In chapter eight, Craig answers the question, “How credible, then, is the New Testament witness to the resurrection of Jesus?”
Craig argues that the apologetic arguments used against eighteenth century opponents of the resurrection are not effective today against modern biblical critics.
The traditional apologetic, represented by William Paley, may be summarized in three steps.
1. The Gospels are Authentic was a good argument against the Deists who granted apostolic authorship to the Gospels. Taken together, then, the internal and external evidence adduced by the Christian apologetics served to establish the first step of their case, that the gospels are authentic.
2. The Text of the Gospels is Pure.
This step was important to ensure that the Gospels we have today are the same Gospels as originally written. The abundance of manuscripts over a wide geographical distribution demonstrates that the text has been transmitted with only trifling discrepancies. Sounds like a majority of the text argument.
3. The Gospels are Reliable.
The apostles were neither deceivers nor deceived. All 500 disciples could not have had the same hallucinations simultaneously. Nor were the apostles deceivers rather they were men of integrity.
Because the apostles were neither deceivers nor deceived, the church was founded and endured despite persecution and even martyrdom.
The Decline of Historical Apologetics.
The decline of the nineteenth century historical apologetic was the result of the advance of biblical criticism which grew in Germany. The Rationalists who would not join the Deist camp and reject Christianity, turned to biblical criticism. Rationalism sought a middle ground between Deists and the supernaturalists. The rationalists rejected the physical resurrection but not a spiritual resurrection. Hermann Samuel Reimarus rejected the physical resurrection of Jesus. The disciples of Jesus stole his body and spread the story of Jesus’ resurrection.
Johann Salomo Semler, a conservative Rationalists, rejected Reimarus’ views. He believed in Jesus’ resurrection because Jesus taught it, but the resurrection could not be proved historically and was not necessary for a Christian to believe. Semler enabled Rational theology to adhere to the doctrines of Christianity while denying their historical basis.
The roof of traditional apologetics caved in with the advent of David Friedrich Strauss and his hermeneutic of mythological explanation. Strauss taught that the resurrection of Christ was legend.
“In the view of the church, Jesus was miraculously revived; according to the deistic view of Reimarus, his corpse was stolen by the disciples; in the rationalistic view, he only appeared to be dead and revived; according to our view the imagination of his followers aroused in their deepest spirit, presented their Master revived, for they could not possibly think of him as dead” (Herrmann Samuel Reimarus and His Apology, In Fragments 280-81).
In addition, to the advance of biblical criticism that undermined the traditional apologetic of the eighteenth century, there was the tide of subjectivism that replaced the objective approach in the Age of Reason.
Twentieth-Century Development
The first half of the twentieth-century saw theologians who continued to reject the historic resurrection of Christ like Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann. But the second half of the twentieth-century saw a renaissance of belief in the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection by Ernst Kasemann, etc. A new quest of the historical Jesus had begun.
Bart Ehrman claims there is no historical evidence for the resurrection of Christ. “Historians…have no difficulty whatsoever speaking about the belief in Jesus’ resurrection, since this is a matter of public record. For it is a historical fact that some of Jesus’ followers came to believe that he had been raised from the dead soon after his execution” (Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, 16, 294, 227). Ehrman, like David Friedrich Strauss believes the early Christian came to believe the legend of Jesus’ resurrection as truth and read it back into the gospels.
Craig states that Jon Meier’s view on the resurrection of Jesus was kooky. Meier believed that “although the resurrection is a real, bodily event involving the person of Jesus of Nazareth, the resurrection of Jesus is not an event in space and time and hence should not be called historical since we should require an historical occurrence to be something significant that is know to have happened in our space-time continuum” (Mentor, Message, and Miracle, vol. 2, New York: Doubleday, 1994, 525).
Dale Allison disbelieved the resurrection of Christ because of his problem of the identity of the resurrection of the body in the case the body had been completely destroyed. In such a resurrection, the person would be a duplicate and continuity would no longer exist. But this was not the case with Jesus. So there is no consistent basis for rejecting the resurrection of Jesus.
The Evidence for Jesus’ Resurrection
There are three great evidences for the resurrection of Jesus.
The first is the empty tomb.
Craig provides six lines of evidence supporting the fact that the tomb of Jesus was found empty by a group of his women followers on the first day of the week following the crucifixion.
1) The historical reliability of the story of Jesus’ burial support the empty tomb. The disciples could not have preached the resurrection of Jesus if he were still in the tomb. Neither would the residents of Jerusalem believed the apostles’ preaching of the resurrection of Jesus had he still been in the tomb. Also, if Jesus’ body were still in the tomb, then the Jewish authorities would have exhumed his body to disprove the resurrection of Jesus.
Jesus’ burial in the tomb is established by the following facts. First, Jesus’ burial is multiply attested in extremely early, independent sources. Such as Paul in 1 Cor. 15:3-5; Mark 15:37-16:7; Matthew’s, Luke’s, and John’s account of the burial. Most of these are eye-witness accounts within five years of the burial.
2) The discovery of Jesus’ empty tomb is multiply attested in very early, independent sources. The expression “he was buried” followed by the expression “he was raised” implies an empty tomb in the normal sense of language. There are at least five sources that verifying the empty tomb: Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and the sermons in Acts. Historians think they have hit historical pay dirt when they have two independent accounts of the same event. Jesus was said to have risen on the third day just as he predicted. These facts destroy the theory that Jesus’ resurrection was a latter legend read back into the Gospels.
