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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Chapter 2: Occam's Razor

Do not all charms fly at the mere touch of cold philosophy?

       John Keats

Occam’s razor implies that naturalistic explanations are invariably to be preferred over supernatural ones. However convoluted the method by which the murderer escaped from the locked room may be, there is never a sufficiently good reason to say “Perhaps he beamed up to his spaceship” or “Perhaps he cast his Apparition spell.”

Philip K Dick’s late novel The Transmigration of Timothy Archer asks how much evidence you would need before you abandoned Occam and postulated the miraculous. Your late wife’s photo falls off the wall on her birthday? Mere coincidence. The same thing happens next year? Still coincidence. But if the same picture falls off the same wall on the same date every year for twenty years, do you start to believe that someone in the spirit realm is trying to tell you something?

Sherlock Holmes said that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. But perhaps there is a point when the probable becomes sufficiently improbable that the impossible becomes plausible? Conspiracy theorists and apologists want us, in the face of the even moderately improbable, to automatically assume the impossible.

It is highly improbable that a small girl could take a trick photograph so sophisticated as to fool adults and photography experts for decades: therefore we should believe in the literal existence of fairies.  

It is highly improbable that a pious and honest girl would suddenly start telling far-fetched lies (while her dishonest brother sticks to the truth): therefore we should believe that there is a fairy-tale kingdom in the old professor’s cupboard. 

It is highly improbable that a group of simple men would invent a story about their dead teacher being a deity, and stick to it in the face of death: therefore you should buy whatever theology I am currently trying to sell. 

Granted, we don’t definitely know what is and what is not impossible. Plenty of things which would have seemed magical to our grandparents are now easily downloadable onto my smart-phone. For all we know, there might be portals between dimensions; and for all we know, time might flow at different rates in different universes. And if the point under discussion is “Do alternate universes exist?” then the Professor is correct: you can’t take “Alternate universes do not exist” as a premise. 

For all we know, there might be fairies, or magic, or flying saucers, or ghosts. For all we know, dead bodies might occasionally come back to life. But what kind of evidence do we need before we undergo such a dramatic paradigm shift?

Conspiracy theorists very often claim that the relative weakness of their evidence is the strongest indication that it is true. If you were trying to create a fake UFO photograph by hanging a hub-cap from a wire, you’d have the sense to cover your tracks: the fact that the wire is plainly visible in the photo is a strong indication that the photograph is genuine. A forger would have not made so obvious a mistake. For all we know, the human eye would find it hard to focus on otherworldly creatures, so the fact that the little girls are looking through the fairies rather than at them is a point in favour of the Cottingley pictures.

People who argue in this direction are, I think, trying to invoke something along the lines of lectio difficilior potior: “the hard reading is to be preferred”. A scribe copying a document would be more likely to simplify it than to make it more difficult, so faced with two versions of the same text, the obscure one is more likely to be accurate. Scholars of the historical Jesus talk about the “criterion of embarrassment”: passages which are theologically awkward are more likely to be authentic than ones which are theologically convenient. The Church probably wouldn’t have invented a story about the sinless saviour being baptised by John, but it might very well have made up a story in which Jesus delegated the power of forgiving and not-forgiving sins to the Bishop of Rome.

But this kind of thinking leaves you wide open to “heads I win, tails you lose” arguments in which every contradiction and improbability is proof of authenticity. You only get to say “This must be true, because it is so silly no-one would have made it up” if you are also prepared to say “This seems sensible and believable, and is therefore probably a forgery.”

What if a genuinely open-minded sceptic was persuaded to investigate the claim that the Old Inn was haunted? He would certainly have lots of questions. How far back do the ghost stories go? How consistent are they? Are there concrete accounts, or is it just a bit of free-floating folklore? Were the ghosts first mentioned in a story by a writer of spooky fiction, or by ordinary witnesses? Were the people who saw the haunting sceptics, or did they already believe in ghosts? Apparitions tend to be dispersed in the face of that kind of scrutiny. 

But perhaps the sceptic finds that this is an unusually well-attested haunting. A guest in the hotel in 1920 found a distressed child crying in one of the corridors, but by the time the proper authorities could be sent for, the kid was nowhere to be found. Another guest in 1978, oblivious to the first incident, described precisely the same event: a scared little boy who was gone by the time the police arrived. And then in 2003, excavations in the hotel uncovered a child’s remains, presumably a murder victim, evidently concealed since the seventeenth century.

Whereupon, of course, every ghost-hunter in England books into the offending room and claims to have seen a small figure or heard crying or just felt that something was not quite right. 

I think the sceptic might very well come to the conclusion that there was something to the first two sightings. He might very well conclude that there was a real phenomenon to be investigated. Would it necessarily follow that he “believed in ghosts”? And even if he did, would the verified haunting commit him to a particular version of the afterlife?

