I am indebted to my friend Neil Shenvi for this info
Introduction
Modern critical scholars –such as the participants of the widely known Jesus Seminar- assume that only a small fraction of the New Testament is historical and that the majority of the material is either fictional or only loosely based on historical facts. To determine what material is historical, they use three major criteria 1) the criterion of multiple attestation 2) the criterion of embarrassment 3) the criterion of dissimilarity. If a saying or action recorded in the New Testament gospels meets one or more of these criteria, it is considered more likely –though by no means certain- that this material is historical. Obviously, as an evangelical Christian, I believe that there are serious flaws in the assumptions made by these scholars. But as we will see below, the Resurrection accounts meet all three of these major criteria of historicity.
a) The criterion of multiple attestation – scholars assume that incidents which are recorded in more than one independent source are more likely to be authentic. The Resurrection clearly meets the criterion of multiple attestation. In fact, I don’t know if there is any other event in the New Testament attested by more sources. Mark (Mark 16), John (John 20) and Paul’s epistles (1 Cor. 15:1-8) all give independent accounts of the Resurrection. In addition, Matthew (Matt. 28) and Luke (Luke 24) – which are both believed to rely on Mark’s gospel as a source- provide details in their accounts of the Resurrection that appear to be independent of Mark’s account. Hence, we potentially have five independent accounts of the Resurrection within the New Testament. Given that scholars accept attestation by even two independent sources as an indication of historicity, the Resurrection clearly satisfies this criterion.
b) The criterion of embarrassment – scholars assume that incidents which would have created embarrassment or difficulty for the early church are more likely to be authentic . To see how this criteria is applied to the Resurrection, we need to consider that in all the gospel accounts, the first witnesses of the Resurrection are women (see Mark 16:1-3 which scholars believe is the earliest gospel account written). Although this fact does not seem particularly surprising to modern readers, we should remember that women in the ancient world were accorded such low status that their testimony was not valid in a court of law. Hence, there must have been tremendous pressure on the early church to alter the Resurrection accounts to make Peter or one of the other prominent male disciples the first witnesses of the Resurrection. The fact that all the accounts preserve the discovery by female disciples is most plausibly explained by the hypothesis that the gospel writers did not feel at liberty to tamper with the historical record.
c) The criterion of dissimilarity – scholars assume that if sayings or events in the gospels are incongruous with Jewish, Christian, or pagan beliefs, they are more likely to be authentic. In this case, we run into a problem since the Resurrection could not possibly be incongruous with Christian beliefs; in fact, the earlier Christians held that this event was the cornerstone of all Christian belief! However, it is interesting to consider how a belief in the bodily Resurrection of Jesus would have been viewed by either Jewish or pagan (Greek) society. The Jews believed in a general resurrection of all people at the end of time (as Christians still do today), but the idea that a single individual could be Resurrected in the middle of history would have been preposterous.
In fact, in the decades before and after Jesus there were many people who claimed to be the Messiah, who gathered large followings, and who were eventually captured and killed by the Romans. In no other case did the followers of these figures ever claim that their leader had been Resurrected. Such a belief would have been bizarre and unbelievable to contemporary Jewish ears. Similarly, the bodily Resurrection of Jesus would have been repugnant to Greeks, who believed that matter was evil. The idea of a spiritually “resurrected” god may have been plausible; indeed, later Gnostic beliefs expunged the distasteful idea of a physical resurrection. But a physical Resurrection would have been both implausible and unpalatable to Greeks.
In this sense, the Christian doctrine of the bodily Resurrection of Jesus appears to have no antecedents in either Jewish or Greek culture and therefore meets the criteria of dissimilarity (see N.T. Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God, Chapters 2-4 for a discussion of the pagan and Jewish concepts of the soul, the afterlife, and the possibility of resurrection).
As seen above, these criteria corroborate- although they do not prove- the historicity of the Resurrection accounts. To argue that the accounts are complete fabrications, one would have to answer the following questions: 1) why do we have five independent accounts of a fictitious event? One could deny these sources are independent and argue that a single, extremely early account (prior to Paul’s letters in 50-60 A.D.) was elaborated and modified by five different authors; however, in no other case do scholars believe there is such a single source to which all the evangelists and Paul had access. Why would we hypothesize such a source only in this case? 2) why do all four gospel accounts record women discovering the empty tomb? This fact would have been incredibly embarrassing to the early church. If the accounts were complete fabrications, why did the authors not advance Peter or John as the first witnesses? 3) where did the idea of a bodily Resurrection come from? No other crucified Jewish messianic figure was ever claimed to have been bodily Resurrected. Such a claim would also have been a major stumbling block to the Greeks that the apostles were trying to evangelize (see the incredulous Athenians response to Paul in Acts 17 quoted at the beginning of this essay).
Pagan myths of gods dying and rising in some spiritual realm (to mark the advent of Spring, for instance) were not equivalent to the bold assertion that a Jew from Nazareth physically rose from the dead with nail marks in his hand and ate fish with his disciples. If the Resurrection was invented to attract converts, why invent such an implausible, distasteful story? In my opinion, dismissing the accounts as complete fabrications is hard to square with the evidence. Instead, many critics who reject the Resurrection still believe that the accounts preserve certain historical elements such as the discovery of an empty tomb by women and the disciples’ belief that they had seen Jesus.
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