Gunning for God (34 page)

If it wasn’t tomb-robbers, then, who could it have been? Perhaps misguided followers of Jesus, trying to get the body away from under the noses of the authorities to a safer place? But if they had done that, they would not have kept it secret from the other apostles. They would have reburied him reverently (as Mary was intending to do)
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, and eventually all the Christians would have come to know where his tomb was. In any case, we are still left with the noisy problem of rolling away the stone within earshot of the guard.

The way in which the grave-cloths were lying convinced John that something supernatural had happened. We can imagine him thinking it through. So, could someone have taken the body and rewound the cloths deliberately to give the impression that a miracle had happened? But who could this have been? It was morally impossible for the followers of Christ to have done it. It was also psychologically impossible, since they were not expecting a resurrection. And it was practically impossible, because of the guards.

Finally, it would be absurd to think of the authorities doing anything remotely suggestive of a resurrection. After all, it was they who had ensured that the tomb was guarded, to avoid anything like that!

For John and Peter, it was an electrifying discovery. They had ruled out impossible explanations, so they were left with only one alternative: that the body had come through the grave-cloths. But what did that mean? And where was Jesus now?

Well-known historian Michael Grant of Edinburgh University writes: “True, the discovery of the empty tomb is differently described by the various Gospels, but if we apply the same sort of criteria that we would apply to any other ancient literary sources, then the evidence is firm and plausible enough to necessitate the conclusion that the tomb was, indeed, found empty.”
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So Peter and John left the empty tomb. They thought there was nothing more to be gained by remaining there. However, as events proved, they were wrong.

IV. THE EYEWITNESSES

The empty tomb is important: if it were not empty, you could not speak of resurrection. But we need to be clear that the early Christians did not simply assert that the tomb was empty. Far more important for them was the fact that subsequently they had met the risen Christ, intermittently over a period of forty days culminating in his ascension.
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They had actually seen him, talked with him, touched him and even eaten with him. It was nothing less than this that galvanized them into action, and gave them the courage to confront the world with the message of the Christian gospel. And what is more, when the apostles began to preach the gospel publicly, the fact that they had personally witnessed these appearances of the risen Christ formed an integral part of that gospel. The evidence for this is so strong that even atheist scholar Gerd Lüdemann writes: “It may be taken as historically certain that Peter and the disciples had experiences after Jesus’ death in which Jesus appeared to them as the risen Christ.”
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Not surprisingly, Lüdemann’s atheism forbids a resurrection as the cause. He holds that the appearances were visions — a view that turns out to be highly improbable as we shall see below.

First, let us look at the documentary record:

Peter in Jerusalem (1):
On the day of Pentecost, at the first public announcement of the resurrection of Jesus in Jerusalem, Peter says: “This Jesus God raised up, and of that we all are witnesses.”
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Peter in Jerusalem (2):
Shortly after Pentecost, in the second major speech recorded by Luke, Peter says: “You killed the Author of life, whom God raised from the dead. To this we are witnesses.”
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Peter in Caesarea:
In the first major announcement of the Christian message to non-Jews, Peter says to Cornelius, the Roman centurion, that he and others “ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead”.
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Paul at Pisidian Antioch:
In a major speech in a synagogue, Paul says of Christ: “They took him down from the tree and laid him in a tomb. But God raised him from the dead, and for many days he appeared to those who had come up with him from Galilee to Jerusalem, who are now his witnesses to the people.”
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When Paul eventually came to write down a brief, but definitive, statement of the gospel, he included a selection of Christ’s appearances to various witnesses as an essential part of that statement:

Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel… that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then… to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then… to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all… he appeared also to me.
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Hume’s criteria for witnesses

As we saw in the last chapter, Hume lists several criteria that he regards as important for assessing the strength of evidence for an alleged event, particularly the number and character of the witnesses, and the way in which they deliver their testimony. In that chapter, in response to Hume, we thought about the character and integrity of the apostles as witnesses; now we shall look at other aspects.

Criterion 1. The number and variety of witnesses

According to Paul’s list in 1 Corinthians 15 there were originally well over 500 people who at different times saw the risen Christ during the forty days between his resurrection and ascension. Twenty years later, in the mid-fifties
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when Paul was writing 1 Corinthians, more than half of them were still alive, and presumably, if need be, available for questioning. There was no shortage then of eyewitnesses to the resurrection during the early phase of the growth of the Christian church.

But it is not only the number of eyewitnesses who actually saw the risen Christ that is significant. It is also the widely divergent character of those eyewitnesses, and the different places and situations in which Christ appeared to them. For instance, some were in a group of eleven in a room, one was by herself in a garden, a group of fishermen were by the sea, two were travelling along a road, others on a mountain. It is this variety of character and place that refutes the so-called hallucination theories.

The inadequacy of hallucination theories

Lüdemann and others suggest that the so-called resurrection “appearances” were actually psychological occurrences, like visions or hallucinations: the disciples “saw” something, but it was not objectively real, rather something going on inside their minds. However, psychological medicine itself witnesses against this explanation.