He might think that some barely understood naturalistic phenomenon caused two people to have the same hallucination. He might think that the house was infested by toxic mould. He might think that both witnesses had, in fact, read an ancient newspaper report of the murder, but repressed the memory. He might even think that violent events can leave some sort of psychic residue.

But would he be likely to say “I think, on balance, the dead child really did appear to the two visitors: therefore Father O’Murphy is correct when he talks about people who have been denied Christian burial being stuck in purgatory?” 

Or would he say “I am convinced that this room is haunted, and therefore, that everything Madam Acati and the Spiritualists say about ectoplasm and the Other Side is the literal truth.” 

I don’t think he would. “Some people honestly did see, or think they saw, a ghost” is the beginning of the investigation: not the end point. 

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Ecclesiastical Minimalism

   

Did Jesus of Nazareth really rise from the dead? 

Do we all mean the same things by "really" and "rise"? 

Does historical logic prove Christianity to be true? 

Are some American apologists really quite silly?

Are modernist theologians any more sensible?

And has Andrew discovered the lost ending of St Mark's Gospel?

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Chapter 1: A Conjuring Trick With Bones

The hymn writer says that Jesus walks with him and talks with him along life's narrow way. But did he really mean it?

Chapter 2; Occam's Razor

What would it take to make you honestly believe you'd seen a ghost?

Chapter 1: A Conjuring Trick With Bones

“Joe Hill ain’t dead,” he says to me,
“Joe Hill ain’t never died.
Where working folk are out on strike
Joe Hill is at their side.”

I grew up in one of those concrete suburban Methodist churches, built at the end of the 1960s. I was going to describe the architecture as “brutalist”, but apparently the correct term is “ecclesiastical minimalist”.  The minister was youngish and veered towards the trendy. He ran youth groups with names like “Sunday Session” and “Questers”  and made the drama group stage an impenetrable play called Christ in the Concrete City. 

Sunday Session used a hymn book that may have been called Youth Praise and was already looking quite dated. Some of the songs had verses to be sung by “girls” and other verses to be sung by “fellows”. It included a pop lyric that went. 

Hey, crazy mixed up generation

There is only one solution

Jesus is the great sensation….

Oh dear. Two other hymns stick in my memory. One, fairly well known, went thus:

He lives! He lives! 

Christ Jesus lives today!

He walks with me!

He talks with me!

Along life’s narrow way! 

He lives! He lives!

Salvation to impart!

You ask me how I know he lives?

He lives…

Within…

My heart….

The other, relatively obscure, one went 

The stone was rolled away

from where the saviour lay!

that glad and glorious day

when Jesus rose again! 

A living saviour he 

for all eternity! 

From sin to set me free

who died and rose again!

A bit of light googling reveals that “He Lives!” was one of five hundred songs written by an American Presbyterian pastor named Alfred Ackley, who died in 1960. But the only trace of “The Stone Was Rolled Away” that I can find on-line is in a Kenyan Christedelphian service book.

Everyone remembers that in 1984, David Jenkins (soon to become Bishop of Durham) was accused of saying that the resurrection of Jesus was “a conjuring trick with bones”. Nearly everyone knows that he actually said that the resurrection of Jesus was not a conjuring trick with bones. But the misquotation did not entirely misrepresent his intention. His view was that the story about Jesus’ body disappearing from his tomb, if historically true, would only amount to an astonishing and puzzling event, without further religious significance. It follows that the resurrection is not reducible to that story. He didn’t directly say that he disbelieved in the story but he certainly thought that it was inessential.  

The National Theatre’s legendary production of the Mysteries (based on the medieval mystery plays) which premièred a year after Jenkins had given his misunderstood interview, literally depicted Jesus’ tomb as a conjurer’s cabinet. The actor playing Jesus was placed inside, it was sealed with chains by the Roman soldiers, and revealed to be empty just as the actor playing Jesus emerged  from the other side of the auditorium. Trap-doors and body-doubles may have been involved.

I don’t suppose that the two hymn-writers substantially disagreed about their theology. I imagine that the one who wrote that the stone was rolled away felt that Jesus lived in his heart, and the one who said that Jesus lived in his heart believed that the stone had been rolled away. But as lyricists, they chose to emphasise different things. One says that the entrance to the mausoleum had been unexpectedly unblocked, and therefore they believe that the occupant is still alive. The other doesn’t mention bodies or interment at all, but says that Jesus is alive because they feel that Jesus is alive. 

This is not, incidentally, very good theology. Poetry never is. I suppose the writer could be saying that Jesus promised that he would come back to life after his execution, and also promised that he would send the paraclete, the Holy Spirit, to his disciples. Since the hymn writer feels the presence of the Holy Spirit, he trusts that the other promise was fulfilled as well. It is presumably as heretical to say that the Son is present in the heart of the believer as it would be to say that the Holy Spirit was crucified? But as a sensible trainee pastor once remarked to me “Now you are trying to be more sound than the Apostle Paul.”

