'minimal witness' explanation for resurrection
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I was hearing about the 'minimal witness' criticism of the reliability of the resurrection and was wondering if this might be something worth discussing here.
I think it is a reaction to the Christian apologist idea of the historicity of the resurrection which goes something like this; a lot of people had experiences of the resurrection of JC after Good Friday which they obviously sincerely believed even to the point of death. Therefore that's good evidence that it actually happened.
The counter discussion is something like this; although the gospels speak of many disciples seeing the Risen Christ, there doesn't seem to be much evidence of many named people who actually were there beyond a few gospel paragraphs and a few in the book of Acts. Of those named people who have a level of well-known historical standing and who were later killed were:
Peter
James and John
Paul
Of which Paul never seems to have met Jesus and was converted after seeing a vision at some point after the other resurrection accounts.
So, as the theory goes, perhaps it was just Peter who experienced something after the crucifixion and who was able to enthuse James and John as other "true believers" in the movement.
One criticism of this idea is that it seems to discredit the gospel accounts as unreliable - although there does seem plenty of confusion about the dating of different writing and so on. So it is possible that remarkable resurrection accounts were written in later after all these four were already dead.
Or perhaps there was a form of mass delusion; Peter is energised by the idea that the individual he has been venerating has experienced this amazing resurrection, is able to passionately enthuse others with the idea and collectively the group manage to delude themselves.
Mass delusion is obviously a real phenomena, as is that of charismatic leaders persuading others to believe something they say they experienced. It doesn't even need anyone being malicious, just a group of people who really want it to be true. Plus a febrile religious and political environment, a story repeated many times in a particular cultural setting and so on.
Thoughts?
I think it is a reaction to the Christian apologist idea of the historicity of the resurrection which goes something like this; a lot of people had experiences of the resurrection of JC after Good Friday which they obviously sincerely believed even to the point of death. Therefore that's good evidence that it actually happened.
The counter discussion is something like this; although the gospels speak of many disciples seeing the Risen Christ, there doesn't seem to be much evidence of many named people who actually were there beyond a few gospel paragraphs and a few in the book of Acts. Of those named people who have a level of well-known historical standing and who were later killed were:
Peter
James and John
Paul
Of which Paul never seems to have met Jesus and was converted after seeing a vision at some point after the other resurrection accounts.
So, as the theory goes, perhaps it was just Peter who experienced something after the crucifixion and who was able to enthuse James and John as other "true believers" in the movement.
One criticism of this idea is that it seems to discredit the gospel accounts as unreliable - although there does seem plenty of confusion about the dating of different writing and so on. So it is possible that remarkable resurrection accounts were written in later after all these four were already dead.
Or perhaps there was a form of mass delusion; Peter is energised by the idea that the individual he has been venerating has experienced this amazing resurrection, is able to passionately enthuse others with the idea and collectively the group manage to delude themselves.
Mass delusion is obviously a real phenomena, as is that of charismatic leaders persuading others to believe something they say they experienced. It doesn't even need anyone being malicious, just a group of people who really want it to be true. Plus a febrile religious and political environment, a story repeated many times in a particular cultural setting and so on.
Thoughts?
Comments
There is a saying - extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
If you claimed the bus was late this morning I'd take your word for it.
If you claimed it turned into a spacecraft and took you to work via Neptune, I'd want rather more support for your claim.
I would therefore be very wary of this line of reasoning, and more wary still of a faith depending on it.
https://youtu.be/pGIHBc6XHjM?si=b5q76BFKLnqzcW_7
You mean that none of the named people existed? They're all entirely mythical figures?
On this, I was once around someone who said he was having visions of something (yeah, it was an unhappy mix of drugs and mental illness). Whilst what he was saying was absurd and weird and wild, I can see how a third-party could have been wrapped up in it.
It's easy to think you'd say 'OK mate, you are off your head and talking utter BS' but in my experience in those moments the difference between delusion and reality can be hard to parse, even for bystanders who are not actually experiencing the vision.
Matthew has his resurrection experiences take place in Galilee, but "some didn't believe." Luke and John have him in Jerusalem, John including both. I fully accept that the apostles had experiences of the Risen Christ, but I find some of the later gospel accounts both inconsistent and "developed" over the half century or more between the events and their being written down. My instinct is to take more seriously the earliest account, that of Paul. He claimed to have been taught by the Risen Lord, and paid little heed to the earliest Christians who had known Jesus in the flesh.
Paul's insistence that "flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of heaven" is consistent with his lack of interest in the life and teachings of Jesus, and his theology based entirely on the crucifixion and resurrection. Perhaps the Jerusalem Church, headed by "The Lord's brother" James placed more importance on what He taught in His ministry, as shown by the contrast between the Epistle of James and the teachings of Paul
Or they did exist and things were put into their mouths that they never said.