3) The phrase “the first day of the week” reflects ancient tradition. The more common designation of Jesus’ resurrection as on the third day added to by the less common designation “the first day of the week” argues against this truth being the result of a latter legend.
4) Mark’s account is simple and lacks the legendary development. The Gospel of Peter stands in contrast, which describes Jesus’ triumphant egress from the tomb as a gigantic figure whose head reaches above the clouds, supported by giant angels, followed by a talking cross, heralded by a voice from heaven, and all witnessed by a Roman guard, the Jewish leaders, and a multitude of spectators! This is how real legends look: they are colored by theological and apologetical developments. By contrast, the Markan account is stark in its simplicity.
5) The tomb was probably discovered empty by women. Since the role of women in the first century was so low, no legend would have stated that the first witnesses were women.
6) The earliest Jewish polemic presupposes the empty tomb.
Matthew 28:11-15 tells of the Jewish authorities absurd explanation for the empty tomb: While the guards slept, the disciples of Jesus stole his body. The Jewish authorities, the enemies of Christ and the Gospel, were admitting that the tomb was empty.
Explaining the Empty Tomb
The Conspiracy Hypothesis: The disciples stole the body of Jesus and then lied about his postmortem appearances. Craig says that all modern scholarship rejects this explanation. As Wright nicely puts it, if your favorite Messiah got himself crucified, then you either went home or else you got yourself a new Messiah. But the idea is hardly one that would have entered the minds of the disciples
The Apparent Death Hypothesis: Jesus was not completely dead, he revived in the tomb, and escaped to convince his disciples of his resurrection. As Strauss mused, the appearance of a half-dead man desperately in need of medical attention would hardly have elicited in the disciples the conclusion that he was the Risen Lord and conqueror of Death.
The Wrong Tomb Hypothesis: The women lost their way that Sunday morning and happened upon a caretaker at the unoccupied tomb in the garden. He said something, “You’re looking for Jesus of Nazareth. He is not here.” The unnerved women flee. Later the disciples experience visions of Jesus alive and the women’s story develops into their finding the empty tomb. This was the view of Kirsopp Lake in 1907. Lake accepted the words of the angel ascribed to the caretaker, “You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, He is not here,” as authentic but then he passes over the words, “He is risen.”
The Displaced Body Hypothesis. Joseph Klausner in 1922 proposed that Joseph of Arimathea placed the body of Jesus in his tomb only temporarily because of the lateness of the hour, but then moved Jesus’ body to the criminal’s graveyard. The disciples being unaware of the move found the tomb empty and wrongly believed Jesus was resurrected. The Jewish custom was to bury criminals in the criminal graveyard the same day as execution which was only a short distance away from the place of crucifixion. Joseph of Arimathea had plenty of time to do the Jewish custom.
The Second is the Postmortem Appearances
Craig provides three main lines of evidences.
1) Paul’s list of eyewitnesses to Jesus’ resurrection appearances guarantees that such appearances occurred which includes Peter; the twelve; the five hundred brethren; James, the Lord’s half-brother; all the apostles; and Paul.
2) The Gospel accounts provide multiple, independent attestation of postmortem appearances of Jesus. The Gospels independently attest to postmortem appearances of Jesus, even to some of the same appearances found in Paul’s list.
3)The resurrection appearances were physical, bodily appearances. The disciples saw physical appearances of Jesus not hallucinations (which is the result of natural or human causes) nor visions which are caused by God.
Explaining the Resurrection Appearances
As Wright observes, for someone in the ancient world, visions of the deceased are not evidence that the person is alive, but evidence that he is dead. In the first century Jewish context, Jews were not expecting a resurrection of an individual but an end-time general resurrection. Dunn remarks: “Why draw the astonishing conclusion that the eschatological resurrection had already taken place in the case of a single individual separate from and prior to the general resurrection.”
The Third is the Origin of the Christian Faith
This is the evidence that N. T. Wright emphasizes in his The Resurrection of the Son of God.
Craig discusses three influences skeptics have for early believers coming to believe in the resurrection.
1. Christian influence. This is not a possibility because Christianity was not yet in existence.
2. Pagan influence. Contrary to what nineteenth and twentieth century scholars in the History of Religion school believed, scholars discovered that there were no parallels between pagan myths of seasonal gods dying and rising again and the resurrection of Christ.
3. Jewish Influence. This influence could not have led to the early church believing in the resurrection of Jesus, first because the Jews only believe in a resurrection at the end of the age. For example, when Jesus tells Martha in John 11:23-24, “Your brother will rise again.” What is her response? “Martha said to Him, ‘I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.’” Second, Jews believed that the resurrection at the end of the age was a resurrection of all the righteous or all the people and no concept of the resurrection of individuals.
Therefore, left to themselves, the disciples would not have come to belief in Jesus’ resurrection because of Jewish beliefs. They had to be convinced by the empty tomb and the postmortem appearances of Christ.
Craig ends this chapter with practical application and personal illustrations showing the three evidences of the resurrection can be used evangelistically.
In his Conclusion, The Ultimate Apologetic, Craig argues that the “more often than not, it is who you are rather than what you say that will bring an unbeliever to Christ.” This is the most effective and practical apologetic. This apologetic is based on our relationship with God by loving him with all our heart and our relationship to people by loving them as we love our selves. Jesus summarized this apologetic in John 13:35.