But the real glitch is the more obvious one. “You ask me how I know he lives? He lives within my heart!” invites the response “You ask me how I know he doesn’t live? He doesn’t live within my heart!”

Some people believe (or speak as if they believe) that the resurrection was a phenomenon: the moving of an immovable stone, the inexplicable vanishing of a corpse, tangible encounters with a being who eats and can be touched and has scars and wounds on his body. Others believe (or speak as if they believe) that the resurrection was and is the subjective or spiritual experience of feeling close to Jesus.

The two views are, in principle, separable. You might think that the followers of Jesus came to believe that he was alive because his tomb was empty; you might think that they started to tell stories of an empty tomb because they felt that he was still alive. Certainly, someone might accept that a corpse came back to life supernaturally without necessarily feeling that the owner was continuously communicating with them personally. Equally, someone could experience a vivid spiritual presence while remaining agnostic on what several women called Mary may or may not have found in a graveyard two millennia ago.

The man we call Saint Paul very much believed that Jesus was alive: we are told that some Athenian philosophers formed the mistaken opinion that he was advocating the worship of two new deities, one named “Jesus” and the other named “Resurrection”. It is open to question whether Paul knew the story of the tomb, the stone, the angels and the female witnesses: if he did, he doesn’t ever refer to them. If you had asked him how he knew Jesus was alive, he would presumably have replied  “I know because Peter saw him, James saw him, a big group of Christians saw him, and finally, I saw him.” 

It is easy to miss the fact that Paul is our one indubitable eye witness to whatever the resurrection was. At least some of the epistles in our “New Testament” were definitely written by Paul, and in those epistles, he definitely claims to have seen the risen Jesus. But these first hand accounts are rather obscure: Paul says simply that Jesus “appeared” to him, and that “God revealed his son to me”. The second-hand accounts in the Acts of the Apostles describe what seem to be visionary experiences: Paul hears Jesus’ voice but his companions do not. And Paul himself is explicit that he didn’t learn about Jesus from eye-witness testimony or oral tradition, but by direct supernatural revelation. He believes what he believes because God told him so directly.  I don’t say he would have taken the tomb tradition to be secondary or inessential or that he would have talked about conjuring tricks, but I think he would have come down on the side of the first hymn-writer: Jesus lived in his heart. 

But was he merely using flowery language? When Paul says that he heard Jesus’s voice and that God’s son was revealed to him, perhaps he really only mean that he sat down and had a jolly good think and decided that the evidence about the carpenter being the long awaited Messiah stacked up awfully well, and that it followed that it was more important to have faith than to keep the Torah…? Come to that, when Rev Ackley talks about being in constant dialogue with Jesus, maybe he means nothing more than “I do find some of those stories and parables in the Bible awfully helpful”?

When I was a kid, I thought that people who talked about encountering Jesus literally meant that they had encountered Jesus: a physical form with a beard in a nightie and sandals had walked into their room. Visionary experiences like that do happen, or at any rate, people allege that they happen. How many pious Catholics have seen the virgin Mary? But then, how many distraught relatives have seen Granny sitting in her old rocking chair?

A Sunday School teacher once told me about a good Christian gentleman in our village who had given up a lucrative banking career to work for a charity “because God had told him to”. My immediate response as a child was that I wanted to ask him what God’s voice sounded like, and if he really had a beard. Thank Crom I never did. Obviously I now see that  “God told him” meant “He had a really strong conviction that this was the right thing to do”. 

People who use this kind of language--whether it is Paul or Alfred Ackley or the old man in my village-- are usually sincere. When they say that Jesus lives in their hearts, that he talks to them directly, or simply that they have been “called” to become preachers or missionaries or nuns, they are not talking about nothing. Like Johnny Cash, they were there when it happened so I guess they ought to know. And it is entirely possible that Paul was talking about something a lot bigger and more world-changing than a strong morally intuition that perhaps he ought to stop stoning Christians to death.

But I am now going to ask a hard, and possibly, offensive question. 

What is the necessary connection between those feelings and the phenomenon of a body vanishing from a locked mausoleum?

Do people who don’t believe in the anomalous tomb phenomena ever have spiritual experiences or strong moral intuitions?

Or are those experiences entirely without meaning if you don’t accept the factual historicity of the conjuring trick with bones? 

This series of essays on faith, doubt, and textual criticism is appearing for free on this blog over the coming weeks.

If you don't want to wait for the next installment, the complete 10-part series is already available to read on my Patreon.

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• Patreon Membership ($5/£3.75 month): Immediate access to all 10 parts and the rest of my Patreon archive (including exclusive essays on Spider-Man, CS Lewis, and the Rings of Power)
• Premium Membership ($10/£7.45 month): Includes free access to the complete series as a downloadable PDF book.
• One-Off Payment ($20/£15): Buy access to this specific Patreon collection.

Or just buy me a cup of coffee.