chess | Evidence-for-the-Resurrection sermons, and why people don't believe them

Actually got to church this morning for once, to discover that they're running a new-years 'basics' series, which started with one of those 'historical proof that Jesus rose from the dead' sermons. If you haven't heard one, the first page of Google results for 'historical resurrection' provides plenty; I could go into it if anyone was interested, but I'm not a historian and I'm sure other people have put it a lot better than me.

I was thinking, on the way home, of reasons why people hear what seems superficially like very compelling historical evidence (on the level with or better than most historical 'facts' they would cheerfully accept) but quite reasonably go away not believing a word of it - mostly as an exercise in 'how can these kind of sermons be improved', but also as an interesting question of what actually motivates human beings and makes them believe one thing or another.

So, in no particular order, some reasons I came up with - and if you have any further information or are generally thinking 'but that's not why _I_ don't believe it', please comment and tell me where I am full of shit :).

Note that I don't believe most of these statements; I do believe in the physical Resurrection, but not really because of the 'historical evidence'. This is what I think other people are thinking - if I'm wrong, which I quite likely am, please tell me!

1) The supposedly compelling historical evidence isn't actually very compelling if you look at it closely.

From inside my little bubble of Christian thought, there is a strong meme that goes like this: everyone who seriously researches the historical basis of the Resurrection from a truth-seeking point of view - even an antagonistic, 'I want to prove this didn't happen' point of view - finds out that they actually end up proving that it must have happened, and usually end up converting to Christianity.

I don't know if this meme is true or not; I don't have the intellectual tools (or the time and inclination, to be honest) to do a comparative study of academics who researched the historical basis of the Resurrection, see whether they ended up saying they believed in it, whether they converted, and whether they had any pre-existing beliefs that prevented them from being honest in their truth-seeking.

I mean, I know people have written books about stuff like the theory that Jesus didn't die on the cross and instead revived in the tomb and went to India or something, so I know some people _have_ looked into it and come to some other conclusion. But I don't know how rigorous and free of prior bias their work was - I haven't studied history and have no way of objectively judging good scholarship from biased nonsense in that field.

It's possible some of these people are just as good historians as the people who decided they'd found excellent proof for the historical resurrection; it's possible that the only reason I have the 'information' in my head that all serious studies have led to (historical-standard) proof is that I've been primarily fed from biased sources. If anyone has any information on this - especially comparative studies or well-researched pieces that argue against the historical resurrection - please point me at them so I can update my knowledge from less biased sources :).

2) I don't accept the 'historical' standard of evidence for things that I might actually have to care about if they were true.

I know I have a lot of scientists and engineers among my friends, and to someone who is used to mathematical proofs and experimental evidence, standards of 'proof' that are accepted in the field of history are generally pretty weak. So even if there was a compelling historical case for 'Jesus appeared to people acting very much like he was alive after he had been very much confirmed to be dead', it wouldn't necessarily meet the standard of proof that they would accept.

After all, most 'historical facts' just aren't that important to most people; it's one thing to accept that someone lived here and said these things and died there, it's another thing to accept that someone went around exhibiting signs of life after being very dead, without a plausible biological mechanism. And many things which are widely accepted as 'historical fact' on the same amount of evidence are almost as widely known to be simplifications or subsequently proven to be just outright false.

The 'Jesus was revived after crucifixion and didn't actually die there' meme seems to come out of this - there is a more plausible biological mechanism for 'people who didn't know much medicine thought he was dead then he wasn't' than 'he was actually dead and then he wasn't', and otherwise it seems to fit the most widespread historical facts (Jesus got crucified, there was a widespread resurrection story believed fervently by people who knew Jesus and saw something they were very convinced was Jesus alive again, the authorities couldn't produce the body).

Again, I don't know enough biology to definitively state that it was impossible that Jesus didn't die of the crucifixion process - people have made compelling-sounding arguments (including this morning) that after being beaten and stabbed and hung on a cross for a bit he was in no shape to go around looking healthy while the resurrection appearances were going on, but I lack actual reliable evidence sources here.

The usual follow-on argument is 'if he _was_ revived rather than resurrected, he would have needed some help; and the help would have had to be a) very competent and b) none of the disciples or their confidantes, because those guys went on to die for their belief in his resurrection and that isn't something people generally do for a lie they know is a lie'. It's often brought out in these sermons (it was this morning) and unfortunately it again is only superficially compelling - it doesn't seem that implausible to me to posit a bunch of other people whose names history has forgotten who did the 'inner circle' work and orchestrated the birth of the religion.

3) I don't actually care whether Jesus was resurrected historically or not. Unexplained stuff happens all the time. It doesn't affect my life or mean the rest of Christianity is true.

