Jesus’s Resurrection Can’t Possibly be Historically Proven

The apologist’s red herrings and the deeper matter of historical reasoning

Photo by JINU JOSEPH, on Pexels

Besides the quaint assumption that God exists at all, the key assurance that Christian apologists want to give is that Jesus was physically resurrected from the dead.

The highly educated apologist James W. Miller argues that “Jesus’ Resurrection is Historically Proven,” as the title of one of his articles declares.

And he says this is important for Christians because “The resurrection is not a metaphor for hope. It is either a historical reality or Christianity collapses.” Luckily, says Miller, the evidence is on the Christian’s side: “There was early creedal proclamation within a few years, identified eyewitnesses, multiple independent traditions, enemy corroboration, an empty tomb, martyrdom, explosive growth in Jerusalem, and strong manuscript preservation.”

Thus, “The resurrection [hypothesis] explains more data with fewer assumptions than its rivals,” such as the scenario in which there was only a hallucination or vision of a risen Jesus. But if the resurrection hypothesis is the best explanation of early Christianity, “we are not dealing with inspirational mythology.” Instead, “We are dealing with history.”

It turns out, though, that not only are Miller’s pieces of evidence weak, but they’re all red herrings.

For that reason, I’ll go through them summarily here before turning to the more important question of what it would mean to show that a miracle happened in history.

The red herrings that apologists misconstrue as proofs

Miller says that Christianity’s resurrection claim begins early with the eyewitness testimony of Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:3–8, which includes a kerygma (proclamation), or a creedal summary of the Christian faith that most (Christian) scholars think goes back to an earlier tradition that sprang up only a few years after Jesus’s crucifixion. That summary affirms that Jesus was resurrected.

Alas, as New Testament historian Robert Price explains, there’s reason to think that the kerygma was a later redaction from the early second century. After all, that creed, which uses technical language about the rabbinical passing on of tradition, contradicts Galatians 1:13–24, which explicitly says that Paul received the gospel from scripture and a vision, not from anyone else.

Miller makes much of the kerygma’s limb-climbing assertion that 500 witnesses saw the risen Christ. But as Price says, that very assertion is rather evidence that the kerygma is “a late piece of apocrypha,” since the gospel narratives are wholly silent on this tradition. If there had been 500 eyewitnesses, and this was known at least as early as when Paul was writing, why didn’t the canonical gospels incorporate that evidence in their accounts?

Miller goes on to say that the resurrection narrative satisfies the historian’s criterion of multiple attestation since it’s “attested across independent traditions: Markan tradition, M tradition (unique to Matthew), L tradition (unique to Luke), Johannine tradition, Pauline tradition, Pre-Pauline creeds.”

Yet this is nonsense. The scholar of early Christianity, Robyn Faith Walsh, explains that the presumption that the gospels were formed in communities that preserved their traditions is an anachronism deriving from Romantic German studies of early Christian history. The traditions that matter were literary ones, meaning that the early communities consisted of just the writers who borrowed frequently from each other. So, as the synoptic problem shows, the gospels aren’t independent of each other, and Mark was probably aware of Paul’s epistles.

As the ex-Christian and YouTuber Paulogia explains in his naturalistic, minimal witnesses hypothesis, the simplest explanation of the early resurrection claim is that the claim began with at most two independent visions of a risen Jesus, Peter’s and Paul’s. The rest spread from there, as James, Jesus’s brother, joined the movement, and word spread of Peter’s vision. The gospel writers wrote about the meaning of those visions, relying on Paul’s theology, and they borrowed from each other.

Miller says the empty tomb tradition is further evidence of Jesus’s resurrection.

I dispose of William Lane Craig’s version of that argument in two comprehensive articles (linked below), so I won’t belabor the counterarguments here. I’ll just point out that, contrary to Miller, who says it’s strange that the gospels would maintain that women were the first witnesses since women didn’t have legal authority to give testimony in Jewish circles, that legal standard was irrelevant to the spreading of gossip.

Moreover, the strangeness would have been precisely Mark’s point since his theology emphasized the revolutionary aspect of Jesus’s mission. Repeatedly, his gospel contends that Jesus reversed expectations, such as by preaching that the poor would do better with divine judgment than the rich.