See the historical narratives of Parson Weems.
A truly excellent analysis!
I'm a more or less conventional believer who disbelieves both 'proofs'and 'disproofs'.
But I, like Paul, can claim some encounter(s) with the risen Christ.
Delusional? Perhaps ... except, "In Him I live and move and have my being".
Basically, it's the "Puddlegum Defence". If you know a better hole, go to it!
Right. I'm quite interested in comparative religion - admittedly at a superficial level - and it seems like almost all of them have historical elements which only make sense internally and which on some level are often/usually seen as critical points to believe.
Important Person A did this impossible/unlikely/miraculous thing from this specially sacred place. And Person A did it at this date, in this specific time or era.
Of course it isn't just religions that do this, many cultures have long apparently historical stories with lots of detail, somes miracles and special things that happened. Sometimes from long in the past, sometimes relatively recently.
It's a bit like the various contemporary conspiracy theories; someone clearly seems to have made up QAnon - but is it possible that it is just something created by overactive minds putting together desperate information in a form that somehow takes on a life of its own?
Religions often seem to have that other special quality - Believer B may never have actually seen Important Person A, but feels like they have a divine leading to paint, write or whatever a story about them that makes sense to them. And may, of course, in time come to believe that what they've created is consequently 'more true' than ideas that other believers held before them.
He does seem to have been party to some sayings about the Lord's Supper / eucharist which aren't recorded elsewhere in the NT.
We can only conjecture as to how much he picked up on or missed from the other Apostles.
As for the Resurrection, when as a Good Little Evangelical I was never that impressed by some of the popular apologetics around it, but that didn't stop me saying, 'Lord I believe, help Thou mine unbelief."
Delusional?
We'll find out one day.
If I were to go purely on my recently departed mother in law's reactions to hymns and prayers as she approached her death then yes, it all looked pretty convincing to me. But I didn't 'see' anything myself, only her beatific demeanour and reactions to particular words and phrases etc.
None of that proves or disproves anything, of course.
Have you ever considered the possibility that Paul's description of the Eucharist is absent from the rest of the NT because it's his interpretation of it? He would probably have said he was taught it by the Risen Christ and we would have to decide if we believe him or not. But it's very obvious that he was at odds with the other apostles over many things and it's largely Paul's version of Christianity that has come down to us. This may even include his interpretation of the significance of the Eucharist the Crucifiction and the Resurrection.
The Didache or teachings, which many scholars believe to be a very early Christian document with no obvious Pauline influences days 1.2 " The way of life is this: first you shall love God who created you; and second, your neighbour as yourself; all those things which you do not want to be done to you, you should not do to others."
With regards to the Last Supper: "First at the cup say: we give thanks to you our Father, for the holy vine of David your servant, which you have made known to us. Through Jesus your servant, to you be glory forever."
It's apparent that, at least in that community, there was no salvation through belief in the atoning sacrifice of Christ or of eating his flesh and drinking his blood. It's quite possible that all those ideas originate with Paul. As I said before I find it quite plausible that some of His followers experienced His presence and it came to be interpreted as resurrection, but Paul was certainly a loose canon whose views differed greatly from Jesus' original followers, but whose teachings have come down to us as Christianity.
Yes. Or if they did exist, what we are told of them in the NT is more or less fabricated from scraps of memory handed down through the folk process.
People in the past sometimes had a loose conception of what was and wasn't history, I think. Sometimes writers seemed happy to invent scenarios for familiar or historical characters.
Perhaps they thought they had special permission from God to expand the stories they heard, or maybe they just thought "what's the harm" because the purpose of the story was not in the historical detail.
Or maybe it was just changed and mutated as different people heard and misheard the story.
You and me both!
But I do struggle to understand why people make claims and offer cast-iron 'proofs' for things which have fairly simple alternative explanations. Maybe I will never understand unless I'm deeply involved in the thought-processes where these things make sense.
To me saying 'I choose to believe this thing because it is noble and right and uplifting' makes a lot more sense than 'this thing is true because of this convoluted pseudo-historical reason.'
Would there be oral history there that somehow didn't get mentioned by the men who wrote most (all?) of the rest of the NT?
Whether that be the case or not, it certainly isn't the case that it's automatically true in the objective sense that can, for example, raise us from the dead and grant us eternal life.
Well I certainly think ahistorical and religious stories can be uplifting without being true. Don't you?
Tangent alert: There is a splendid cartoon by the great American humourist James Thurber. Two ladies at a dinner party talking about a bespectacled man on his own: "Oh, don't bother talking to him. He's a scientist. He doesn't know anything except facts."
I am a scientist , so I know well the dangers!
That's why I'm an agnostic as regards the existence of God.