There was a kind of coda on the end of the sermon which hung a lampshade on this point - that it's entirely consistent to say, 'so, okay, it looks like something scientifically unexplained happened and the easiest explanation for the historical facts is that Jesus was dead and then he got up and had breakfast with his mates; but that doesn't mean he was God, or that God exists or is anything like what it says in the Bible, or any of that'.

Unexplained phenomena happen; people are 'miraculously' healed, as in the doctors don't understand what fixed them, on a regular basis, for instance. Many of those cases are likely to turn out to be something we just didn't understand about the human body yet. People are very sure that all kinds of non-Christian supernatural forces exist, for all kinds of reasons.

Even if the historical Jesus did rise from the dead, this doesn't somehow magically prove the rest of Christianity; it could have been some other force entirely, or a fluke of nature we don't have the context to understand, or a carefully planned episode from an inner circle who didn't leave their footprints in history and didn't face sufficient consequences for their beliefs to recant sufficiently loudly to derail the whole thing.

So it's nice to have 'proof' of the historical resurrection, but it isn't sufficient to then turn around and go 'so, because this one unexplained event happened, the rest of all this stuff is true as well'.

There's another offshoot of this which says 'okay, maybe this _is_ real - but in that case, God is evil and we should oppose him'. The historical case for the resurrection makes no claims about the _character_ of supernatural power, only that it exists and intervened in this case; it doesn't even make any serious evidence-based claim that Jesus wasn't deluded as to why he was being resurrected, so using his words as a guide to the 'meaning' of the event isn't actually an evidence-based position.

4) I don't actually care if it is true - I live in my own truth / I would have to change too much / it's just not relevant to me.

There are two things here, but they're pretty much the same answer: quite a lot of people just don't care about the 'objective' world at all.

Maybe they have a solopsistic or simulationist view of reality - either it's all in their head, or it's all a computer simulation some unimaginably advanced civilisation is running for shits and giggles / science / whatever, and therefore it doesn't need to be consistent. Or some other worldview, which maybe involves other supernatural powers of some description, or something else which means 'proof' doesn't matter because the game can change unpredictably from moment to moment anyway.

Maybe they just carefully don't have a view of reality at all. Attempting to think about objective truth is difficult and uncomfortable; it's often just easier for most people to say 'that's nice, but it doesn't feed the kids / get me the promotion / entertain me / stop wars / solve the problem of suffering' and not even look into the evidence (especially as 'evidence' is pretty difficult to dig into in most fields - as I've admitted above, I'm pretty much completely lost to tell facts from falsehoods outside my field, and I consider myself to be relatively good at that kind of thing!).

'Historical evidence for the resurrection' style sermons are likely to be lost on these people anyway.

----

So, why _do_ people believe?

I think most people believe in whatever world they want to be the case. People believe in religions because they want there to be a God / gods / supernatural powers / whatever; people believe in science because they want the world to be understandable; people believe in the many worlds theory / we're-all-a-computer-simulation / solipsism because they want it not to matter that they haven't got everything right and everything is a bit rubbish really.

(I know some of you will be aggravated with lumping 'believing in science' with 'believing in religion', but what I mean by that is not 'believing in gravity / evolution etc' (which almost everyone can do on top of whatever else they believe) but more like what I think is technically called 'materialism'? - it's about what you believe the fundamental basis of reality is, whether it's turtles all the way down, mind as just an emergent property of matter, or there is some kind of creator intelligence, or there is no objective reality at all.)

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A few responses:

1. FWIW, IME, most non-Christians would assume that the evidence is NOT compelling if you look at it closely, so I would expect many Christians to do the same (especially if they are not personally invested in believing the historicity) regardless of which is actually true.

2. I'm not sure. Most non-Christians would probably say that even if the historical evidence is compelling, they would still hold some judgement in reserve, because the conclusion is so unlikley to them. (I mean, seriously, if Josephus describes "a big battle happened", most people would probably believe it, because that's so much more plausible than the alternative. However, if he said "Thor rode around the sky on a thunder chariot", the idea that he might be wrong, or lying, or something is now MORE likely than the alternative.) However, most non-Christians would probably prefer it if the evidence weren't compelling even by historical standards, so I dont' know how many would admit "it is, but I still don't believe it".

3. Similar to the last point, even if all the miracles did happen as described, which is more plausible? Jesus was a super-advanced alien, or Jesus was an all-powerful creator of the universe? If you've personal experience of God answering prayers, etc, and believe other historical evidence, the second seems more plausible. If not, it may well not.

Most of those refer to non-believers, but I suspect (I don't know) many people internally believe in God, but don't _really_ believe Jesus happened as described, even if they think he did die for our sins and come back to life, so may have a similar attitude to the evidence.

