Chapter 3: The Case Against 'The Case For Easter'.

And Abraham said unto him, “If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead.”

Luke 16:31

The Case for Easter:
A Journalist Investigates Evidence for the Resurrection
by Lee Strobel.

Lee Strobel, an atheist, is shocked when his wife becomes a Christian. He decides to use his journalistic training to investigate her new found faith, with a view to de-converting her (“maybe I could liberate her from this cult”). He takes the story of the resurrection as his starting point, because it is obviously the linchpin of Christianity. In order to prove the that it never happened, he consults a number of experts. He talks to a forensic pathologist, in order to find out if crucifixion was generally fatal. He talks to a philosopher to find out if Jesus’ body really disappeared from his tomb. And he talks to a Bible scholar to find out if people really saw Jesus alive after he died. Astonishingly, the answer to all three questions is “yes”, and in the face of such overwhelming evidence, the writer becomes a believer himself. The results form the basis of his book The Case For Easter.

The veneer of neutrality is pretty thin. The book was published some twenty years after Strobel’s actual conversion, and he admits that he is “retracing and expanding” upon his original journey. The experts he talks to appear to be committed evangelical Christians, and their arguments come heavily laden with theological presuppositions. 

So, he visits one Dr Alexander Metherel to find out about the gruesome details of crucifixion. Metherel, he says, can be relied on to discuss the subject “dispassionately as well as accurately”. The purpose is to explore the theory that the resurrection stories arose because Jesus was only mostly dead. He went into some kind of coma on the cross, but revived three days later in the tomb. 

The interview is full of this kind of thing: 

Jesus was in hypovolemic shock as he staggered up the road to the execution site at Calvary carrying the horizontal beam of the cross. Finally, Jesus collapsed and the Roman soldiers ordered Simon to carry the cross for him. (p16)

When he talks about “hypnovolemic” shock, Metherel is giving his expert opinion as a professional pathologist—describing what he thinks the physical condition of a man who had been brutally flogged would be. But when he describes Jesus’ journey to Golgotha he is talking as an amateur expositor.

Mark’s gospel says:

And when they had mocked him…they led him out to crucify him. And they compel one Simon a Cyrenian, who passed by, coming out of the country, the father of Alexander and Rufus, to bear his cross.(Mark 15 20-21)

Matthew and Luke use almost exactly the same words.  But John says:

And they took Jesus, and led him away. And he bearing his cross went forth into a place called the place of a skull, which is called in the Hebrew Golgotha. (John 19:17)

That Jesus carried the cross some part of the way and that Simon was pressed into service when he could go no further is an apologetic gloss: an attempt to reconcile two contradictory passages. John’s language is emphatic: most modern translations say “bearing his own cross” but some prefer “carrying the cross himself”: It may very well be that he is consciously refuting Matthew, Mark and Luke for theological reasons.

I do not say that the supposition that Jesus staggered and then collapsed is unlikely or far-fetched. Many good Christians have come to that conclusion, and it’s been one of the official “stations of the cross” for at least five hundred years. There is nothing wrong with a preacher or a mystic or a story-teller using his imagination to flesh out a story. But if we are being asked to treat this as a forensic investigation, we must assume that at this point the judge would have intervened. “Could the witness kindly avoid speculation and confine himself to the facts?” 

Again, Metherel explains that the process of crucifixion would involve dislocating the victim’s shoulders. For all I know, this may be true. But he continues: 

This fulfilled the Old Testament prophecy in Psalm 22 which foretold the crucifixion hundreds of years before it took place. (p19)

It is certainly true that Psalm 22 contains the line “all my bones are out of joint”. And it is certainly true that Mark says that Jesus quoted the first verse “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me” before he died. But if we are being sceptical, let alone dispassionate, that’s as far as we can go. A Christian text, written some forty years after the event, uses language drawn from an ancient hymn. Metherel, brought onstage to speak scientifically about the medical reality of crucifixion takes it for granted that the Bible contains genuine prognostication. We are being asked to assume the supernatural inspiration of scripture before we have established that Jesus really died. 

