This is the second instalment of my series where I look at Richard Carrier’s case against the resurrection of Jesus. The first instalment was quite some time ago, in May 2011. There I examined Carrier’s comparison of the historical evidence for the empty tomb versus the historical evidence for Julius Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon. I attempted to explain why Carrier’s rejection of that analogy was inadequate. Part three will be the most important in the series, as it addresses the argument that Carrier continually uses to bear the main load of his case. That argument is the argument that Christianity did not need an empty tomb to avoid falsification when it first began, because the first Christians, Carrier alleges, didn’t really believe that Jesus’ body had been resurrected, believing instead that Jesus had left his old body lying dead and been raised to spiritual life in a new, non-physical body. But that argument can wait, for now. In this part I will look at Carrier’s second category of argument: General Case for Insufficiency. Let’s dive right in – As it’s Easter the timing seems most appropriate!
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In the New Testament in Mark chapter twelve (paralleled in Matthew chapter twenty-two), we read about an encounter between Jesus and some Sadducees. Sadducees, as you may know, were a group of Jews who denied the resurrection of the dead, as well as the existence of spirits (in the sense of departed spirits), angels and demons. This life is all there is, they believed, and when you die, that is the end of you forever.

In this passage the Sadducees were trying to reduce the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead to absurdity by showing that it led to bizarre consequences. What if a woman’s husband died, so she remarried a number of times, with each subsequent husband dying (!!!). At the resurrection of the dead, who would she be married to? Their implied answer was: “Surely not all of them. So the resurrection leads to unacceptable consequences, and you should really just give it up.”

Jesus gave two answers, and I’m going to focus on the second. His first answer was to say that actually at the resurrection of the dead there won’t be any marriage, so the issue won’t even arise. His second answer, however, is an unexpected foray into the Hebrew Scripture in verses twenty-six and twenty-seven:

And as for the dead being raised, have you not read in the book of Moses, in the passage about the bush, how God spoke to him, saying, ‘I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not God of the dead, but of the living. You are quite wrong.

What is particularly significant about this quote from Scripture is that Jesus is referring to an account in the book of Exodus. The Sadducees only accepted the authority of the Torah, the first five books of the Bible (often called the five books of Moses). They didn’t accept the other books of the Hebrew Scripture and they didn’t accept the oral traditions and other writings. As far as they could see, the Torah contained no references to the resurrection of the dead (unlike, for example, the book of Daniel), so they didn’t accept it. For Jesus to draw support for the resurrection from the book of Exodus, then, shows an approach that is happy to meet with opponents on common ground where possible.

While the question of the Sadducees, along with Jesus’ answer (“And as for the dead being raised…”) make it clear that the intention of the author was to capture a dispute concerning the resurrection, some have sought to find more here, arguing that actually this passage shows that Jesus believed in a conscious intermediate state of the spirits of the departed. Since God is said to be the God “of the living,” and since Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were physically dead when those words were spoken, Jesus must surely have meant that the dead are really alive, conscious in the intermediate state.
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Episode 42 presents the “minimal facts” approach to the resurrection of Jesus.

This episode doesn’t just present the argument in order to persuade you, it’s also meant to show you what the argument is like so that you can use it yourself (if you find it persuasive of course). It starts out with four facts granted by the majority of New Testament critics, and then works towards an explanation of those facts.

In this episode I refer to other blog posts and podcast episodes, and as promised here are links to those:

Merry Mithras!
Episode 19: Osiris and Jesus
Is there No Evidence that Jesus Even Existed?
Is there No Evidence that Jesus Even Exited? Part 2
Is there No Evidence that Jesus Even Exited? Part 3

Episode 042: The Minimal Facts Approach to the Resurrection of Jesus [ 1:04:14 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

This week I’m in Auckland taking part in a couple of speaking events as part of Jesus Week at the University of Auckland. On Wednesday the 4th of August I really enjoyed taking part in a panel discussion with Matt and Madeleine Flannagan, called “A Godless Public Square”? The broad subject area was the legitimate role of religious convictions in public life, law and politics – certainly a topical area of discussion today. Pat Brittenden did a great job as moderator/ facilitator of discussion, providing a relaxed and really open forum for conversation.
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At his Internet Infidels website and in a number of talks including a debate with Michael Licona on the Resurrection of Jesus, Richard Carrier presents an argument for “Why I Don’t Believe the Resurrection Story.” I have decided to put together a response to the reasons that Carrier offers for not believing in the resurrection of Jesus. This will be a series of three or four blog posts, and when complete I will make it available in the article section.

At his website, his presentation is divided into five sections: Main Argument / Rubicon Analogy, General Case for Insufficiency, Probability of Survival vs Miracle, General Case for Spiritual Resurrection, and Rebutting Lesser Arguments. Actually the section that drew my interest the most was Carrier’s arguments for a “spiritual resurrection.” His position is that the earliest biblical account of the resurrection of Jesus has nothing to say about Jesus actually coming back to life in any bodily sense. Instead, says Carrier, the first disciples of Jesus had either a vision or a dream of Jesus in heaven, and came to believe that in spite of his death, Jesus had spiritually survived in an immaterial form in heaven. I’ll say more about that later.

Out of convenience, I’ll divide my coverage of the arguments into five sections as Carrier did. For what it is worth, I commend to readers the debate that Carrier had with Michael Licona (see the link provided above) for a succinct, clear verbal presentation of Carrier’s position.
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Early on the morning of the first Easter Sunday, according to the New Testament, a small number of women came to the tomb where Jesus had been laid, only to find that it was empty. The empty tomb is one of the widely accepted facts that speak in favour of belief in the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth from the dead.

One of the numerous considerations that favour the historical reliability of the account of the empty tomb is the fact that the initial testimony of the empty tomb is said to have come from a small group of women. However chauvinistic it might be, the fact is that in first century Palestine as in the wider Middle East, the testimony of a woman was regarded as inferior to that of a man. If an author had simply invented the discovery of the empty tomb and been trying to make it seem as persuasive as possible, women would certainly not have been his first choice of initial witness. Even in a court of law, women were regarded as being – compared to men – unqualified as witnesses. Presenting the testimony of women as the epistemological basis of the belief of others would perhaps have even served as an embarrassment to the early church. Hence, the authors of the Gospel would not have been motivated to paint fictional accounts with women as first witnesses. That they portrayed the events this way therefore counts in favour of the reliability of the account of the empty tomb.
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A couple of times in recent history I’ve encountered Christians who have used the sentence “you’re going to be dead a lot longer than you’re going to be alive” as a way of referring to the fact that heaven (or hell) is forever.

Christians have said it when responding to the popular book, “The Secret.”

One of the finest spokespeople for intellectually defensible Christianity has said it when responding to the nonsense of the likes of Sam Harris. This example frankly shocked me.

I just don’t know why Christians say this at all. They cannot possibly believe it. The language suggests a complete rejection of the physical world in our eternal future, beginning with the point of our death. Our experience will be of heaven or hell forever and ever, and we will always – always – be physically dead, living on only in a disembodied afterlife. Hence, we are (physically) alive for a short while until we die, but we will be dead forever after that, and so “we’re going to be dead a lot longer than we will be alive.”

But Christianity has literally never taught this. This denies the resurrection of the dead. If the resurrection of the dead is true, then we will be dead temporarily, but alive forever. Now, I’m not accusing the many Christians who use this careless phraseology of actually denying the resurrection of the dead – but why use language that does precisely this? Why say something so confusing when it reflects the opposite of what all Christians actually affirm? Please stop.

I also published this blog entry over at the Preterist Blog.

I’m under no illusions about the fact that my view on the mind-body problem is a minority view in the history of Christian thought. I’m a physicalist. This puts me in the minority because, as well known Christian philosopher of mind William Hasker (himself a dualist of sorts) put it:

By all odds the most influential mind-body theory in Western civilization has been mind-body dualism. Dualism was first developed as a philosophical theory by some of the Greek philosophers, notably Plato. It was adopted by most of the Christian thinkers of the first few centuries and subsequently came to share Christianity’s dominance of European civilization.
Hasker, Metaphysics: Constructing a Worldview, Contours of Christian Philosophy (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1983), 65.

This is not such a terrible indictment on Christian theologians. It’s hard to live in a culture utterly saturated with a certain viewpoint without being influenced by it. As an almost inevitable result, “the Greek Fathers of the first three centuries of the Common Era (c.E.) drew upon various traditions within the Greco-Roman world from as early as Plato and Aristotle in formulating their language and concepts of the human person.” [Ray Anderson, “On Being Human: The Spiritual Saga of a Creaturely Soul” in Warren Brown, Nancey Murphy, and H. Newton Maloney (eds) Whatever Happened to the Soul?: Scientific and Theological Portraits of Human Nature (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998), 183.]

As the facts of history would have it in the pre-modern world, physicalism was a quiet voice amidst a loud dualist majority. As the facts of recent history would have it, the tables are turning on this state of affairs. In contemporary Christian philosophy and theology, there is a growing acceptance of physicalism as an expression of a biblical holisitc picture of humanity, evidenced by a flood of scholarly yet conservative books, articles, conferences and so on, advocating a real willingness to question the cultural baggage that Christianity has taken on board and a fresh willingness to revisit what the Bible has to say about all this. Christian dualism is still the majority view, but it is a majority in decline, a fact I take some pleasure in. If you’re a dualist, all of this may be a little unnerving. As Bob Dylan told us decades ago now, the times they are a changin’! I have no intention of dragging you kicking and screaming out of dualism in this fairly short blog entry, so don’t bother preparing for battle with me just now. The purpose of this blog isn’t to promote my views on that issue (however much I think those views would be good for your theology). However, it’s best to lay all my cards on the table right at the outset so you know what I am.

The reason I’m even broaching the subject is to draw attention to how philosophy of mind is related to the hyperpreterist controversy (controversy? OK, so in Christianity in general it’s not even a storm in a teacup, so insignificant is that movement, but you know what I mean). Hyperpreterism is necessarily a very dualistic outlook, even more dualistic than mainstream Christian dualism. Here’s why:
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Every Christian who decides on a stance to take on the mind-body issue is going to have to live with the fact that there will be certain “problem texts” in the Bible that appear to conflict with the position they take. As a physicalist, I think there is a very small number of such texts for my view, and I think there are plausible explanations for all of them (for example Jesus’ words to the criminal on the cross Luke 23:43, which I discussed recently). What one hopes to do is to settle on a view that has fewer problems than all others, problems that have an explanation in sight.

I think that traditional Cartesian/platonic dualism has a real problem, therefore, when it comes to 1 Corinthians 15, as I think it contains a problem for dualism – a problem with no real solution that I can see. The chapter is a decent size, so I won’t reproduce it here, but go ahead and read it first to make sure I’m representing what it says faithfully. The subject is the resurrection of the dead, and it arises because some of those in the church in Corinth had said that there will be no resurrection. The Apostle Paul makes a number of comments on this, one of which concerns my point here. In doing so he indicates that he cannot possibly have been a dualist.
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Mainstream New Testament scholarship on the Gospels is considerably more conservative than it was, say, forty years ago (or thirty, or perhaps even twenty). For example, the greater number of New Testament critics seemed to agree as a kind of in-house duty that the Gospels were written late in the first century – the later the better, and if you can find a way of saying that they weren’t finished until the second century, even better! The centre of what is “mainstream” has moved a long way since then. Now, voices like those of Bart Ehrman or the Jesus Seminar have been nudged well and truly to the fringes, well-known now more as curiosities than as sources of sober minded scholarship, and it is voices like N. T. Wright, Craig Evans and Richard Bauckham that are setting the pace. Much of the extraordinary scepticism and radical reconstruction of first century Christianity is now seen as simply unwarranted.

But I digress (I got distracted by a certain sense of satisfaction with the sea change that the world of biblical studies has seen). Even those with outdated and extraordinarily sceptical approaches to New Testament studies acknowledge the relatively early date of authorship of the letters written by the Apostle Paul. The first epistle to the Corinthians was composed in the mid fifties, around twenty-five years after the crucifixion. From reading through the letter you can see that one of the theological issues that the church in Corinth was struggling with was scepticism over the resurrection.
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