Taking the top Google hit, I found that (one particular author’s) “excellent” historical evidence for Jesus was actually written in the 2nd century and was at best historical evidence for 1st-century Christians. That is to say it doesn’t even take a close look to see that it’s not compelling.

Well, I definitely agree with that, but experience suggests that if two people disagree about it, they don't normally manage to come to an agreement in a short discussion :)

What we mostly learn from looking at 2,000-2,500 year old figures is that it is important to have literate disciples if you want to be considered to have existed despite having written nothing yourself (or even if you theoretically did write things yourself despite not actually having existed, Homer). Pythagoras and Christ both might have done, but nothing about their lives was written down until long after they were dead, which makes people suspicious. Socrates, on the other hand, had the good sense to instruct Plato and Xenophon, who busily wrote things down, so nobody doubts the existence of Socrates.

FWIW, the actually useful historical-resurrection 'proofs' generally centre around 'there are non-Christian historians that mention that there was this troublesome cult leader that fits Jesus' profile and that he was crucified' and 'Christianity grew out of the resurrection story and if the authorities could have produced the body they would have done so; whilst the followers could have nicked the body and hidden it, most of them met unpleasant ends which they could have avoided if they'd been willing to say they'd made it all up and here is where the body is, which seems unlikely if they were lying'.

The sources they're using for those facts (there was a preacher, he got crucified, the authorities lost the body, a religion grew relatively quickly out of reports he'd been seen alive again, the people best placed to make it up kept up their story even under torture and penalty of death) seem as solid as any other contempory historical sources - mostly it's the Roman and Jewish historians who were writing around then that they quote.

Thanks. FWIW 'there are non-Christian historians that mention that there was this troublesome cult leader that fits Jesus' profile and that he was crucified' and 'Christianity grew out of the resurrection story' all sounds plausible to me (although I've _not_ studied it).

If I were considering it, I would explore the rest: the trouble with chains of deduction, however reasonable, is that the longer they are, even if each individual step is likely, ONE of them is likely to be flawed (I mean, contemporary governments do all sorts of things that don't _seem_ to make sense, I'm not sure 'obviously the government would have done X' is a watertight historical argument. But I'm only speculating, I don't know how specific the historical documents are.) But I have to admit, that's just a guess, I don't know the validity of all the sources.

This is very interesting, and makes me all the more painfully aware that my religious beliefs (including belief in the Resurrection) are held on premises very different to my 'beliefs' in science, historical events, etc. And there's a lot to think about philosophically there, but instead of doing that, just two points where I think I can say something relatively meaningful:

1) to someone who is used to mathematical proofs and experimental evidence, standards of 'proof' that are accepted in the field of history are generally pretty weak

I guess this is true in an abstract way, but a historian might take issue because the aims of the discipline of history are so very different to the aims of the sciences. Disclaimer: I'm not a historian, I'm a classical linguist (so my ways of 'proving' things come a bit closer to scientific principles, while my data simply can't be tested in a scientific way), but I did study history as a major part of my Classics degree for three years, so I have some reasonably informed ideas about it.

So, the aims of history are very often represented as a quest to find out the 'truth' of the past, to be able to say that such and such an event happened at such and such a time in such and such a place. But actually if that's all history did then it would only be half a discipline, because it's not really very difficult to work out when and where things happened, and we either have evidence for it or we don't. Even for the very earliest historians, that wasn't the aim of their discipline - it was to tell the story of the past and its people, to find out people opinions about historical events, to show different versions of historical narratives, to try to understand historical events by assessing the biases of the people who tell us about them, and so on. Those are the things that historians really have to think hard about. A minority of historical research might aim to work out from an assortment of obscure sources when and where (and whether) X happened, but the majority of it is about interpreting sources, understanding people and their motives, and so on. NB this is probably vastly oversimplified.

When you understand history as a discipline that looks at much more complex phenomena than events, you realise (or at least this is what I came to realise while studying) that 'historical evidence' isn't even remotely similar to scientific proof, and in fact history isn't really about proof at all. As a historian, I think what you do is gather historical evidence and make a judgement about whether it's plausible that X happened, and consider how people at the time might have thought about X. In the end, admittedly, that's a judgement pretty similar to the sorts of judgements you make when deciding whether you believe in particular religious phenomena!

ETA: So yes, the point of that was that evidence and proof are different things. I seem to have meandered away from that a bit.