Strobel asks Metherel what can possibly have motivated a person to endure the sort of treatment Jesus underwent. The scientist dispassionately replies:

Jesus….was willing to go through with it because this was the only way he could redeem us—by serving as our substitute and paying the death penalty we deserve because of our rebellion against God. (p27)

“The historical Jesus was convinced that he had to die in Jerusalem in order to fulfil God’s purposes” might be a valid (though in fact contentious) claim: “The historical Jesus was a fully paid up subscriber to a Lutheran/evangelical view of penal substitution”, not so much. Metherel is speaking as a committed Christian, not a qualified pathologist.

*

Next, Strobel interviewers Dr William Lane Craig, a fairly well known Christian philosopher and theologian, whose job it is to prove that Jesus’ body really did vanish from the tomb. Craig makes short work of all the stock rationalist explanations. It is inherently implausible that any third party exhumed the body, or that the various Marys got lost and went to the wrong grave, or that Mary Magdalene mistook the gardener for her rabbi. The sceptical Strobel admits that “every theory seemed to crumble under the weight of evidence and logic”. But surely, despite their obvious holes, these flawed rational explanation are more plausible than “the absolutely incredible idea that Jesus was God incarnate who rose from the dead”. 

This is Bart Ehrman’s line: it’s unlikely that the Romans exhumed Jesus’ body—but that’s more likely than a dead person coming back to life. It’s unlikely that the disciples made up a deliberate lie—but that’s more likely than a dead person coming back to life. It’s unlikely to have been a matter of mistaken identity—but that’s more likely than a dead person coming back to life. People do sometimes lie: people do become absolutely convinced of the most unlikely things. Remember the medieval Italian peasant who went to the stake because he wouldn’t back down on his conviction that the universe was made of cheese?

But Craig has an answer: 

“What is improbable is the hypothesis that Jesus rose naturally from the dead. That, I would agree, is outlandish. Any hypothesis would be more probable than saying the corpse of Jesus spontaneously came back to life.
 

But the hypothesis that God raised Jesus from the dead doesn’t contradict science or any known facts of experience. All it requires is the hypothesis that God exists, and I think there are good independent reasons for believing that he does.”(p56)

“If there definitely isn’t a God, miracles definitely don’t happen: but if there is a God then they might” seems like a reasonable proposition. But quite a lot depends on how you define your terms. An atheist might perfectly well believe in anomalous, supernatural, inexplicable events; he just wouldn’t call them miracles. And a theist might believe in a God who could perform miracles, but doesn’t, or indeed, one who has set things up so that miracles are impossible. The claim “miracles become plausible if you believe in God” only works if you have tacitly defined God as “a being who performs miracles” and miracles as “things done by God.” The claim boils down to “if miracles ever happen, then this miracle may have happened”. Or, put another way “You disbelieve in this particular miracle only because you have decided in advance to disbelieve in all miracles.”

It’s a theological Catch-22. The resurrection proves the existence of Craig’s God— but if Craig’s God doesn’t exist, there are no good grounds to believe in the resurrection. 

You can’t get a job unless you’ve got a green card but you can’t get a green card unless you’ve got a job. 

Strobel started his investigation as an atheist. He is investigating the resurrection because, if it really happened, it validates Jesus’ claim to be the son of God. The resurrection is “the prime vindication of Jesus claim to deity”. Anyone, he says, might claim to be God’s son, but if someone definitely returned to life after being definitely dead, that would “substantiate the assertion” and offer “compelling confirmation” that he was telling the truth. 

I am not completely sure that it would. But if Craig is right, the question does not arise. You can only get to the resurrection if you have already decided, on other grounds, that Craig’s God exists. In which case vindications, substantiations, and confirmations are neither here nor there. At best, they rubber stamp what you already know to be the truth.

I think that Craig may also be smuggling another idea into the argument. If the proofs of the resurrection are compelling on the assumption that God exists, it follows that the people who disbelieve in the resurrection are assuming that he doesn’t. As sceptical inquirers, that is in fact precisely what they ought to be assuming. But Craig is attempting to shift the burden of proof. And his case verges on the Bulveristic. If a sceptic presents a sensible counter-argument—say that the texts are too late and too obviously polemical too be treated as historical evidence—the believer can counter with a deft “You only think that because you’ve already decided that God doesn’t exist.” 

It is neither silly nor dishonest to treat Christianity as a faith-position. That’s what it is. But we’d have been better off leaving the resurrection to one side and going straight to the “good reasons” for thinking that there is a Christian God in the first place—which Craig assures us do exist.