However, there are any number of things that we can know to all intents and purposes are objectively true. That atomic nuclei contain protons and neutrons. That the sun is around 92-93 million miles away depending on the current position of Earth in its orbit. That the Prime Minister is Rishi Sunak. That Queen Elizabeth II is dead. Lots and lots of things, really.
Whether God exists clearly isn't one of them or there'd be considerably more consensus on the subject. I'd also add that whether we can know something is objectively true and whether it actually is are two completely different questions. We cannot know if there's a planet 100 light years away with a pink sea, but if there is, its existence is objectively true.
Hence there might be a God out there who exists independently of whether anyone believes him or not, and who has the power to raise the dead and grant eternal life, or there may not. That we can't know whether there is or not doesn't actually dictate whether there is such a God or not.
And with a horrible feeling of deja vu I find myself hoping we can have this thread without a repeat of the absolute car crash on Faith and Coincidences.
But being scientifically minded (even a very logical and literal kind of scientist, which I'm not) doesn't mean that I only accept one kind of truth.
Something can be true - in the sense of helpful and uplifting - even if there isn't a single accurate thing about it. That's why novels can be powerful and we don't just tell each other the literal truth all the time.
Well no, but if there was a deity like that and there was uncertainty about whether an individual has actually experienced them (I mean within their own head) then that's quite a strange way to behave.
To me, as someone on the outside looking in, the fact that even those who were in the centre of this maelstrom and mindset have doubts suggests to me - more likely than not - there's some mistake in that conception of the deity.
It's a bit like that guy who I was discussing earlier who was seeing visions. If I speak to him later and he says to me that he saw all kinds of weird stuff when he was off his head on drugs, I'm much less likely to believe it was a Real Thing even if I was closer to being persuaded at the time.
Jumping in because I think this sort of philosophy is great fun. I think we could argue the opposite too. If people have a striking experience that we thought was impossible and they don't doubt it at all, I would find them suspect, perhaps true believers but not good witnesses. Because whenever I experience something that conflicts with my world view--I'm thinking of very mundane things here--I tend to question myself and disbelieve it. For instance, I thought Ridge was an east-west street, but I know that my city was built on a strict grid and here is Ridge running north-south. I must have made an error. In fact, I did not. It's one of the few streets that turns and does both. But I had completely convinced myself that I was wrong before someone who knew the area better assured me about the street.
Anyway, we are not talking about a person you knew, we are talking about a story you've heard of something that happened 50, 100, 200 years ago to an important person.
Apologies
Yes.
I know a number of people who believe Paul essentially 'invented' Christianity as it's come down to us or that he distorted the whole thing and it would have been alright if he hadn't messed around with it.
And yes, I've read the Didache.
Thing is, other than the epistle of James perhaps, there aren't that many NT epistles that give us much insight into what the first followers of Jesus taught and believed. There's the intriguing Petrine reference to the difficulty of understanding what Paul was on about and whatever else that tells us it indicates some kind of creative tension at the very least - but those references are still capable of being understood and interpreted in a traditional framework whereby the Pauline corpus is seen as complementary rather than necessarily contradictory to what was going on elsewhere.
Doctrines and approaches develop through dialogue and debate. They don't drop out of the sky ready made.
It's hardly surprising to find different perspectives and emphases within the NT itself. I'm not sure some kind of Marcionite like attempt to tidy everything up gets us anywhere.
Sure, I'm aligning myself with traditional teachings here and, like @Telford saying 'I trust in Christ.' That doesn't mean I'm not aware of other perspectives and interpretations.
I don't find evangelical apologetics very convincing. Nor do I find some Orthodox attempts I've come across to reconcile apparent contradictions within the NT epistles that convincing either.
Sure, we Orthodox don't get fazed by apparent contradictions in the Gospel narratives nor insist that the NT is 100% factually or historically accurate as Protestant fundamentalists do.
Sure, there can be a kind of 'Church Fundamentalism' that treats the writings of the Fathers, church canons and so on as 'inerrant'. A kind of 'The Church says ..." rather than 'The Bible says ...' thing.
Whilst nobody can 'prove' any of this stuff scientifically I can see how it is possible to combine a belief that the Holy Spirit has somehow guided revelation with the very evident fact that there were differences, debates and disagreements among the early Christians until some kind of 'orthodox' consensus emerged.
Heck, a similar process occurred within Judaism with all the 'midrashes' and rabbinic debates. Islam also.
I'm sure similar processes took place and take place within Buddhism and other faiths. Did The Buddha really teach such-and-such or did So-and-So alter the original teachings ...
It seems as if for such a crowd of physical resurrectees, along with the fact that they appeared to such a swath of people, they should have enjoyed more notoriety. Any notoriety, really. But, no.
You've witnessed these things personally, have you? Or taken these things on trust? You've seen protons and neutrons? Counted the quarks?
I see a bright light in the sky. I've been told it's millions of miles away. I believe this. I don't know it in the same way as I know my wife .... and God.