As a postscript, I have historical evidence for Daleks in the 2nd millennium BC Mediterranean. And I can show you the evidence, but I don't really expect you to believe they existed :)

2) On 'truth' generally as a concept, and the quest for knowledge and particularly knowledge about historical/religious/occult things, I still think that Indiana Jones has taught me more about how to think about it than years of study. OK, in Indy it turns out that phenomena such as the power of the Ark of the Covenant are demonstrably 'true', so it isn't the best thing to set your standards by (plus it's fictional). But there's something about Indy's insistence that archaeology is about a search for 'facts' (which comes from work in the library and studying human remains and so on according to him), while the search for truth belongs in the discipline of philosophy, that has always resonated with me. I think it's relatively meaningful that Indy's standards vary depending on whether he's teaching in a classroom or out being an adventurer - because when he's adventuring, it's all about believing what he sees, and that isn't really historical or archaeological. Anyway, this point was more of a digression than a point :)

Edited Date: 2012-01-15 04:01 pm (UTC)

I have historical evidence for Daleks in the 2nd millennium BC Mediterranean. And I can show you the evidence, but I don't really expect you to believe they existed :)

Go on, I'm curious :)

Annoyingly I can't seem to find a digital picture of the specific inscription, which I thought I had lying around somewhere. But basically, there's a single Cypriot inscription dating from the second millennium BC that contains this sign:

That's my own line drawing of it. It rather spoils it not to see it in situ though, where it looks rather more convincingly Daleky!

I'd have defined myself as a liberal Christian until quite recently. Now I'm basically rather confused; while I don't reject Christianity as a path to Truth, and I think there is a transcendental Truth out there, I do reject Christianity's claims to exclusivity, which also means I have become more sceptical of the Resurrection (which is one of the key elements for that exclusivity).

Back when I was a Cambridge undergraduate, and more devout than I am now, I did read one of those evangelical books called "Who Moved the Stone". My knowledge of the New Testament was sufficient then to wish that the "historical proof" brigade would just shut up and stop embarrassing the rest of us. The Gospels were never intended to be read as historically accurate witness statements to matters of fact; they are didactic accounts of faith, pictures to be given to the next generation. The details of what happened after the Resurrection in Matthew, Luke and John are, if we are honest about it, completely inconsistent (and Mark, suspiciously, has nothing at all to say), and while it's fun to try and make the stories tie up, it has about the same intellectual validity as establishing the accurate history of the Daleks.

Obviously something happened, something which the disciples understood as Jesus being physically present with them again, for a short while. The proof of that is the existence of Christianity. But their belief that it happened doesn't, as you rightly say, constitute much proof in and of itself. What exactly what did happen, we cannot possibly know, and it is foolish to assert that we can find out at this distance.

slightly disingenuous> What, it's Easter already?

ontology> There are very few objective truths that can be proved without assumption. Talking about the objective nature of reality quickly gets into a discussion of which axioms you'd like to accept and which you cannot accept - most people are happy with basic assumptions like 'my senses are not lying to me' and 'I can reason about tomorrow from yesterday's data', which are fundamentally believed or not believed on the same level at which we are asked to believe in God.

I say this only because it's an important point in a physical scientist's education when they realise that they are not in the business of finding the objective truth. To unpack that - everything runs off axioms, you can never be certain of any result to arbitrary precision, you can never measure the entire universe, you can never have a perfect theory, yours is not the only model that fits the data, there's always a worse model, there's probably a better model, and on top of all that there is no *objective reason*, no reason that you can derive from any other result, why tomorrow should behave the same as today. (Yesterday behaved the same as today? Pah. Coincidence.)

bodily resurrection>
For me, God's existence must be an axiom, assumed a priori. I cannot prove it; in fact, trying to prove it is literally as easy and as difficult as proving that the sensory impulses I interpret as the existence of an outside world are not falsified. To the believer, no proof is necessary; to the unbeliever, no proof is sufficient.

So I think it's possibly dangerous to preach concerning the historical Jesus in a conversion context: you run the risk of conflating in the new or prospective Christian's mind the idea of the historical man and the living God. It is quite literally immaterial to my belief whether there is evidence that Jesus was physically raised from the dead, because I believe (and we are hoping that new converts believe, yes?) via the action of the Holy Spirit today.

I shall leave aside the argument that asks whether the acceptance of biblical literality and historicity is a requirement for Christian faith.

What evidence is one looking for, anyway? What would make one go 'well, I wasn't sure whether Jesus was resurrected, but now I have made this measurement and I am convinced that He was'?

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm not a Christian because I became convinced in the historical existence of Christ, and I'd be very surprised to find anyone who was. I'm a Christian because I cannot disbelieve in God; one of my fundamental ontological assumptions is that there is a God. I'm not sure how one convinces people, teaches people to change the way they think in that way. I'm really not sure that I'd start from (or even include at all) trying to convince them of the historical literality of the Bible.

Very good post. It takes some of the things I vaguely think, and puts them more clearly. I found it helpful.

you run the risk of conflating in the new or prospective Christian's mind the idea of the historical man and the living God.