*

In the final section, Strobel talks to someone called Dr Gary Habermas about the posthumous appearances of Jesus. From the dialogue as Strobel reconstructs it, Habermas comes across as a more sophisticated thinker than either Craig or Metherel. I think that there is a great deal to his argument that Paul in the epistle to the Corinthians preserves a credal statement about the people who purportedly saw the risen Jesus, and that this means that we can say with some confidence that within a decade of the crucifixion that there was a widespread belief that the dead Jesus had really come back to life. And I take his point that the inconsistencies between the four Gospel accounts shouldn’t obscure the fact that the stories they are telling are very similar indeed: Jesus is buried; the tomb is found to be empty; women see messengers; Jesus appears to his sceptical disciples; he returns to heaven. (By contrast, the two stories of Jesus’ birth, in Matthew and Luke, have very little in common with each other.)

Some of his arguments are less impressive. If Mark’s Gospel was written around CE 70, he says, and if his passion narrative was based on still earlier sources, he maintains that there simply isn’t time for “legends” about empty tombs and angels to have developed.

Now, it is very true that our earliest stories about, say, King Arthur were written five hundred years after the date of any historical prototype, and the definitive version that everyone knows was written a full millennium after any possible real event. The Jesus-stories are clearly not legends in that sense. But to add “And therefore they must be broadly historical” is too big a leap. Legends about Elvis Presley faking his death and selling burgers in Kalamazoo were in circulation within a decade of the singer’s demise; and the legend that Walt Disney was cryogenically frozen kicked off as early as 1969.

“Yes…but Elvis fans weren’t prepared to be executed for their belief that the King was alive, and Mousketeers didn’t found a religion which acquired billions of adherents.”

No, indeed: but that wasn’t the point either of us was making.

Strobel and his three experts all take the gospels at face value: as evidence or testimony or reports. No-one seems to notice that John’s gospel and Mark’s gospel are radically different books—narratively, poetically and theologically. And no-one seems to care that Mark and Matthew are incredibly similar, to the point that they can’t be independent. The synoptic problem is glossed over in a single sentence “Some people say that Matthew and Luke plagiarised Mark.”

Instead, we keep getting this kind of thing:

The disciples were fearful, doubtful and in despair after the crucifixion, whereas people who hallucinate need a fertile mind of expectation of anticipation. Peter was hardheaded, for goodness sake. James was a skeptic—certainly not a good candidate for hallucinations. (p79)

I don’t know if Habermas is right about the psychology of hallucination. I don’t know if a man who was riddled with guilt having disowned his best friend hours before that friend died by torture would be less likely to imagine that he saw him alive than someone who parted on good terms. 

But every clause needs the words “Sez who?” printed after it in large, friendly letters.

    Who says the disciples were fearful and in despair? 

Christians.

    Who says that Peter was hard-headed (whatever that means)? 

Christians.

    Who says that James was sceptical? 

Christians.

We have no neutral accounts. A Christian sacred text, explicitly written in order to demonstrate that Jesus was the Messiah, tells a story about Peter disowning Jesus, and then tells another story about Peter seeing Jesus alive after he died. Habermas wants us to take this as strong evidence that Peter was not hallucinating, and to take that in turn as strong evidence that Christian claims about the trinity, the incarnation, and the atonement are valid.

It won’t do. In a fair trial, the jury is not asked to determine whether Mr J T Ripper is really a murderer: they are only asked to determine whether the prosecution has proved that he is. If the evidence is weak, they must acquit, and the accused must be presumed innocent (even if, on balance, it is quite likely that he did dunnit). 

The strongest, most favourable summary of Strobel’s case that I could construct would go like this.

“By CE 40 Christians were claiming that other Christians had seen Jesus alive after he died. By CE 70, Christians were writing down stories about Jesus’ body disappearing from his tomb. These two data points—that there were strong early traditions about an anomalous tomb phenomenon, and strong early traditions of posthumous appearances—are sufficient to establish that Jesus literally came back to life after he died, which are in turn, sufficient to convince fair-minded sceptics of the unique truth of Christian theological claims.”

I am extremely tempted to quote a review of this book I read on an atheist website.

“Is that really the best you’ve got?”

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