Miller says that enemies of Christianity, such as Tacitus and Josephus, conceded that early Christians believed Jesus was raised from the dead, and “That requires explanation.”

But the explanation of that fact isn’t hard to come by since no one denies that early Christians believed Jesus was resurrected. The appeal to early non-Christians’ confirmation of that fact moves the goal posts since the question at issue is whether there’s sufficient evidence to think that Jesus probably was resurrected, and thus that the early Christian belief was correct.

If we deny that Jesus was actually raised from the dead, how do we explain the fact that early Christians believed Jesus was resurrected? That’s not hard at all. How do we explain the emergence of the trillions of lunatic notions that have spread like wildfire for thousands of years of recorded history? People are foolish and gullible, especially illiterate peasants from the ancient world.

(Note that the educated Christians likely subscribed to a more esoteric, Hellenistic interpretation of the resurrection, such as the one Paul provides. According to him, flesh can’t inherit the kingdom of God, and what’s resurrected is a “spiritual body,” so the resurrection wouldn’t have been physical after all.)

Next, Miller warms up the old chestnut about how early Christians, such as Peter, James, and Paul, were martyred. According to Miller, “If the resurrection were a conspiracy, the disciples would have known it was fabricated. Yet they maintained their testimony under torture and death.”

The historian Richard Carrier disposes of this apologetical ruse. There’s no early evidence that any of the apostles were martyred. Moreover, the best sources we have about the executions of early Christians don’t tell us why they were killed. For their deaths to be relevant to the question of whether Jesus was probably resurrected, the martyrs would have had to die for that very belief. But if they were executed, they could have been killed on wholly unrelated grounds, such as political ones, in which case denying that the resurrection occurred wouldn’t have made a difference to their killers.

And even if they died for that very belief, who says no one dies for a mistaken belief? They’d have been martyred for their contention that Jesus was resurrected, but that would testify only to the fervency of their religious belief, not to the belief’s rational justification. Plenty of errors and even lunacies have been fervently believed on fallacious grounds, which is why psychology isn’t the same as epistemology.

Miller says that when it comes to the New Testament, “We possess over 5,800 Greek manuscripts, more than 10,000 Latin manuscripts, and thousands more in other languages.”

Yet quantity isn’t the same as quality. As the popular adage reminds us, a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth puts on its shoes. The number of copies of New Testament texts doesn’t make the texts reliable for historical purposes. For one thing, that quantity doesn’t make up for the lack of early, first- or second-century texts.

As biblical scholar Bart Ehrman says,

despite the large number of manuscripts we have, there are hardly any that are extremely early. Most of our manuscripts are from the Middle Ages, many centuries — over a thousand years! — after the originals. What is worst, all these surviving manuscripts disagree with one another, often in minor ways, and sometimes even in major ways. Apart from the smallest fragments, no two of our manuscripts are exactly alike.

Moreover,

If our first reasonably complete copies of the New Testament do not appear until two or three centuries after the books were first put in circulation, that’s two or three hundred years of scribes copying and recopying, making mistakes, multiplying mistakes, changing the text in ways big and small before we have complete copies. We can’t compare these, our oldest surviving copies, with yet older ones to see where their mistakes are. There aren’t any older ones.

Also,

If you take two New Testament manuscripts from around the year 1000 and compare them to one another, they are often very much alike in every verse. But if you do the same thing with the fragmentary copies made around the year 200, you find lots and lots of differences — differences both from the manuscripts of the year 1000 and, more disconcertingly, differences from one another. This tells us that the earliest scribes were not as skilled or assiduous as the later ones. And that’s a problem, because all of our surviving manuscripts were copied from earlier manuscripts, and the earliest copies of all were filled with mistakes.

Lastly, Miller says there’s a “failure of alternative explanations.” That’s not so, of course, because Paulogia’s minimal witnesses hypothesis is far more plausible than the traditional Christian’s resort to the supernatural. Also, there’s no such thing as a genuine explanation that appeals to the supernatural.

The resurrection claim is ahistorical

Here, finally, we can dispense with those red herrings since even if you discount everything I’ve said above and grant all of Miller’s points, they don’t “prove” that Jesus rose from the dead as a historical fact.

David Hume explained the basic reasoning used in actual history, as opposed to the apologetics that masquerades as history purely in the field of New Testament “studies,” which is loaded with Christians who have a patent conflict of interest.