...although I don't quite get this bit - aren't they the same?

Hmm. Appears that I was trying to use the phrase 'the historical man' as distinct from 'the man who actually existed' and that's not what those words mean ><

The idea that God can be found - that God can be learned about, should be learned about - by studying archaeological evidence concerning people who may or may not have been Jesus. The idea that it matters where Jesus lay in the tomb, whether the site was reused, where that stone is now. Fundamentally the conflation of the accidents of the thing with the thing, similarly to witnessing a miracle and believing because of the miracle. Does that make sense?

I don't accept the 'historical' standard of evidence for things that I might actually have to care about if they were true.

I think it's mostly this, for me. Clearly there are different standards of proof. To win a civil court cases, you need to prove balance of probability is in your favour. To get someone convicted of a crime, you need proof beyond reasonable doubt. To make someone change the entire way they live their life and throw away many of their material beliefs in the way the universe works? Feels to me like one would want better proof than the historical standard of evidence. And presumably an omnipotent God could provide that proof if he wanted to...

One vote (poll count?) for type 3. It would be nice to be able to explain more stuff, but a weird story from over 2,000 years ago isn't even *near* the top of my list.

I'm volunteering my perspective on this as someone who was brought up in an evangelical Christian household/community, and left that after I was exposed to alternate ways of looking at the world. I hope it's useful. :)

"From inside my little bubble of Christian thought, there is a strong meme that goes like this: everyone who seriously researches the historical basis of the Resurrection from a truth-seeking point of view - even an antagonistic, 'I want to prove this didn't happen' point of view - finds out that they actually end up proving that it must have happened, and usually end up converting to Christianity."

You're certainly right about it being a bubble. Having come from this background myself and investigating it "when I got out" - as it were - I was surprised (or rather, not really surprised at all, considering the rest of the dogma I was exposed to) at how few credible sources anyone could actually name.

In my personal experience, Christian thought (including "christian" versions of science, history and so forth) tends to suffer from the typical cognitive biases you'd expect from any heavily guarded dogma, especially confirmation bias. Occasionally you will hear stories of miracle healing, or of someone having a vision which saved their life, or of conversion after "looking into the evidence". Like all of these stories it's quite possible that there was someone who experienced what they thought was a miracle. But then that one example gets taken as gospel, has all the inconvenient bits stripped away, and is then amplified within the echo chamber to the point where it's "everyone who ever investigated" (conveniently forgetting any counter-examples, to boot). I have literally seen this happen myself as stories moved around from church to church, and the story which came back later was unrecognisable to those who were actually present. Unsurprisingly, that part gets ignored.

I suspect the vast majority of people who claim to be an authority on subjects relating to this particular point in history are anything but, and certainly not the ones who are most vocal about it and trying to sell books to a willing audience. Unfortunately the serious hard work required to do this sort of historical study can take a lifetime and even then might not produce a solid answer - leading to people's prior biases coming to light, and very little chance for verification.

My conclusion is, since I've not been able to verify any credible historian discovering solid proof for the existence of a historical Jesus - let alone his supposed resurrection, that it didn't happen. Now, I personally don't think it's all that unreasonable that some rabble-rousing Jewish bloke was the centre of a messianic cult, because from what I've read that shit happened all the time and the weight of proof required is much lower. Is there a historical basis for the dude actually being the son of God and being resurrected after being crucified? None that I've been able to make out - extraordinary claims, and all that.

Coming back to the original point about it being a bubble - how much literature have you and/or most of the Christians in your life actually read which seriously attempts to debunk or disprove the arguments? It's a serious question and I don't think it's one that many people can answer truthfully without admitting their own confirmation bias. If you live in a world where you don't see the other side of the story, of course all the examples you have to hand are the ones that support your side.

(part 1 of 2)

"I know I have a lot of scientists and engineers among my friends, and to someone who is used to mathematical proofs and experimental evidence, standards of 'proof' that are accepted in the field of history are generally pretty weak. So even if there was a compelling historical case for 'Jesus appeared to people acting very much like he was alive after he had been very much confirmed to be dead', it wouldn't necessarily meet the standard of proof that they would accept.

After all, most 'historical facts' just aren't that important to most people; it's one thing to accept that someone lived here and said these things and died there, it's another thing to accept that someone went around exhibiting signs of life after being very dead, without a plausible biological mechanism. And many things which are widely accepted as 'historical fact' on the same amount of evidence are almost as widely known to be simplifications or subsequently proven to be just outright false."

This touches on what I was alluding to above. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. You can't really live your entire life requiring the most rigorous proofs for everything, so one reasonable response is to scale up the amount of proof you require to accept a particular claim based on how it fits in to the rest of your worldview. Interestingly, this is also confirmation bias in its own way; the difference is that people would a) seek out dissenting information and b) change their minds or moderate their views if and when they find it.

So how much evidence do we need for the messianic prophet's existence? Not a whole lot. People lived there, many of them were Jewish, and the Jews of that time and place had a whole load of messianic prophets wandering around. It seems reasonable that the events of the New Testament might well be based on one of these people. How much do we need for his resurrection? Well, quite a lot more. As you've already pointed out, it's basically a biological impossibility, unless you spend quite some time twisting circumstances to fit the story. What's more likely - someone rose from the dead, or that a grief-stricken person hallucinated the cult leader who they adored? I mean, people still see Elvis, and no-one claims that Elvis was resurrected, right? Or any number of other possibilities - all assuming that the events related in the gospels are based on truth, which we haven't really even properly established either.

And that's about where it stands as far as I'm concerned. I've never seen any credible evidence for a historical resurrection, so why would I believe, especially since the consequences of that belief are a whole lot more absurd?

(part 2 of 2)

Hallucination is pretty definitely a bad theory - we can actually look at that one with Science (tm) and see how hallucinations present themselves in human beings generally, and there is a resounding lack of similar mass hallucinations than the one you would need to explain the resurrection appearances if you accept the Epistles as a decent account of the available eye-witnesses.

Deception or self-reinforcing failures of memory and reporting, especially given the standard of communication available and the usual human desire not to be the one to say the Emperor has no clothes, are another matter entirely...

I don't accept the 'historical' standard of evidence for things that I might actually have to care about if they were true.

All historical knowledge is provisional and subject to revision upon the discovery of new evidence.

If social policy on homosexuality, public school science curricula, and United States foreign policy in the Middle East depended on whether William Shakespeare really wrote the plays that are attributed to him, then I would want better evidence that he did. Since many people claim that these issues should be determined by what the Bible says, I want better evidence for the historical claims upon which the Bible's authority is thought to depend.

Historical standards of evidence are what they are because of the uses to which we put historical information. If you want to use historical information to establish the supernatural authority of an ancient book of myths and legends , it is appropriate to require a different standard of evidence.

I have Thoughts on this one. Let's see if I can actually get any of them down usefully.

I don't know if I've told you this before but some time before I knew you, when I worked out that I was fundamentally not an atheist, I went through a period when I said to my religious friends, persuade me.

(The person who did was Helen, and largely what she said was 'work it out for yourself, fucknuts', and over the course of the next few years I developed my own personal brand of heretical jewish eclectic syncretistic neopaganism that works for me...)

Some Christians spoke pretty persuasively about their faith. But I also spent a while reading up on 'historical evidence for christ' stuff. And it really turned me off.

That sort of attempt to 'prove' that Jesus Christ rose from the dead read to me like the worst kind of missing-the-point-of-the-discipline history. Like, 'was Robin Hood Gay?', like 'Who Was The Real King Arthur?' like 'Did Margery Kempe Have Schizphrenia?' it had more in common with what sensationalist journalism thinks history is than anything actually useful.

What history does, in my understanding, is present accounts and contexts and speculations. Historians don't tend to call the artefacts they are working with 'evidence', they'd call them 'sources'.

(Gah, I'm sort of going round in circles writing stuff and deleting it. The other thing that put me off the book was much more unrelated to the historical evidence question and was around whether or not Jesus (and I always have the urge to call him Yoshki in this context) fulfilled the old testament prophesies reguarding the Meshioch, which is the bit where I get the most stuck with christianity, because I don't need historical proof to believe in mystery and miracle, that's what faith is for. But, while I accept that the disciples could have believed during his/their life times that Jesus was the Meshioch, it seems less plausible with hindsight; vis a complete lack of End of Days / time of the Messiah etc... )

Anyway, I am well off point now.There's also the issue that someone else touched on of most historical evidence that most people believe are things that are pretty... un-unique. We know what evidence for a medieaval battle looks like because there were lots and we can compare. We don't know what evidence for a bodily ressurection of the only son of god looks like, cos it only happened the once, there's no way to compare those sources with other sources of a similar nature and go, yup, looks very similar to all those other historical cases of the bodily ressurection of the only son of god...

In terms of plausibility of evidence, I haven't been impressed with most stuff I've read. I don't know of a comprehensive comparitive study, but for example re: he must clearly have been dead having been tortured for that long in that way: There are certain kinds of torture that we know more or less exactly how badly they damage someone and how long it takes to kill them. They are mostly types of torture that were carried out and meticulously documented by the Nazis, although a couple of South American dictators provide similar records. How much damage is done by crucifixion and precisely how it kills someone I am fairly sure is something we only have contemporary (ie Roman), and conflicted, accounts of. The Christian accounts of crucifixion must have been fatal that I have read have all been by modern experts in medical science, who hopefully haven't crucified anyone recently, presented as 'science'. This really rubbed me up the wrong way. Especially given that what a bunch of the Nazi torture documentation 'proves' is that people survive much worse things for much longer than you might expect.