1. Hallucinations usually occur to people of a certain temperament, with a vivid imagination. The disciples were of very different temperaments: Matthew was a hard-headed, shrewd tax-collector; Peter and some of the others, tough fishermen; Thomas, a born sceptic; and so on. They were not the sort of people one normally associates with susceptibility to hallucinations.
   
2. Hallucinations tend to be of expected events. Philosopher William Lane Craig points out: “Since a hallucination is just a projection of the mind, it cannot contain anything that is not already in the mind.”
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   But none of the disciples was expecting to meet Jesus again. The expectation of Jesus’ resurrection was not in their minds at all. Instead, there was fear, doubt, and uncertainty — exactly the wrong psychological preconditions for a hallucination.
   
3. Hallucinations usually recur over a relatively long period, either increasing or decreasing. But the appearances of Christ occurred frequently, over a period of forty days, and then abruptly ceased. None of those first disciples ever claimed a similar experience again. The only exceptions were Stephen and Paul. Stephen, the first Christian martyr, in the moments before he was stoned to death, exclaimed: “Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.”
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   Paul records having met the risen Christ once, and that he was the last to do so.
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   This pattern is not consistent, therefore, with hallucinatory experiences.
   
4. It is difficult to imagine that the 500 people who saw him at once
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   were suffering from collective hallucination. Indeed, Gary Sibcy, a clinical psychologist, comments:
   

I have surveyed the professional literature… written by psychologists, psychiatrists and other relevant health care professionals over the past two decades and have yet to find a single documented case of a group hallucination, that is, an event in which more than one person purportedly shared in a visual or other sensory perception where there was clearly no external referent.
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5. Hallucinations would not have led to belief in the resurrection. Hallucination theories are severely limited in their explanatory scope: they only attempt to explain the appearances. They clearly do not account for the empty tomb — no matter how many hallucinations the disciples had, they could never have preached the resurrection in Jerusalem, if the nearby tomb had not been empty!

C. S. Lewis makes a characteristically perceptive remark on the topic: “Any theory of hallucination breaks down on the fact (and if it is an invention it is the oddest invention that ever entered the mind of man) that on three separate occasions this hallucination was not immediately recognized as Jesus (Luke 24:13—31; John 20:15; 21:4).”
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Criterion 2. The consistency of the testimony

If several witnesses to an event make statements in court that agree in every detail, word-for-word, any judge would be likely to deduce that the testimonies were not independent; and, worse still, that there had possibly been collusion to mislead the court. On the other hand, testimonies of independent witnesses, which were hopelessly in disagreement on all the main points, would be of no use to a court either. What is looked for in independent testimonies is agreement on all the main facts, with just that amount of difference which can be accounted for by different perspectives, etc. There may even be what appear to be minor discrepancies or inconsistencies in the secondary details, which can either be harmonized with one another in a natural way, when more background information is available, or else must be left hanging for the time being, in the hope that further information will clear them up; but which are of such a nature that none of the primary details is affected.

Historians proceed in a similar way to lawyers. No historian would dismiss multiple versions of an event, just because there were discrepancies in the secondary details. Indeed, that is true even if some of the details are irreconcilable; as is the case, for example, with the two versions of Hannibal’s journey across the Alps to attack Rome. Although they differ in many details, no scholar doubts the truth of the core-story — that Hannibal did indeed cross the Alps in his campaign against Rome.

When we apply these criteria to the records of the resurrection, we find that the Gospel narratives have the same primary details. There is a clear core-story: Joseph of Arimathea puts the body of Jesus in his tomb; a small group, or groups, of women-disciples visit the tomb early on the first day of the week, and find the tomb to be empty. They, and the apostles, subsequently meet Jesus on a number of occasions.

In the secondary details there are some apparent discrepancies. For example, Matthew says that Mary Magdalene came to the tomb at dawn;
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whereas John says, “while it was still dark” Mary went to the tomb.
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Such statements are easily harmonized: Mary may well have set out while it was still dark, and got to the tomb as dawn broke.

In addition, in any attempt at a detailed reconstruction of events, it is important to be aware, as we pointed out above, that there were different groups of women associated with the death and resurrection of Christ. The group consisting of Mary Magdalene, the “other Mary”, and Salome arrived at the tomb first. On approaching the tomb they saw the tomb opened, and Mary ran back into the city to tell Peter and John. While she was gone, Joanna (and possibly Susanna), who had set out from the Hasmonean Palace, arrived by a different route. They would have come through a different gate of the city, and so they did not meet Mary Magdalene. The four women now went into the tomb, where they are told to go back into the city and tell the disciples. As there are many routes through the narrow streets of Jerusalem, they did not meet Peter and John running towards the tomb, followed by Mary Magdalene. On arriving at the tomb John and Peter saw the evidence of the grave-clothes that indicated to them that Jesus had risen. They left the tomb. Mary Magdalene lingered, and it was at this point that she saw Jesus.
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She then returned to the others at the house in Jerusalem.

Now the women had been told to tell the disciples. So far, only two of them knew - John and Peter. The other nine, who had presumably spent the night in Bethany, had to be told. At this point, Wenham argues, a group of women (probably including “the other” Mary and Salome) set out for Bethany, and on the way they too met Jesus.
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