Historical reasoning is inductive or analogical, so one thing is compared to something else, and if one thing is similar to lots of other things, our background knowledge more easily assimilates it as familiar. If something is very strange and unlike what’s already been experienced, an explanation that reconciles the strange thing with what’s already understood will always be preferable to a hand-waving claim that dismisses all our background knowledge. Inductive reasoning is conservative and holistic in that respect.

So Miller wants to say that the above evidence indicates that a miracle occurred, which is the basis of Christianity. In strictly rational terms, however, no such theological declaration could compete with any naturalistic account of the same evidence. This is because theology plays by a very different set of rules. Again, the critical study of history, as in the kind that was fully formed only in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as an approximation of scientific methods, proceeds roughly with inductive, analogical, conservative reasoning.

For instance, suppose we want to explain the origin of the early Christian belief that Jesus was resurrected. We know what committed Christians like Miller think about that question, but the assertion that a miracle happened is never, ever strictly rational. On the contrary, to assert that a supernatural being raised a crucified man from the dead and welcomed that man’s spiritual body into outer space is precisely to discount the entire sphere of background human reasoning.

All natural reasoning would be a trick of the devil, and only divine testimony or direct religious experience of the supernatural would matter. All natural life would be fleeting, and reason would only mislead us into thinking we have an independent way of understanding and progressing in the world. That pride would lead us to everlasting hell, making a mockery of the paltry, illusory progress in history.

The alternative to throwing our hands up, tearing our clothes, and living as ascetic monks, which is what the New Testament says all Christians should do, is to notice that lots of folks have been wrong about lots of stuff. Specifically, premodern knowledge of the world doesn’t hold a handle to the scientifically informed kind.

Also, we know that trauma affects the brain and is liable to give us hallucinations, somewhat like how psychoactive drugs alter our perception, as we struggle to process a devastating experience. What could have been more devastating than your treasured charismatic leader getting humiliated and crucified before the eyes of the world? Or what could have been more traumatic than feeling guilt for prosecuting peaceful, spiritual Christians?

Moreover, we know how gossip works. So why couldn’t Christianity have started largely from gossip based on one or two traumatically induced hallucinations or visions (in addition to the background, cultural factor of Hellenistic Judaism, which was already combining the relevant concepts)?

That kind of naturalistic explanation will always be simpler and more plausible than the apologist’s theological assertions because the latter could never amount to a genuine explanation in the first place. You don’t explain one mystery by positing a deeper mystery. That’s not what an explanation is.

Here, it’s interesting to dwell on Miller’s misuse of “proof.” Real historians don’t speak of proof since that’s a standard of evidence in mathematics and courts of law. Historians deal with the weight of probabilities, not necessities, since their distinctive reasoning is analogical, not deductive.

Why, then, does Miller speak so loosely about how Jesus’s resurrection is supposedly a “proven” matter of history? It’s because the apologist’s appeal to the miracle of a resurrected body operates outside the discipline of history. This theological claim is more like a mathematical one since the theologian, too, deals in necessities, albeit mere psychological or socially stipulated, metaphysical ones.

Mathematicians can prove this or that because they work with axioms that are likewise stipulated, so their necessities are game-like. Necessarily, once you accept certain rules, some moves are permitted while others are forbidden. Likewise in theology, once you’re indoctrinated into a religion, so you think in its terms, and your character, identity, and existential hopes for an afterlife are bound up with its dogmas, you take its creed to be necessary. The resurrection claim is crucial to that creed. Hence, the resurrection can be proven from that indoctrinated, dogmatic standpoint.

But it couldn’t be proven in the modern, critical telling of history since that would be oxymoronic.

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Further reading

• Jesus’s Resurrection and Evangelical Showmanship: Part One

• Jesus’s Resurrection and Evangelical Showmanship: Part Two

• “Jesus’ Resurrection is Historically Proven,” on Medium

• “Apocryphal Apparitions,” by Robert Price

• “The gospels were written by the elite… not peasants,” on YouTube

• ‘The “Minimal Witnesses” Naturalistic Hypothesis,’ by Paulogia

• “Did the Apostles Die for a Lie?” by Richard Carrier

• “New Testament Manuscripts: Good News and Bad News,” by Bart Ehrman

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