Anyway. I'm wavering away from any sort of useful point again. I can imagine that sort of 'historical evidence' presentation being useful for someone who has faith but has been taught or come to believe that 'truth' needs to be presented in certain ways. But as a tool for conversion, it mostly made me feel like 'this is a bunch of people who believe that my truth is the only truth, and don't actually have a good handle on what kind of a truth this is they are dealing with...'

The 'proof' of the definite death that was presented in the sermon was more of a social proof (i.e. 'the Roman soldiers were liable to the point of death for getting the execution right, and had lots of experience at getting executions done, so they probably wouldn't have cocked it up and lefth im alive').

But yes; a lot of people are confused between different types of truth. Personally it all seems faintly irrelevant to me as I'm pretty sure that _I_ believe that historical-ness or otherwise fundamentally doesn't matter and is in the unknowable category, and there's plenty of other stuff in there that I'd pick to worry about first... but it does worry me that some people may well base their faith on that (maybe that's one reason why a lot of people do a lot of incredibly counterproductive shit in the name of my religion?).

Disclaimer: I'm an Atheist. But I believe the most rational belief is Agnostic. So that's the view I'm going to discuss things from:

A) You've missed a big reason in your list. The historical evidence for Christ? Every other religion can also produce historical evidence in their favour that's just as reliable. Makes it difficult to say which is the correct one.

B) I'm prepared to accept various historical facts of the same reliability as the bible for most things, because they have little bearing on me. For example: It doesn't matter overly much if the battle of Hastings happened or not. By the time you get close enough to modern day to really matter, the standard of evidence is a lot higher (It would be harder to Disbelieve WW2 for example).

However, the existence of God is a Huge game changer, with massive effects on everything. Insisting on a higher standard of proof than for other historical events is pretty reasonable.

On 1)
I haven't really gone digging into the academic-history perspective on this, mostly because I don't see why I should bother; when I hear people sermonising about it they tend to rely over-heavily on the Bible texts, and since I think the Bible was written down much later by people heavily invested believing the things written in it... yeah, not the best source. So if I was writing a sermon intend to persuade people who DON'T already believe I'd have to take care to not circularly use the Bible as "proof" of its own truth. Further my prior probability for the existence of God is very low; so you have to go a lot further to convince than you would to convince me of something I already think is quite likely.

On 2)
This is also relevant; but I think a bit less so.

On 3)
My thinking doesn't really get that far; because I don't accept the "fact" of the resurrection. So I'm not really interested in what (if anything) it means. I think it is useful to remember when writing sermons that not all people who accept the existence of supernatural powers that sometimes act to change the world go on the accept that Christianity is the correct lens with which to view/worship/etc them/it.

This particular sermon was quite a good example of the genre, explicitly only leaning on information from non-Christian sources (mostly the Roman historians but also Jewish sources) to provide evidence for the claims 1) there was a guy fitting Jesus' profile who got crucified; b) the Romans were sufficiently competent and motivated to make sure someone getting crucified under these circumstances was very certainly dead; c) the authorities claimed that the disciples had stolen the body instead of producing the body, which demonstrated that they didn't have the body to produce.

They did use Biblical sources (1 Corinthians, which he claimed some research shows was earlier than the Gospels) for the 4th fact they were leaning their argument on (that there were a _lot_ of people who claimed to have personally seen the risen Christ, many of which had known him personally beforehand so wouldn't have mistaken an imposter for him, and who maintained their eyewitness testimony of this even to the point of being tortured to death, and skeptics were being encouraged to go talk to them to check their testimony). But there are also non-Christian sources for some of this (although I think only to the level of 'there are suddenly loads of these Christians everywhere, wtf' rather than specifically being about eyewitness testimony to the risen Christ).

Obviously the other historical sources aren't exactly a repeatable experiment's worth of proof themselves, though...

This particular sermon was quite a good example of the genre, explicitly only leaning on information from non-Christian sources (mostly the Roman historians but also Jewish sources) to provide evidence for the claims

The problems: The Jewish Josephus is writing some 60 years after the crucifixion and most scholars agree that Christians doctored what he wrote. Even if we can determine his undoctored version of events, what was his source? Did he have independent knowledge of the events or is he relating stories that the Christians told about themselves? The first Roman source is Tacitus who is writing 25 years after that and the same question arises. Did Tacitus have independent information about Jesus or did he rely on the stories that Christian told about the origin of Christianity? We just don’t know whether the non-Christian sources actually constitute independent corroboration because they are long after the events and they give no indication of their sources.

They did use Biblical sources (1 Corinthians, which he claimed some research shows was earlier than the Gospels) for the 4th fact they were leaning their argument on (that there were a _lot_ of people who claimed to have personally seen the risen Christ, many of which had known him personally beforehand

When I was in Catholic grade school, the nuns used to tell stories about the tens of thousands of people who witnessed appearances of the Virgin Mary at Fatima. Unfortunately, none of the nuns were there or had talked to anyone who was there. They were simply passing along stories that they believed to be true.

In the New Testament, the only first person account of an appearance we have is Paul’s in 1 Cor. 15. He is the only one who says “Jesus appeared to me.” Unfortunately, Paul did not know Jesus and he gives us no details about the nature of the experiences. Paul also says that Jesus appeared to others, but he gives no details and he wasn’t present at those appearances. He is like the nuns passing along a story he believes to be true.

From the historian’s perspective, we do no have a lot of people who claimed to have personally seen the risen Christ. We have one person who claims to have seen the risen Christ who also claims that a lot of other people saw the risen Christ. We also have some later claims by unknown persons that a lot of people saw the risen Christ. It is some evidence, but not nearly as impressive as these types of sermons typically make it out to be.

who maintained their eyewitness testimony of this even to the point of being tortured to death

The historical evidence that eyewitnesses to the resurrection willingly died for their belief is much too shaky to bear any real weight. Many of the traditions concerning the deaths of the apostles are not first recorded until centuries after the fact. The earliest accounts are often found in apocryphal works like the Acts of Paul or the Acts of Peter which were rejected by the church as spurious and heretical.

Thank you, this is a really interesting post.

Like you, I'm a Christian who doesn't find this historical evidence for the resurrection hugely compelling. My objections are basically your (1) and (2). We just don't know enough about what happened to make such a significant life-change based on it. Personally I'm more convinced by philosophical arguments.

But some people (presuambly of different temperament from me) are converted by the historicity of the resurrection, and provided they're not actually being misinformed, I think that's a good thing, and makes such sermons worth preaching.

I should probably do my own damn research, but I'm interested in the assertion 'some people are converted by the historicity of the resurrection' - I think it's quite hard to determine what causes someone to choose one set of axioms over another / convert to a religion, and I'm not sure if any actual studies have been done on that, either.

I know there are testimonies of 'I was converted because I looked into the historicity of the resurrection trying to disprove it and I couldn't', but I'm innately skeptical about those claims; I can see how that might get one interested in the area and then involved with the Bible etc etc, but it seems a very fragile thing to base one's entire faith in.

I guess most people probably undertake less self-examination / rational examination of their beliefs than I think they do though :) so they could think that it is based on that, or even have it actually be based on that, with far less discomfort than doing that would cause me.

2. for me.

I'm happy to accept that there is more evidence for Jesus' resurrection than there is for (an example I've had used in anger) the existence of Julius Ceaser.

Thing is, accepting that Julius Ceaser existed required me to believe some melodramatic but basically plausible things about the Romans, but not otherwise change my life.

Believing in Jesus, with all the trimmings, means a great deal of change to my life, and would also contradict a lot more apparently observed evidence.

Therefore, I hold it to a higher standard of evidence. Rather a lot higher. More than the gap in standards ofhistorical evidence generally presented.

Caesar wrote De Bello Gallico (a text which has survived in full and was frequently used as an introduction to Latin),which is something that was agreed upon by a very large number of contemporary and subesequent Roman authors; we have no equivalent writing in anywhere near as much detail for the Resurrection. This is a silly example.

As I say, it's the only one I've been personally exposed to.

This is a really interesting subject. I guess I'm of the same opinion as you: I do believe in the physical Resurrection, but not really because of the 'historical evidence'. And yet I am fairly interested historical and scientific evidence, and thats the kind of stuff I like to show to my non-christian friends, even tho its not the stuff that convinced me.. so why should I think it would convince them?

There was a phrase I once heard when much younger something along the lines of: "For those who don't believe, no explanation is possible. For those that do believe, no explation is neccessary". which kinda works.

I'm quite interested in the Jesus went to India theory (although the way i heard it, it was between 13-30 and then some also say after ressurection). I have a book or 2 on the subject that I need to get around to reading. But my first questions are not as such IF he DID or COULD HAVE been to India post ressurection, but WHY would he?

I guess I've never truly questioned why people don't believe in the resurection, because I've never actively tried to convince anyone otherwise. Any of my atheist friends would probably give any of the answers 1-4 or a combination. I'm really not sure what answer a believer of another religion would give... have you had much experience with that?... maybe I should ask the boyfriend and see what he says!

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Michelle Taylor

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