it cannot be disproved. And I have never said that the claim that Jesus was raised from the dead was a hoax.
[00:01:22] Question in your scholarly opinion, how should we see the fact that an author is saying they read something one of the disciples wrote relative to its historical accuracy?
[00:01:33] Does it give the author any authority because he has direct chain of transmission response? If someone claims to have based a story about Jesus on what he read from an eyewitness, that would not mean that his or her story was historically accurate. The author may have gotten the story mixed up when rewriting it, or he or she may have misheard it, or the eyewitness may have misheard, mistaken, misrepresented it.
[00:01:59] Or the author may have made up the claim, or there are other authors.
[00:02:04] It certainly does not mean the story actually happened. It would mean you would need to investigate it closely to see if the claim was likely to be true, and if so, whether the story was likely to be true, etc. If you see what I mean.
[00:02:19] I'm fascinated by your view that someone might have redacted Philippians and Corinthians, deliberately removing portions of the letters and combining them rather than preserving them entirely. Isn't it more likely that whoever collected them edited what by that time were only surviving fragments of the original letters? Wouldn't they have seen some relationship between the fragments of the Corinthian correspondence, for example, and assembled them the best they could.
[00:02:43] Then they were copied together and eventually considered one single text rather than a collection of separate texts.
[00:02:49] You don't think that scenario makes more sense of what remains than someone had separate complete letters and decided to cut them up and combine them?
[00:02:57] Please correct me if I misunderstood your position. Thanks.
[00:03:02] One difficulty with that scenario involves what we know about fragments of ancient documents, of which we have millions. They almost never end or begin at a convenient place, for example right at the end or the beginning of a paragraph, but usually in mid word, mid sentence. But that's not what we have with the fragments that make up Philippians and 2 Corinthians.
[00:03:23] Another difficulty is that fragments are almost always the result of extensive use over many decades, or from erosion, worms, etc. The portions of Philippians and 2 Corinthians we have would have been in circulation for a while, but certainly not for many decades. If they had for some reason started suffering some wear and tear and someone in the church that wanted to preserve them was afraid they were getting tattered, they would simply have recopied them.
[00:03:49] The kinds of editing activities I've described where our surviving books are compilations of earlier texts, more or less patched together, are found in other writings, for example in the Hebrew Bible, parts of Isaiah and early Christian literature, say the Letter to Diagnatus, and elsewhere in secular literature, for example.
[00:04:09] On the whole, that's what makes it likely that this is what is going on in 2 Corinthians and possibly Philippians.
[00:04:17] This comment came from someone who objected to my view that the second law of thermodynamics is a law that cannot be broken, so far as we know, in our world. An argument against the idea that a historian working as a historian can show that resurrection of an actual corpse is historically probable.
[00:04:37] It's not necessarily the case that thermodynamics means that entropy always moves only in one direction.
[00:04:43] It's true that a shattered cup wouldn't come back together by itself, but thermodynamics per se doesn't prevent someone from putting it back together. That is, it would not prevent a reversal from disorder to order in a localized system. It only says that global disorder is ever increasing overall.
[00:05:01] So a resurrection in the sense of putting the structure and memories of an overall state of the brain back together, not to mention the physical restructuring, would require an overwhelmingly powerful outside presence. Doing is just incompatible with known biology, but not necessarily with thermodynamics, according to me.
[00:05:23] Yep, that's right, and pretty much my point it needs agency. The second law is not that entropy can never be decreased, it is that it cannot be decreased in a closed system without intervention. With cups, human agency works just fine for the intervention, although the cup is still not the same as it was. It happens all the time, but it never happens for dead humans. That would take non human agency. So to say it's possible would be to say it requires a superhuman force. But then it's a tautology, because then we'd simply be saying that a force that transcends laws of nature is not bound by the laws of nature.
[00:06:02] If you presuppose there is a God active in the world, there is no reason to question whether a miracle could have happened. But that presupposition is theological, not one available to the scientist observing what happens in the world or the historian doing history.
[00:06:19] I've been seeing John the Baptizer lately instead of John the Baptist. Why the change?
[00:06:25] Perhaps because John the Baptist could be interpreted as John who attends the First Baptist church.
[00:06:32] Ha. It's because the Greek of our earliest reference, Mark 1:4 and elsewhere, uses a participle to describe him rather than a noun. Literally, John the one who baptizes elsewhere. For example, in Matthew 3:1, the noun is used to modify the name John the Baptist.