Anyone can play at being sceptical as it costs little. To believe in Christ requires a change of heart ..... costly and scary!
I was talking about what *we* know as humanity in general. Unless a massive fraud is being perpetrated on us we, as a species, do to all intents and purpose know these things.
It's not a case of playing at scepticism. It's a case of weighing the confidence we can have in a conclusion. It's not a matter of will; one cannot decide to believe God exists any more than a believer can choose to believe he doesn’t.
I don't see how making a judgement on the strength of the case that God exists and Jesus was him incarnate is a change of heart really. The reason I can't wholeheartedly do it is simply that I know that we don't know for certain it's true.
A star being a hundred light years away seems much *more* knowable to me than God is. At least the instruments give readings; God is the void into which we pour our hopes and fears and the response is total silence.
Perhaps this is for Epiphanies. I'm much sure about my relationship with god than ... er ... well anything else!
Blessings.
Or as Christopher Hitchens used to quip (and I paraphrase, here): "it makes the issue of resurrection... kind or a banality, really."
What would be the point of posting them anywhere else?
God if he is real must ultimately be able to sit us all down and say "Look. I can explain everything". He must be bigger than the differences between us. Able to relate to those of us whose minds simply will not drop the "how do we know?" questions as well as those to whom that question doesn't seem important, and those who just somehow "know".
Well, there is currently a "turning away" thread. This can be what happens when God remains silent. I've found that and the "how do we know if we believe?" thread fascinating. I think I'm hoping for fellow travellers whose minds work the way mine does but I fear most of them are agnostics or functionally atheist. Because God can be so silent.
That's something I can neither imagine nor understand. But the same is true of ice skating and lots of people can do that, so does it mean anything? Some of them can even play hockey at the same time. That's beyond comprehension.
Yes. Millions of people do.
Can we decide not to believe in God?
Yes. Millions of people do.
Can unbelievers decide to believe?
Yes.
Can believers chose not to believe?
Yes.
Nobody's forcing any of us to adopt whatever faith or non-faith position we adopt.
Sure, there's a whole complex web of influences, assumptions, cultural and social factors involved and much else besides.
I think we've also got to be wary of value judgements either way. A decision not to believe can be as costly and scary as a decision to believe.
There are no glib answers to any of the questions posed on this thread.
Scepticism isn't a cop-out.
I still hold the traditional creedal Christianity as I understand it but that doesn't mean I'm in any position to judge those who, for whatever reason, find it difficult to do so.
I would certainly say there's more to faith than giving intellectual assent to a set of propositions. It's hard though to present an example or an individual whose life bears irrefutable evidence of the reality of their faith.
My old mother in-law's faith was palpable. That doesn't mean she floated six inches off the ground or walked across the canal on her way home.
Anyhow - the Matthew 27 passage. Yes, I've often wondered about that. Why isn't there any evidence outside the Gospels for the veil of the Temple being torn in two or people getting out of their grwves and wandering around town?
Does that undermine a belief in the Resurrection?
Should it?
Really believe he doesn’t. Does such a decision really work?
No. If I could make myself believe in God - the way some people seem to believe in God - I'd do just that. Save myself so much bother. But belief doesn't work like that.
Decide whether I was going to try to follow a religious practice - yes, one can do that.
But deciding whether you believe God exists or not - a totally different question - no, that just isn't a question of will. If God doesn't seem real you can't manufacture his reality.
Hence the sort of thinking in the OP in this thread - find an objective argument for a God's reality; the truth of Christianity.
It's not that different and in any case, most church services use Paul's version.
I have often wondered why John's gospel makes no reference to the Eucharist. I can only conclude that it's because it had already been well covered elsewhere.
Those of you who are certain and sure in your faith are greatly to be envied. Many of us find it all much more difficult.
And some give up trying altogether.
At which point it's not about believing or disbelieving, but about admitting and accepting.
I think the overarching message of the New Testament is that Jesus came to establish the kingdom of God. That's a place where God's will is done on earth as it is in heaven. And His will is that we love one another as He has loved us. To love God and our neighbour, to do into others as we would want other to do unto us, and to recognise that we all have one Father in heaven, and are therefore all brothers and sisters.
All the doctrine which has grown around Christianity and the person of Jesus has caused so much division between Christians and Jews, between Christians and Muslims, and even between Christians and Christians.. the Bible, the authoritative Word of God has been interpreted in many incompatible ways between people who all claim to believe in the same God and the same Lord and Saviour. I don't trust doctrine because it's fallible human interpretation. But I think we can trust love. Some version of the Golden Rule exists in all the world's religions. Our requirement to love is the universal language of spiritual history, and is a good enough starting point for all humanity.
How about John chapter 6?
Are you referring to John 6 v35?
35 And Jesus said unto them, I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst.