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Why I Am Not a Christian (2000)

Keith M. Parsons
This essay was originally published for the Atlanta Freethought Society in 2000.
Reprinted with permission.

Introduction

Why I Am Not a Christian

1. The Sins of Christianity

2. Kreeft and Tacelli on Hell

3. The Historicity of the Gospels

The Gospels Were Written by Persons Unknown (Not Eyewitnesses)
The Dates of the Gospels
The Gospels are Based on an Unreliable Oral Tradition
The Gospels Have a Theological Bias and an Apologetic Agenda
The Gospels Contain Fictional Forms
The Gospels Are Inconsistent with Each Other
The Gospels Are Inconsistent with Known Facts
There is No Independent Support for Gospels Claims
The Gospels Testify to Things Beyond Belief

4. Craig's Case for the Resurrection

The Postmortem Appearances
Were the Gospels Written Down Early, Under the Scrutiny of Eyewitnesses?
The Empty Tomb

5. Legend

6. Kreeft and Tacelli on the Hallucination Theory

Appendix: C.S. Lewis on Sex Outside of Marriage

Source:
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/keith_parsons/whynotchristian.ht
ml

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Introduction

This monograph will have an unusual format. It begins with an essay based on the
opening arguments of my debate with Dr. William Lane Craig on the subject "Why I
am/am not a Christian." This debate was held at Prestonwood Baptist Church in Dallas,
Texas, on June 15, 1998, before an audience of approximately 4500 (about 4450 of
whom supported Dr. Craig). Dr. Craig defended his Christian beliefs, and I gave my
reasons for disbelief. At the end of the debate I felt confident that I had defended my
view effectively and had rebutted Dr. Craig's points. The reactions of others who
witnessed the debate or viewed the videotape (available from Prestonwood Baptist)
encourage me in that conclusion. I would therefore like to present an elaborated and
extended version of those arguments as my opening essay.

The remainder of the book will consist of chapters that provide more detailed support for
the arguments in the opening essay. In these chapters I extend my critique and rebut
anticipated replies and objections from Christian apologists. I also give lengthy
quotations from authoritative sources in support of my claims. Parenthetical references in
the opening essay will refer the reader to the chapter number where the relevant points
are elaborated and supported. This format allows me to open with a succinct case in the
mode of Bertrand Russell's famous essay, "Why I am not a Christian." While that essay
reflected Russell's literary brilliance, it has been criticized as superficial and dismissive.
The documented corroboration and detailed argument supporting the claims of the
opening essay should obviate that criticism.

I would like to thank Ed Buckner and the Freethought Press for inviting me to do this
book and all others whose comments and criticisms were offered.

Why I Am Not a Christian

Can belief argue with unbelief or only preach to it? When worldviews clash, is rational
debate possible, or only a hostile exchange of epithets and rhetoric? Positions too far
apart cannot find enough shared ground even to begin a debate, and there is no question
that believers and unbelievers often simply talk past one another. The problem is this:
Knowledge claims are never evaluated in a vacuum. When we assess a particular claim,
we do so in the light of background knowledge. That is, the credentials of a claim are
evaluated by how well it is supported by what we already believe and by our standards of
rationality or justification. However, what "we" count as background knowledge or
appropriate standards might differ so radically between Christians and non-Christians that
rational debate is a practical impossibility.

Generations of Christian apologists have assumed that fruitful communication is possible.

They have assumed that enough common ground exists for reasonable debate between
belief and nonbelief. I share that assumption. That is, I think that Christians and
nonbelievers share enough background beliefs, values, and standards to engage in fruitful

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debate about the reasonableness of Christian claims (though some of the wilder effusions
of creationists and fundamentalists tempt me into doubt).

Christian apologists argue that Christian claims are well grounded vis-à-vis the
background knowledge they share with unbelievers and that, therefore, unbelievers
should acknowledge Christian truth. My argument is just the opposite, i.e., that given
only what we (scientifically and philosophically literate Christians and non-Christians at
the beginning of the twenty-first century) share in our background beliefs (about science,
history, the Bible, and everything)--and excluding any specifically Christian
"revelations"--Christian claims are poorly supported and therefore less reasonable than
unbelief. I shall endeavor to appeal only to common sense and to invoke no premises
Christian apologists cannot accept, or at least concede.

In this century the Christian religion will become 2000 years old. During those twenty
centuries it has not only survived but flourished. Christianity began as a nondescript sect,
despised by pagan and Jewish intellectuals (when they bothered to notice it), and subject
to sporadic persecution. In the early fourth century the Roman Empire became Christian.
By the end of the first millennium, except for a few pagan holdouts in the north and a
Muslim presence in the Iberian Peninsula, Europe had become Christian. Christian
missionaries set sail on the voyages of discovery and conquest of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries and soon reached every part of the globe. Now a third of the
world's six billion people are at least nominally Christian--and the religion continues to
grow rapidly, especially in Asia and Africa.

Christianity has inspired a rich cultural and intellectual tradition. Many of the greatest
paintings of the Renaissance masters represent Christian themes. Christian music from
Amazing Grace to the Missa Solemnis achieves a beauty and depth seldom reached by
other music. The King James Bible is one of the treasures of the English language; its
sound resonates in many of the great works of British and American literature. Some of
the greatest intellects of the Western world have been Christian theologians and
philosophers. St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to name only two, are among the
handful of thinkers who may be mentioned in the same breath as Plato and Aristotle.
Christian charities have alleviated want and brought education and medical care to many
needy areas.

Yet Christianity has a Janus-face. As we note, the Christian religion has inspired much of
the world's great art, literature, and music--but many of history's most horrifying crimes
were committed in the name of Christ. Christianity has encouraged scientists to seek to
know God by understanding nature, but Christianity has also been the most powerful
force of obscurantism. Great pioneers in all fields have suffered--and continue to suffer--
the ignorant opposition of priests, preachers, and inquisitors. Christianity has comforted,
uplifted, ennobled, and empowered. It has also degraded, persecuted, terrorized, and
polarized. Both the highest and purest love and the basest and cruelest fanaticism are
legacies of Christianity.

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So, on balance, has Christianity been a force for good or ill in human history? Why are
we even asking this question? Is not the only relevant question whether Christianity is
true? It is an appropriate question because not all defenders of Christianity appeal to its
truth. People often defend religion by adducing its allegedly good effects on society. This
is a stock claim of right-wing politicians and of the recent plague of "Dr. Lauras"--
common scolds and busybodies who have appointed themselves guardians of other
people's morality. To assess such a pragmatic apologetic we need to ask whether
Christianity is likely to make us better and happier.

The problems with Christianity begin with the Christian Bible. What are we to make of
stories like that of II Kings 2? That chapter relates how the prophet Elisha was
approaching the town of Bethel when a group of boys jeered him. Elisha cursed them in
the name of the Lord and two she-bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of
the children. I once asked a Christian philosopher about this passage. He bit the bullet
and said that God must not permit his holy prophets to be mocked. I concluded that Jerry
Falwell and Pat Robertson were not holy prophets since I had often mocked them but had
not yet been mauled by she-bears.

Then there is the passage in I Samuel 15 where the prophet Samuel, speaking in the name
of the Lord, orders Saul to utterly destroy the Amalekites: "Spare no one; put them all to
death, men and women, children and babes in arms, herds and flocks, camels and asses"
(I Samuel 15). What did the Lord have against camels and asses (not to mention babes in
arms)? Were the Amalekites so evil, even their infants and animals, that they merited
utter extirpation? Scripture is full of such atrocities. Tom Paine spoke truly:

Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and
torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible
is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon rather than the
Word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize
mankind; and for my part, I sincerely detest it as I detest all that is cruel (Paine, 1974, p.
60).

There is nothing to add to this but "amen."

When confronted by such passages in debate, Dr. Craig has offered two sorts of
responses: (a) God has the right to do whatever he wants to humans and (b) that this
argument counts only against Biblical literalism, not Christianity per se. I find both
replies woefully inadequate. First, it strikes me as monstrous to suggest that God would
have the right to do anything whatsoever to us. What would give him that right? Surely
not his omnipotence, since might does not make right. Is it the alleged fact that God
created us? Suppose I were to create a race of sentient androids, fully as capable of
suffering as humans. Would I then have the right to inflict capricious cruelty upon them?
If Dr. Craig insists that I would, he must be moving in a moral universe that does not
intersect my own.

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The second sort of reply raises the question of just how literally we should take the Bible.
Dr. Craig and other apologists often want parts of it to be taken very literally indeed (e.g.,
the discovery of the empty tomb on Easter morning by women followers of Jesus).
Apologists cannot take scripture literally when it is ideologically convenient but as myth,
allegory, or symbol when it is not. We need a consistent and independently justified set
of interpretive principles. However, even if we do take the horrific passages as myth or
metaphor, their spirit is still cruel and vindictive, and they still merit the censure so
eloquently expressed by Paine.

The Christian Bible bequeathed a legacy of cruelty; the Church wasted little time in
acting on that legacy. Even Christian historians such as Paul Johnson grow eloquent
recounting the persecutions, pogroms, crusades, witch-hunts, inquisitions, and religious
wars whereby countless persons were burned, butchered, tortured, or thrown into
dungeons by God-fearing fanatics (Johnson, 1976). In his recent best-seller Hitler's
Willing Executioners, Daniel Goldhagen traces the long disgraceful record of Christian
anti-Semitism (Goldhagen, 1996). The hatred sown in Martin Luther's rabid anti-Jewish
diatribes was reaped at Auschwitz. Forrest G. Wood's book The Arrogance of Faith
details Christian complicity in the genocide of American Indians and the defense of
slavery (Wood, 1990). (See Chapter One of this monograph for supporting details.)

But haven't Christians repented of their past evils and grown into a force for tolerance?
Did not Pope John Paul II recently express sorrow for the Catholic Church's past
persecutions? In 1983 (350 years after the occurrence) the Church even repented its
treatment of Galileo. Is this not (belated) progress?

Public pronouncements by Christian spokespersons have changed; blatant expressions of

intolerance are no longer fashionable. Some Christian activists have glibly mastered the
language of inclusiveness and pluralism and have turned such language to their own uses.
For example, even radical-right moralists, with nauseating hypocrisy, claim not to despise
gay people; they "hate the sin" while "loving the sinner." Still, one does not have to dig
very deep to hit the hard bedrock of bigotry beneath the shifting sands of rhetoric.
Religious Right activists, caught with their guard down, are a wonderful revelation.
Listen to Pat Robertson talking politics when he thinks the microphone is off or to D.
James Kennedy's sermons to his choir as he spits hatred at anybody who disagrees with
him. Recall the head of the Southern Baptist Convention who just a few years ago said
that God does not hear the prayers of a Jew, or the more recent Baptists who say that
women are unfit to serve as ministers.

When confronted with the "holy horrors" of Christian history, the standard apologetic
line is that the perpetrators of such horrors were not acting in the "true spirit of Christ" or
according to the "true" Gospel message. This line always rings hollow. It sounds like the
strained apologetics of academic Marxists who admit the horrors of the Gulag but who
deny that the Soviet Union was a true communist society.

One thing Marx and Jesus definitely had in common was their insistence that what
matters is not abstract theory but how a scheme works out in practice. As Jesus said of

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false prophets "By their fruits shall ye know them (Matthew 7:15)." Communism may
sound great on paper, but if every society that attempts to implement it becomes a
totalitarian nightmare, so much for Marxist theory. When Poland suffered under General
Jaruzelski, the Poles had a bitter joke: "Where does the true socialist society exist? On the
moon." The same may be said of the "true" Christian society. If anyone wonders what a
society run by the Robertsons and Falwells would really look like, they should read
Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1986).

Still, someone might object that Christianity should be judged in its pure, revealed form
rather than by its admittedly shoddy practice. But the monstrous doctrine of hell is part of
that alleged revelation. The greatest Christian teachers exhausted their vast powers of
eloquence offering lurid depictions of hell (see Bernstein, 1998). Surely these revolting
fantasies are the most misshapen progeny of the human imagination. All the most
orthodox divines, Calvinist as well as Catholic, taught that one of the chief joys of heaven
is the viewing of the torments of the damned (Johnson, 1976, p. 342). Tertullian cackled
with glee as he anticipated seeing pagan philosophers writhing in the flames. Surely
Paine was right. Such doctrines have corrupted and brutalized humanity. Cruel dogmas
make cruel people. (See Chapter Two for supporting details.)

More fundamentally, the Christian concept of human nature is at odds with the aims of an
open, democratic, and pluralistic society. Christianity insists that human nature is
depraved, a beast that must be caged. Since humans are evil, they must be controlled by
higher authority imposed from above. Christians talk about faith, hope, and love, but
obedience is the prime Christian virtue ("There is no other way to be happy in Jesus but
to trust and obey" says the old hymn). Since submission to authority, whether human or
divine, is the chief Christian duty, Christianity lends itself naturally to authoritarian
political schemes. We should not forget that the Church supported Franco in Spain and
King Leopold in the Congo. In short, the City of God does not run on democratic
principles.

So, will Christianity improve society? I guess it turns on what we regard as "improving"
society. If we want the regimented, authoritarian society of The Handmaid's Tale, the
answer is "yes." So, when the pundits tell us that religion will improve society, they need
to be frank about the fascism they are recommending.

To sum up the argument so far, the Christian Bible if full of atrocities ordered or
committed by God. Christianity produced St. Francis, but it also produced Grand
Inquisitor Torquemada and the authors of Malleus Malleficarum, the witch-hunter's
handbook. Today's Religious Right dreams of a golden age when we will truly have one
nation under (their) God. History shows that a Holy Inquisition would be more likely
than a golden age. Christianity has preached hatred, soaked the earth with blood, and
filled the mind with supernatural terrors. It seems clear that my first point is established:
A rational, conscientious person may doubt the beneficial effects of Christian preaching
and practice. A pragmatic apologetic based on the alleged good effects of Christianity
therefore fails.

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Of course, many Christians are as appalled by the "holy horrors" of Christian history as I
am. Some, such as the Episcopal Bishop of Newark, the Right Reverend Shelby Spong,
are strong opponents of fundamentalism. Others, such as the Reverend Barry Lynn of
Americans United for Separation of Church and State, have fought the good fight against
the theocratic efforts of the Religious Right. Further, there is no doubt that many ordinary
people have found strength and inspiration in their Christian faith. So, can there be a sort
of Christianity that preserves the good things while getting rid of the bad? I do not know.
I do know that, as Voltaire, Paine, Ingersoll, Russell, and others showed, the "old time
religion" was often very bad.

We turn now to the central question of this essay: Is Christianity true? St. Paul lays it on
the line. In I Corinthians 15:14 Paul states unequivocally "if Christ was not raised, our
faith is null and void." No one can ask for fairer than that. I do not believe that Christ was
raised from the dead so I regard the Christian Gospel as null and void.

My argument against the Resurrection is simple:

(1) To be made credible, extraordinary claims must be extraordinarily well supported.

(2) The alleged Resurrection of Jesus is a very extraordinary claim.

(3) The supporting evidence is not good, so we should remain skeptical of the
Resurrection.

I regard the first premise as uncontroversial. No rational person believes everything he or

she is told. Some things are discounted, even when told with a straight face by persons
who are otherwise presumed reliable. Why? Well, there are some things we just regard as
too implausible to accept unless we are told by a very reliable source. We can imagine
cases where the claim would be so outrageous we would not even believe a most
trustworthy person. Suppose that saintly Mother Teresa had told a reporter that she flew
to pick up her Nobel Peace Prize, not in an airplane, but simply by flapping her arms.
Could the reporter be blamed for not believing in flying nuns, even when told by so
respectable and (heretofore) credible a person?

The lesson is that if we rationally regard a claim as extremely implausible, we will rightly
demand very strong evidence before we accept it. How should we approach the claim that
Jesus was resurrected from the dead? With an open mind, certainly, but as one wag put it,
if your mind is too open, your brain will fall out. In other words, being open minded does
not mean that we must empty our minds of preconceptions or suspend critical judgment.
On the contrary, we can only rationally evaluate a claim in the light of what we already
regard as true and reasonable.

Moving to the second premise, how implausible should one initially (i.e., before
examining the specific evidence) regard the claim that Jesus was resurrected from the
dead? Well, as I note in my opening remarks that depends crucially upon what other

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beliefs one already has. Perhaps it would be simpler to start by saying why I begin with a
high degree of incredulity.

The Resurrection claimed by Christians is a physically impossible event. That is, unaided
nature could not have accomplished such an occurrence. It could only have been
accomplished by the miraculous intervention of a supernatural being--the God of the
Bible in this instance. The previous three sentences do not express my stipulation but my
understanding of what Christians are claiming. Now I do not believe in a God who can
perform miracles. I have considered what seem to me to be the strongest arguments for
the existence of God and have found them wanting (Mackie, 1981; Parsons, 1989; Martin,
1990). Also, the existence of so much apparently gratuitous evil in the world seems to me
excellent reason not to believe in an all-powerful, all-good God (Parsons, 1989; Drange,
1998). Therefore, I regard any claim that God has brought about a particular physically
impossible event as having a prior probability of close to zero. So, given my background
beliefs, I have every right to demand very good, even compelling evidence before I
accept the claimed Resurrection.

It would be easy enough for Christians and atheists to draw lines in the sand, take refuge
in their own ideological fortresses, and damn the other side to prove them wrong.
However, we live in an intellectual milieu already severely balkanized, so it is salutary,
for the sake of argument at least, to start with a less extreme position than my
thoroughgoing atheism. Further, I have stated my aim to invoke shared assumptions and
background knowledge. Here I shall have to depart from that aim a bit.

Michael Martin has recently argued that the Resurrection must be considered initially
improbable even by Christians (Martin, 1998, 1999). Christian philosopher Stephen T.
Davis strongly disagrees (Davis, 1999). I think Martin is right, but I shall not enter into
this dispute here. I shall concede to Davis that the Resurrection need not be initially
improbable for Christians. Still, Christians must surely recognize that it is reasonable for
non-Christians to be initially quite skeptical of the claimed Resurrection. Insofar as
Christian apologists aim to address the beliefs of non-Christians, their arguments must
therefore presume the non-Christians' prior beliefs, not their own. So I shall assume that
Christian apologists, for the sake of argument, will grant me premise two.

Again, how low should we initially assess the likelihood of Jesus's alleged Resurrection?
Let us ask how a non-Christian theist--one who definitely believes in a God who can and
has performed miracles--should approach the question of the Resurrection. Let us
imagine a conservative but open-minded person who has practiced Judaism throughout
his or her life and who now decides, for the first time, to consider the purported evidence
for the Resurrection of Jesus. With what attitude will such a person approach this study?

Even for such a theist, an initially deep skepticism would be appropriate. Even those who
believe in a God who can and has performed miracles will regard any particular miracle
claim with skepticism. After all, miracle-claims come a dozen for a dime. Hucksters and
hoaxers abound, as do false prophets and false religions. Also, as Hume remarked,
humans have a natural love for the marvelous; a glance at the "New Age" or "occult"

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section of any bookstore confirms this. In a classic essay T.H. Huxley notes that many
ancient and medieval documents calmly and matter-of-factly present first-person reports
of miracles (Huxley, 1893). We would be credulous indeed if we accepted each of these.
So, even theists will regard false miracle reports as vastly outnumbering true ones. Prima
facie there is nothing distinguishing Christian miracle stories from those that abound
elsewhere.

Further, religious people refrain from jumping out of upper-story windows the same as
atheists. A scientist in the laboratory follows the same procedures and expects the same
laws to hold whether he or she is religious or not. In general, religious people take the
same sorts of precautions and make the same sorts of practical plans as non-religious
ones, so clearly they do in fact expect the usual regularities of nature to hold in the
overwhelming majority of cases. Hence, they also should be initially deeply skeptical of
reports that such regularities have been suspended. After all, when Mary conceived
asexually, was not Joseph, presumably a deeply religious person, rightly scandalized--
until the angel set him straight (Matthew 1:20)?

So, it is entirely in order for us non-Christians, whether theists or not, to approach the
Resurrection claim with a deep degree of initial skepticism. Why should Christian
miracle-claims, from the beginning, be regarded any differently from the plethora of
other such claims extant in historical records? We have every right to demand very good
evidence indeed before we accept the Christian claim. Of course, if we are reasonable,
our beliefs will change if we are given such excellent reasons, so let us now turn to the
purported evidence.

All of the evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus derives from human testimony (the so-
called "Shroud" of Turin is a medieval forgery). Now David Hume's famous argument
against miracles in Section X of his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding has often
been interpreted as claiming that human testimony, in principle, cannot establish a
miracle claim. I think in principle it could (in practice difficulties abound, as we shall
see), but the burden of proof will be on the person claiming the miracle and the burden
will be quite heavy since, as we saw, such evidence must overcome a high degree of
initial skepticism.

Does the evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus meet this heavy burden of proof? Nearly
all of the so-called evidence comes from the four canonical gospels. But let's be honest.
What confidence can we have in documents, (1) authored by persons unknown (with the
possible exception of Luke, who admits he was not an eyewitness), (2) written four or
more decades after the events they purportedly describe, (3) drawn upon oral traditions,
and hence subject to the unreliability of human memory, (4) each with a clear theological
bias and apologetic agenda, (5) containing many undeniably fictional literary forms, (6)
inconsistent with each other (except where one gospel plagiarizes another), (7) at odds
with many known facts, (8) with virtually no support from independent sources, and (9)
testifying to events which, in ordinary circumstances, we would regard as unlikely in the
extreme? (See Chapter Three for supporting details.)

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Allow me to pause to note that the above nine claims are supported by a very broad
consensus of Christian New Testament scholars. Each of these claims is old hat for a
practitioner of higher critical studies of the gospels.

Professor Craig believes that three main points of evidence support the historical case for
the Resurrection of Jesus: The post-mortem appearances, the empty tomb, and the origin
of the Christian faith. I shall explain why I reject each of these pieces of purported
evidence. (See Chapter Four for supporting details.)

The post-mortem appearances: Professor Craig places much emphasis on the formula
recited by Paul in I Corinthians 15:3-8, where Paul lists various alleged witnesses of the
risen Jesus: Cephas (Simon Peter), "the twelve," over 500 at once, James (Jesus's brother),
all of the apostles, and finally Paul himself. This passage is important because (a) it is
very early, (b) it names or refers to numerous alleged witnesses of the risen Jesus, and (c)
it gives Paul's own testimony, the only undisputed first-person report of an encounter
with the risen Christ in the entire New Testament.

The early date of the formula is irrelevant. Contrary to a claim frequently made by
Professor Craig and other apologists, legends can and do spread almost immediately,
despite the opposition of eyewitnesses, and sometimes even with the connivance of
eyewitnesses. Consider Elvis and Bigfoot sightings, "Bermuda Triangle" disappearances,
alien abductions, crashed saucer stories, and other such goofy legends. Such stories
spread quickly, often despite the testimony of eyewitnesses and the efforts of would-be
debunkers. Surely people are not more credulous now than they were in the First Century.
In short, it is a demonstrated, abundantly documented fact that legends do develop and
spread quickly. (See Chapter Five for supporting details.)

Getting back to Paul's testimony, in this passage he is not arguing with skeptical
unbelievers. He says that he is passing on (paradidomi in Greek) a tradition that he has
received. Paul is not trying to convince the Corinthians by adducing objective historical
evidence, he is reminding them of a tradition which they already accept as authoritative.
In fact, Paul was simply re-asserting the kerygma, the basic Christian proclamation that,
in accordance with the scriptures, Christ died "for our sins," rose on the third day, and
appeared to various witnesses.

Paul's formula gives no details as to where, when, or under what circumstances the
appearances supposedly occurred. It does not mention the empty tomb; the phrase "was
buried" in no way implies independent knowledge of an empty tomb tradition. It gives no
place or date for the alleged Resurrection. The Gospels and Acts know nothing of an
appearance to 500; surely they would have reported such a remarkable event. Paul does
not make clear whether the appearances were physical or visionary--the Greek text is
entirely ambiguous on that point. More importantly, we know nothing of the reliability of
any of the so-called witnesses. How reliable were Peter or James? How do we know that
the "500," if they really existed, did not suffer a mass hallucination?

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But does not the very existence of such a tradition at such an early date imply its
historicity? Does not the very fact that the list of witnesses had been definitely formulated
before Paul indicate that there must be a kernel of historical truth here? Essentially this is
an argumentum ad ignorantiam--an appeal to ignorance. We simply do not and cannot
know how that list got formulated. As so often happens with historical investigation, the
trail runs cold just at the point of greatest interest. Without begging many questions,
apologists cannot assume anything about the nature of the "appearances," the reliability
of the alleged witnesses, the lack of legendary accretion, or anything else that would
support the historicity of that tradition.

What then about Paul's own "eyewitness" testimony? As noted earlier, if we accepted all
of the "eyewitness" reports of miracles from old texts, we would be credulous indeed. Is
Paul, then, particularly credible? On the contrary, Paul himself states that he was given to
ecstatic visions. In II Corinthians 12 Paul tells of being "caught up as far as the third
heaven" (verse 2) and not knowing whether he was "in the body or out of it" (verse 2,
repeated in verse 3). He reports that when he was "caught up into paradise" (verse 4) that
he "heard words so secret that no human lips may repeat them" (verse 4). Clearly, this is
an account of a mystical vision. Why not conclude that Paul's experience of the risen
Christ was of a similar kind?

What about the "appearances" to the disciples? All except the most conservative scholars
agree that Mark, the oldest gospel, originally ended with verse 16:8 and included no
account of appearances to the disciples. As G. A. Wells noted, the appearance stories
recounted in the other two synoptics are full of inconsistencies:

Matthew, following hints by Mark, sites in Galilee the one appearance to them that he
records: the risen one has instructed the women at the empty tomb to tell the disciples to
go to Galilee in order to see him (28:10). They do this, and his appearance to them there
concludes the gospel. In Luke, however, he appears to them on Easter day in Jerusalem
and nearby on the Emmaus road (eighty miles from Galilee) and tells them to stay in the
city "until ye be clothed with power from on high" (24:49; Acts 2:1-4 represents this as
happening on Pentecost, some fifty days later). They obey, and were "continually in the
temple" (24:53). Luke has very pointedly changed what is said in Mark so as to site these
appearances in the city (Wells, 1996, p. 100).

So the synoptics give no coherent account of the post-mortem "appearances." Apologists

often insist that the gospel authors wrote in close consultation with the original
eyewitnesses and that this ensures their accuracy. In that case, why are the accounts so
inconsistent?

Suppose that, shortly after the crucifixion, one or more of the disciples did experience an
"appearance" of the risen Jesus. Why not regard these experiences as hallucinations or
visions? Psychologists tell us that hallucinations by normal, non-psychotic persons are
much more common than most people think. Often they seem very real. People suffering
severe reactive depression and a sense of loss and isolation are especially prone to
hallucinations. Given their state of mind after the crucifixion, it would not be surprising if

12
one or more of the disciples experienced a vivid hallucination of Jesus. Biblical scholar
Gerd Lüdemann carefully examined the post-Resurrection "appearances" and concluded
that they can all be explained as visions (Lüdemann, 1995). (See Chapter Six for
supporting details.)

Now for the empty tomb legend: Professor Craig adduces Paul's testimony in the I
Corinthians 15 formula that Jesus was buried as evidence for the empty tomb.
Presumably, this phrase shows that Paul, or whoever composed the formula, had
knowledge of an independent empty tomb tradition. But reciting such a liturgical formula
no more implies knowledge of an empty tomb than singing "John Brown's Body" implies
knowledge of where John Brown is buried. So, Paul's use of the phrase does not indicate
any such knowledge on his part. As for the origination of the phrase, Kee, Young, and
Froelich offer a plausible hypothesis: "The minor observation is that he was buried--
possibly an apologetic note introduced to attest that Jesus had really died, rather than
having merely swooned or disappeared, as enemies of the Christian faith sometimes
claimed" (pp. 56-57). So the phrase may have entered the formula as an apologetic aside
rather than as a reflection of an empty tomb tradition.

Professor Craig also argues that, had the stories of the empty tomb been fictitious, the
prejudices of the day would have dictated that men be portrayed as the discoverers of the
empty tomb. But the gospel accounts say that the disciples fled into hiding with Jesus's
arrest. Among the closest followers of Jesus, only the women were left to care for the
body. Further, it was customary for women to be involved in the process of preparing
bodies for burial (Schroeder and Nelis, 1963, p. 287). Therefore, it is not very surprising
that female followers of Jesus would be depicted as discovering the empty tomb. Besides,
for the gospel writers, the discovery of the empty tomb was not nearly so important as its
subsequent confirmation by the (male) disciples.

More fundamentally, as the Right Rev. Shelby Spong states:

[T]he discovery of an empty tomb would never have issued in an Easter faith. If there had
been a tomb, and if that tomb had been found empty, it would have meant only that one
more insult had been delivered to the leader of the tiny Jesus movement. The disciples,
whoever they were, would have concluded that not even the dead body of this Jesus had
been spared degradation. No Easter faith would have resulted from an empty tomb.
Therefore such a tradition could not have been primary. It was but a story incorporated
later into the narrative (1994, p. 228).

In other words, the empty tomb, by itself and considered apart from the post-mortem
"appearances," would only have been evidence of desecration, not resurrection. It
becomes evidence for resurrection only when joined to the appearance claims, and, as we
have seen, those are unreliable.

Professor Craig's third main piece of evidence for the Resurrection is the origin of the
Christian faith itself. He argues that the Christian faith in a resurrected Jesus has no
precedent in Jewish thought. The Jewish conception of resurrection is a general raising of

13
the dead at the end of time, not the raising to glory of a single individual as an event in
history. Further, the Christian idea that the resurrection of the righteous will somehow
hinge on the Messiah's resurrection, was wholly unknown. Professor Craig concludes that
these new Christian ideas were so radical that only the actual Resurrection of Jesus can
account for so extreme a conceptual shift.

But according to the gospels, Jesus's ministry contained many heretical elements. In
Mark 2 Jesus claims authority for the forgiveness of sins, which elicits a charge of
blasphemy from the scribes. In Mark 7 he sets aside the traditional dietary distinctions
between clean and unclean foods. In Mark 2:28, he even claims to be sovereign over the
Sabbath. Further, Jesus's preaching was full of apocalyptic content. He famously said
"Truly, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see
the kingdom of God come with power" (Mark 9:1). In Mark 8:31 and 10:34 he predicts
that the Son of Man will die and rise three days afterward.

Given the heretical and apocalyptic nature of their master's teachings and the experiences,
whatever they were, that convinced them that Jesus had risen, the emergence of radically
new concepts in the disciples' minds hardly seems to require supernatural explanation.
For the early Christians, the Resurrection of Jesus was the first eschatological event, an
event that ushered in the New Age, the coming of the Kingdom. They believed that they
were in the end times. As a standard textbook puts it:

[Christianity] ... shared with much of Judaism the hopes for the New Age that God had
promised through the prophets and seers. But it differed from the rest of Judaism in one
crucial point: It was convinced that the New Age had already begun to dawn. More
specifically, it believed that God had acted in Jesus of Nazareth to inaugurate the New
Age, and that the community itself was the nucleus of the People of the New Age. The
basis for this conviction was the belief that God had raised Jesus from the dead (Kee,
Young, and Froelich, pp. 52-53).

In other words, early Christians believed that they were in the end times and that the
Resurrection of Jesus was the eschatological event that ushered in the New Age, the
coming of the Kingdom. Further, Jesus's Resurrection was not conceived as an event
separate from the general resurrection, but only as the first resurrection, soon to be
followed by the others at the time of Christ's Second Coming. Thus Paul calls Jesus as the
"firstfruits of the harvest of the dead" (I Corinthians 15:20). Paul continues: "As in Adam
all men die, so in Christ all will be brought to life; but each in his own proper place:
Christ the firstfruits, and afterwards, at his coming, those who belong to Christ" (I
Corinthians 15:22-23).

In all honesty, I simply do not see a gaping, unbridgeable conceptual chasm between
belief in a general resurrection at the end of time and the belief that Jesus's Resurrection
was the first event of the coming of the end times. In the presently fashionable lingo,
paradigm shifts do occur. If Professor Craig insists that, nonetheless, such a conceptual
shift requires supernatural intervention, I simply have to ask: What are his criteria? At

14
what point are concepts so alien that it would require a miracle for someone to shift from
one to the other? We need some such guidelines before the discussion can proceed.

In conclusion, I have argued that there are no grounds for regarding Christianity as either
good or true. Christian scripture, doctrine, and practice have sanctioned cruelty and made
vindictiveness a virtue. The arguments concerning the alleged Resurrection of Jesus
cannot bear even a modest burden of proof, much less the fairly heavy one we have
placed on them. Throughout I have endeavored to appeal only to premises that Christian
apologists can accept or ought to concede. I have nowhere assumed atheism, naturalism,
or extreme skepticism. My appeal was to common sense, common knowledge, and
scholarly consensus, not to a methodology dictated by Enlightenment ideologies. I
therefore take my second point, and the main point of this essay, as now established:
Given only shared background knowledge and expected concessions, it is unlikely that
the alleged Resurrection of Jesus occurred, and so it is unlikely that Christianity is true.

Chapter One: The Sins of Christianity

This chapter documents my claims about the "holy horrors" perpetrated in the name of
Christ. First a quote from Senator Sam J. Ervin Jr. of South Carolina, famous for heading
the Senate committee that investigated Watergate:

The ugliest chapters in history are those that recount the religious intolerance of the civil
and ecclesiastical rulers of the Old World and their puppets during the generations
preceding the framing and ratifying of the First Amendment.

These chapters of history reveal the casting of the Christians to the lions in the Coliseum
at Rome; the bloody Crusades of the Christians against the Saracens for possession of the
shrines hallowed by the footsteps of the Prince of Peace; the use by the papacy of the
dungeon and the rack to coerce conformity and of the fiery faggot to exterminate heresy;
the unspeakable cruelties of the Spanish Inquisition; the slaughter of the Waldenses in
alpine Italy; the jailing and hanging by Protestant kings of English Catholics for abiding
with the faith of their fathers; the jailing and hanging by a Catholic queen of English
Protestants for reading English Scriptures and praying Protestant prayers; the hunting
down and slaying of the Covenanters upon the crags and moors of Scotland for
worshipping God according to the dictates of their own consciences; the decimating of
the people of the German states in the Thirty Years War between Catholics and
Protestants; the massacre of the Huguenots in France; the pogroms and persecutions of
the Jews in many lands; the banishing of Baptists and other dissenters by Puritan
Massachusetts; the persecution and imprisonment of Quakers by England for refusing to
pay tithes to the established church and to take the oaths of supremacy and allegiance; the
banishing, branding, imprisoning, and whipping of Quakers, and the hanging of the
alleged witches at Salem in Puritan Massachusetts, and the hundreds of other atrocities
perpetrated in the name of religion.

15
It is not surprising that Blaise Pascal, the French mathematician and philosopher, was
moved more than three hundred years ago to proclaim this tragic truth: "Men never do
evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction" (quoted
by Peter McWilliams, 1996, p. 125).

Forrest G. Wood put it more concisely:

There are contradictions in every religion; but the missionary quality of Christianity
magnifies the consequences of its contradictions. The history of Christianity may be the
serene and saintly story of Jesus of Nazareth, and the Virgin Mary, St. Francis of Assisi
and Mother Teresa, and Martin Luther King, Jr., leading nuns and clergymen in
nonviolent resistance. But it is also the cruel and bloody story of crusaders and
conquistadores, Pope Innocent II and Torquemada, the Salem witch trials and cross-
burning Klansmen. "Kill a Commie for Christ!" bumper stickers shouted in the 1950's
(Wood, 1990, p. 26).

Apologists sometimes boast of Christian opposition to slavery. Many of the leading

abolitionists were devout Christians. However, many equally devout Christians argued
just as vehemently in defense of slavery. Wood, in his book The Arrogance of Faith,
documents some of these pro-slavery arguments. As Wood shows, Christian doctrine and
scripture were often adduced in support of slavery:

[I]f freedom meant only freedom from sin, then it was fair to raise questions about the
definition and use of the word. When Paul told the Galatians that "there is neither Jew nor
Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus," more than a
few slave holding ministers concluded that he was simply pointing out that the only
freedom that mattered was freedom in salvation in Christ. Life on this earth was brief and
temporary; the hereafter was forever. "The freedom of the Soul for Eternity is infinitely
preferable to the greatest freedom of the Body in its outward Condition upon Earth,"
Anglican minister Benjamin Fawcett told a group of slaves in 1755. When Christ told the
Jews in the temple square "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free,"
they said they could not be set free because they were no one's slaves. But every sinner,
Christ replied, is a slave to sin. "If the son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free
indeed."

In other words, true freedom came from "the emancipation of the will from the power of
sin," southern Presbyterian James Henley Thornwell argued. Salvation grants freedom
from the grip of Satan, not freedom from the secular chains of slavery. Nor was it a
lesson used only by southern clergy. Both George Junkin, a prominent Ohio Presbyterian,
and C.F.W. Walther, head of the conservative Missouri Synod of the Lutheran church,
argued publicly that biblical freedom meant only freedom from damnation and that it
"could be preserved within the framework of a servant-master relationship." It was a
universal Christian blind spot; when salvation was at issue, it mattered not if one was a
slaveholder or abolitionist. Although he was an outspoken critic of slavery,
Congregationalist Jedediah Morse insisted that "belief in Christ, which freed men from
sin, the worst kind of slavery, was the supreme good, far greater than all temporal

16
blessings." Since it was the Christian master who kept the bondsman in chains and the
Christian minister who defended that bondage, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that
the problem was Christianity. (Wood, 1990, pp. 75-76).

Contemporary theologians would of course deny that the problem was Christianity per se,
and charge that the pro-slavery apologists had twisted Christian doctrine. Notoriously,
though, neither the Old or New Testaments contains an outright condemnation of slavery.
Parts of the Bible tell us in great detail how we should live, right down to how we should
wear our hair. Yet it omits to tell us that owning another human being is wrong. Of
course, masters are admonished to treat their slaves well--and slaves are told to obey their
masters. Abolitionists felt that slavery was ungodly, but there simply was no unequivocal
scriptural support for their view.

What about the famous passage where Paul says that in Christ there is no Greek or Jew,
slave or master, male of female? This is a marvelous passage, but as Wood notes, for
many Christians this means that others are equal only if they accept Christianity:

Modern churches have done as much as any philanthropic institution in the world to
ameliorate hunger, poverty, disease, and ignorance, but the fact remains that most
Christians have perceived the African, Indian, or any other nonbeliever as an equal--if
they have done so at all--only after he has been converted. It was impossible for a
missionary to accept the heathen for what he was and consider him an equal. That would
have been real charity (Wood, 1990, p. 29).

A classic work of Victorian scholarship was W.E.H. Lecky's 1869 work History of
European Morals. In this and other works, Lecky again and again showed the pernicious
effects of Christian doctrine on morality. Some of his most powerful writing concerned
the rise and influence of asceticism in late antiquity. Here is a sample:

There is, perhaps, no phase in the moral history of mankind of a deeper or more painful
interest than this ascetic epidemic. A hideous, sordid, and emaciated maniac, without
knowledge, without patriotism, without natural affection, passing his life in a long routine
of useless and atrocious self-torture, and quailing before the ghastly phantoms of his
delirious brain, had become the ideal of the nations which had known the writings of
Plato and Cicero and the lives of Socrates and Cato. For about two centuries, the hideous
maceration of the body was regarded as the highest proof of excellence.

St. Jerome declares, with a thrill of admiration, how he had seen a man, who for thirty
years had lived exclusively on a small portion of barley bread and of muddy water;
another who lived in a hole and never ate more than five figs for his daily repast; a third
who cut his hair only on Easter Sunday, who never washed his clothes, who never
changed his tunic till it fell to pieces, who starved himself till his eyes grew dim, and his
skin 'like a pumice stone' and whose merits, shown by these austerities, Homer himself
would be unable to recount. For six months, it is said, St. Macarius of Alexandria slept in
a marsh, and exposed his body naked to the stings of venomous flies. He was accustomed
to carry about with him eighty pounds of iron. His disciple, St. Eusebius, carried one

17
hundred and fifty pounds of iron, and lived for three years in a dried-up well.

St. Sabinus would only eat corn that had become rotten by remaining for a month in
water. St. Besarion spent forty days and nights in the middle of thorn-bushes, and for
forty years never lay down when he slept, which last penance was also during fifteen
years practiced by St. Pachomius.... The cleanliness of the body was regarded as a
pollution of the soul, and the saints who were most admired had become one hideous
mass of clotted filth. St. Athanasius relates with enthusiasm how St. Antony, the patriarch
of monachism, had never, to extreme old age, been guilty of washing his feet ... a famous
virgin named Silvia, though she was sixty years old, and though bodily sickness was a
consequence of her habits, resolutely refused, on religious principles, to wash any part of
her body except her fingers.... An anchorite once imagined that he was mocked by an
illusion of the devil, as he saw gliding before him through the desert a naked creature
black with filth and years of exposure, and with hair floating to the wind. It was a once
beautiful woman, St. Mary of Egypt, who had thus, during forty-seven years, been
expiating her sins.... The examples of asceticism I have cited are but a few out of many
hundreds, and volumes might be written, and have been written detailing them (Lecky,
1955, Vol. II, pp. 107-113).

Naturally, the ideal of asceticism included a hatred of sex, and, since woman was the
temptress whom the Church "fathers" blamed for their own lust, it led to misogyny as
well. German scholar Uta Ranke-Heinemann was trained as a Catholic theologian but lost
her academic chair when she denied a piece of bizarre nonsense--the Church's dogma of
the biological reality of the virgin birth of Mary. In 1988 she published Eunuchen fur das
Himmelreich, translated as Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven: Women, Sexuality, and
the Catholic Church. In this powerful work, backed by enormous scholarship, Ranke-
Heinemann demonstrates that fear of sexuality and hatred of women were built into the
foundations of Christian theology. She notes that Augustine's attitudes were codified by
Aquinas and continue to influence Christianity today:

Women may well have been astonished to know that they were good only for
reproduction, and unqualified for anything having to do with mind and intelligence. This
idea was formulated by Thomas Aquinas ... in connection with Augustine as follows:
Woman is simply a help in procreation ... and useful in housekeeping. For a man's
intellectual life, she has no significance. Thus Augustine was the brilliant inventor of
what Germans call the three K's (Kinder, Kuche, Kirche--children, kitchen, church), an
idea that still has life in it, in fact it continues to be the Catholic hierarchy's primary
theological position on women (Ranke-Heinemann, 1990, p. 88).

Is such sexism today restricted to the desiccated celibates of the Roman Catholic
hierarchy? Not at all. The Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant
denomination in the United States, recently declared that women should submit to the
"servant leadership" of their husbands. Even more recently, the Baptists have strongly
urged that women not become senior pastors. Pat Robertson gave the fundamentalist
view of the role of women: "God has established a pattern. He is the head of man and
man is to be the head of woman, and together they are to be the head of children ... in the

18
government of the family and the church, men are to be the leaders" (quoted in Nava and
Dawidoff, 1994, p. 95).

Baptist apologists were quick to emphasize that husbands, the "servant leaders," are not
to behave in a dictatorial manner but must practice Christ-like agape love. They imply
that any woman should be struck dumb with gratitude for the opportunity to submit to
such leadership. No matter how you slice it though, Baptist doctrine makes the man the
boss. "Kinder, Kuche, Kirche" is still the Southern Baptist ideal of womanhood. What
reasons justify such strictures? Baptists offer none, at least none that would make sense to
a non-fundamentalist.

For Augustine, sexual pleasure was so horrible that even married couples should endure it
only if, both before and during the sex act, they are wholly motivated by the desire for
children (Ranke-Heinemann, 1990, p. 92). As he put it with casuistic precision: "What
cannot occur without lust should not, however, occur because of lust" (quoted in Ranke-
Heinemann, 1990, p. 92). Ranke-Heinemann comments on such doctrine: "It has warped
the consciences of many men and women. It has burdened them with hairsplitting
nonsense and striven to train them as moral acrobats instead of making them more
humane and kinder to their fellow human beings" (Ranke-Heinemann, 1990, quoted on
back cover).

Of course, today's hip, worldly-wise fundamentalist would deny that sexual pleasure is
bad but would insist that it must be enjoyed only within the "sacred bond" of
heterosexual marriage. Why? Consider spontaneous, joyful, mutually respectful sex
between two mature, responsible, but unmarried (gay or straight) people. Why is this a
terrible sin? Again, we get no reasonable answer, only dogma. One suspects that
something like Augustine's sex-phobia simmers not too far down in the psyche of many
of today's allegedly enlightened Christians. (See the appendix on C.S. Lewis's views on
sex and marriage.)

Instead of attacking sex per se, today's churches prefer to persecute sexual minorities,
especially gay and lesbian people. Here is what the Christian Life Commission of the
Southern Baptist Convention said about homosexuality and gay rights:

The CLC opposes homosexuality, because it is clear in the Bible, God condemns it as a
sinful lifestyle harmful to the individual and society. Therefore, the CLC opposes the
granting of civil rights normally reserved for immutable characteristics, such as race, to a
group based on the members' sexual behavior.... The CLC proclaims the gospel because
the Scriptures declare the Lord Jesus can change homosexuals. To accept homosexuality
as an appropriate lifestyle would betray the life-changing sacrifice of Christ and leave
homosexuals without hope for a new and eternal life (quoted in Nava and Dawidoff, 1994,
p. 98).

Allow me to urge that the Baptists reword their doctrine in more honest language. Here is
a suggestion: "We urge continued discrimination against degenerate queers, who are
damned to hell unless they abandon their perverted 'lifestyle.'" There. That gives the

19
Baptist position much more succinctly and clearly and I urge the CLC to adopt this more
honest phrasing.

Finally, I quote from Lecky on the often-heard claim that Christianity has promoted
peace and discouraged war:

It had been boldly predicted by some of the early Christians that the conversion of the
world would lead to the establishment of perpetual peace. In looking back, with our
present experience, we are driven to the melancholy conclusion that, instead of
diminishing the number of wars, ecclesiastical influence has actually and very seriously
increased it. We may look in vain for any period since Constantine, in which the clergy,
as a body, exerted themselves to repress the military spirit, or to prevent or abridge a
particular war, with an energy at all comparable to that which they displayed in
stimulating the fanaticism of the crusaders, in producing the atrocious massacre of the
Albigenses, in embittering the religious contests that followed the Reformation.... It is
possible--though it would, I imagine, be difficult to prove it--that the mediatorial office,
so often exercised by bishops, may sometimes have prevented wars; and it is certain that
during the period of the religious wars, so much military spirit existed in Europe that it
must necessarily have found a vent, and under no circumstances could the period have
been one of perfect peace. But when all these qualifications have be fully admitted, the
broad fact will remain, that, with the exception of Mohammedanism, no other religion
has done so much to produce war as was done by the religious teachers of Christendom
during several centuries. The military fanaticism evoked by the indulgences of the popes,
by the exhortations of the pulpit, by the prevailing hatred of misbelievers, has scarcely
ever been equaled in its intensity, and it has caused the effusion of oceans of blood, and
has been productive of incalculable misery to the world (Lecky, 1955, Vol. II, pp. 254-
255).

Still, might not Christians reject as irrelevant most of the examples I adduce in this
chapter? Can't they say that fanaticism belongs to the bad old days and that Christianity
has outgrown its earlier intolerance? For instance, the days of fervid self-denial and
mortification of the flesh are long gone. Today's fundamentalist is an enthusiastic
hedonist whose conspicuous consumption of worldly goods and pleasure would shame
any publican or sinner of Biblical days. Solomon in all his glory never had a Lexus in the
garage, a Rolex on the wrist, Italian loafers on the feet, and capped teeth as white as the
pearly gates. Where are the ascetics when we need them? But seriously--two doctrines of
orthodox Christianity make sure that it will always be intolerant in spirit if not in
practice: (a) exclusivism, and (b) the doctrine of hell.

Christianity claims to be the Truth, Truth with a capital "T." It claims to be the final,
complete, exclusive revelation of God to humanity, both necessary and sufficient for
salvation. Further, the consequence of willful non-belief is eternal punishment in hell. If
orthodox Christianity is the only true doctrine and the consequences of not believing that
doctrine are so dire, then Thomas Aquinas was entirely logical in demanding that heretics
be "shut off from the world by death." As Aquinas observed, murderers only destroy the
body; heretics lead people away from the true doctrine and thus into eternal perdition.

20
Heresy is therefore much more reprehensible than murder and much more deserving of
death.

Most Grand Inquisitors were probably not sadistic brutes. Often they must have been
educated, cultivated men who found their tasks distasteful if not repugnant. Yet they were
convinced that the agonies they inflicted with the rack, strappado, or stake were nothing
compared to the eternal pains of hell. So if torture could redeem even one sinner or
burning eradicate one unregenerate heretic, the cost was worth it. Montaigne observed
"We rate our conjectures too highly if we burn people alive for them." Christians have
rated their conjectures highly indeed.

Logically, if there is one and only one True Doctrine and hell is the penalty for not
believing it, tolerance of anything that leads towards unbelief cannot be a virtue. So Jews,
Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, feminists, gay activists, atheists, evolutionists, humanists,
and any others who teach things contrary to the One True Doctrine, must be opposed.
Active intolerance is the only reasonable attitude towards such persons. Pluralistic and
multicultural ideals must be energetically opposed.

Let's face it though: except for a handful of nutty "Christian Reconstructionists" (and
those guys are scary), today's Christians have no stomach for real persecution. The rack
and the stake probably will not make a comeback. (You can never be sure, though.)
Intolerance today takes more subtle forms.

Allow me to illustrate with a personal experience: In June 2000, at a public high school in
the metropolitan Atlanta area, I attended a fundamentalist religious service disguised as a
graduation ceremony. The service opened with prayer--not the ritual invocation of a
generic deity, but a passionate, emphatically Christian prayer. The principal delivered a
sermonette urging students to read the Bible and to accept Jesus Christ as their savior.
Each graduate was given a copy of the Ten Commandments with his or her diploma. The
service ended with another prayer, again explicitly "in Jesus' name." I was amazed when
the evening did not end with an altar call.

To disguise a fundamentalist religious service as a commencement ceremony and foist it

on a captive audience is an exercise in intolerance (not to mention extreme rudeness).
The whole purpose of such an in-your-face display is to flaunt the dominance of the
majority's creed and intimidate those otherwise persuaded. What better way to keep
unbelievers "in their place?"

So no, Christianity has not gotten tolerant over the years; it has merely gotten smarter.
You catch more flies with sugar than salt, and you get more converts with slick rhetoric
and high-tech propaganda than you do with dungeon, fire, and sword. Who needs Grand
Inquisitors when you have gone on-line and satellites broadcast your message
worldwide? So Christian intolerance no longer wears the mask of the Inquisitor; it wears
the "aw shucks" grin of Pat Robertson and the oleaginous simper of Jerry Falwell.

21
Chapter Two: Kreeft and Tacelli on Hell

Of course, I am aware that many modern Christians have cooled the fires of hell, often
interpreting hell as purgatorial or even as merely metaphorical. However, more orthodox
thinkers argue that rejection of the traditional doctrine of hell is tantamount to the
rejection of the entire Christian revelation. For instance, Peter Kreeft and Ronald K.
Tacelli, in their Handbook of Christian Apologetics, insist that the exact same grounds for
believing that God is love, Biblical revelation, also teaches the reality of hell (Kreeft and
Tacelli, 1994, p. 285). So Kreeft and Tacelli throw down the gauntlet to someone like
me: either I accept Christianity and the doctrine of an eternal, punitive hell or I reject hell
and Christianity, too. If that is my only choice, I reject hell and Christianity, too.

The problem is that when Kreeft and Tacelli come to defending the traditional doctrine,
their arguments are woefully weak. They claim that God is not to blame for the pains of
hell since hell is freely chosen by those who go there. The obvious rejoinder is that
anyone who consciously chooses eternal punishment over eternal joy would have to be
insane, and lunatics clearly need treatment, not punishment. The reply of Kreeft and
Tacelli is astonishing:

[T]he Christian replies that that is precisely what sin is: insanity, the deliberate refusal of
joy and truth.... Perhaps the most shocking teaching in all of Christianity is this: not so
much the doctrine of hell as the doctrine of sin. It means the human race is spiritually
insane (p. 290).

However, if an act is insane it is not a deliberate choice; this is entailed by the meaning of
the words "deliberate" and "insane." Is the bizarre behavior of the schizophrenic
deliberately chosen? Does the paranoiac freely opt to believe that the Freemasons, the
Trilateral Commission, Jewish bankers, the CIA, and the Martians are persecuting him?
Maybe Kreeft and Tacelli intend something different by "insane" and "deliberate" than
what those words normally mean, but one hesitates to accuse two distinguished
philosophers of such blatant humpty-dumptyism.

Even if sin is freely chosen, it is God who decides what the consequences of that choice
are. It is God who decides that unrepentant sinfulness must bear the consequence of
eternal pain. The obvious objection is that finite and temporal sin, no matter how gross,
do not merit infinite and eternal punishment, and so hell contradicts divine justice. Kreeft
and Tacelli reply (a) that eternity is not endless time but an entirely different dimension
than time, so there is no problem of endless punishment, and (b) that hell's punishments
are eternal but not infinite; there are degrees of joy in heaven and degrees of misery in
hell.

Unfortunately, these replies raise far more questions than they answer: If hell is not
endless suffering--indeed, if it lasts no time at all--why should we fear it? What would it
be like to experience "eternal" as opposed to "endless" suffering? Is eternal suffering
worse than endless suffering? If so, the problem of apparent injustice arises again. If
Kreeft and Tacelli argue that these questions are out of order since eternal suffering is

22
strictly incomparable with temporal suffering, I begin to wonder about the intelligibility
of their concept of hell. The only kind of suffering that I have experienced or can imagine
is temporal suffering, so Kreeft and Tacelli's hell, with its concept of eternal, atemporal
punishment, is utterly incomprehensible to me.

Kreeft and Tacelli seem to suspect that they have moved beyond rationality and
intelligibility here since they conclude this section with the remark "To refuse to believe
[in hell] is to measure God's thoughts by ours (p. 300)." Allow me at once to plead guilty
to "measuring God's thoughts" by my own! As I see it, I have no other choice. If my
intellect and my deepest moral convictions tell me that hell is a monstrous dogma,
unworthy of belief by decent human beings, then I can think of no greater sin I could
commit than to accept such a doctrine. It is a sad but edifying spectacle to see how
intelligent defenders of the indefensible tie themselves in ethical and conceptual knots.

It is easy to see why Kreeft and Tacelli are loath to give up the concept of hell despite the
conceptual gerrymandering and ethical contortionism it requires of them. Hell is
Christianity's most powerful instrument of control. Religious instruction ensures that the
fear of hell is implanted in the mind in early childhood. When that fear is planted deep
enough, the adult cannot entertain honest doubts without catching a whiff of brimstone.
Dr. Johnson said "knowledge that one is about to be hanged clears the mind
marvelously." Fear of hell has the opposite effect; rational thinking becomes impossible
when that fear is strong.

Remember, you cannot escape hell by being good; for Christians, everybody is bad. No
matter how hard you strive to live a virtuous life, if you lack certain beliefs, you go to
hell. That is what makes hell such a pernicious doctrine. Hell is the penalty for
disagreeing with Christians! It is hard to imagine a more potent tool for propaganda or
one more subversive of rational thought. An appeal ad baculum is an attempt to persuade
by intimidation or the threat of force. Hell is the ultimate ad baculum: Believe or suffer
consequences too horrible to contemplate. In short, the doctrine of hell is Christianity's
campaign of psychological warfare against the human mind.

Chapter Three: Historicity of the Gospels

This chapter gives supporting evidence for the nine claims I make (shown in bold) about
the canonical gospels.

(1) Gospels written by persons unknown (not eyewitnesses):

It is highly questionable that any of them [the gospels] was written by an eyewitness. Not
only did Jesus himself write nothing, but the attribution of the gospels to his disciples did
not occur until the late first century at the earliest. The one gospel for which the strongest
case can be made that it was written by the man whose name it bears, Luke,

23
acknowledges that its author was not himself an eyewitness of the events he portrays
(Luke 1:1-2). (Kee, Young, and Froelich, 1965, p. 55).

As for the author, [of Mark] we do not know who he was. The Mark to whom the gospel
is attributed is a legendary figure from the second century (Mack, 1995, p. 153).

As with the other narrative gospels, we do not know anything about the author [of Luke]
except what can be inferred from the writing itself. Later in the second century, the work
was attributed to Luke, the co-worker of Paul ..., just as other anonymous literature from
earlier times was attributed to either apostles or their companions in order to validate
their truth (Mack, 1995, p. 167).

The articles on the Gospels in the Oxford Companion to the Bible (1993) give the
following information on their authorship:

• Matthew: Written by an unknown Jewish Christian of the second generation;

probably a resident of Antioch in Syria.
• Mark: Notes confusion in the traditional identification of the author but offers no
hypothesis.
• Luke: Possibly written by a resident of Antioch and an occasional companion of
the apostle Paul.
• John: Composed and edited in stages by unknown followers of the apostle John,
probably residents of Ephesus.

According to the editors of The New English Bible, the identity of the author of John is
unknown; it was ascribed to John the son of Zebedee late in the second century (Sandmel,
et al., 1976). G.A. Wells comments on John's claim to be an eyewitness:

That the final chapter 21 of the fourth gospel, where the eyewitness claim occurs, was
written by the author of chapters 1-20 is maintained only by the most conservative
commentators. The whole of this final chapter comes after a direct address to the reader
clearly meant as a solemn conclusion to the gospel.... Just before this solemn end, the
risen Jesus has instructed the disciples to go out as missionaries. . . and has given them
the Holy Ghost so that they can forgive sins, or withhold such forgiveness. But in the
appended chapter that follows, they seem to have forgotten this, and are represented as
having returned to their old profession as fishermen in Galilee (Wells, The Jesus Legend,
1996, pp. 87-88).

In sum, the authors of the gospels seem to be at least one generation removed from the
original eyewitnesses. They did not reside in Palestine and had no firsthand acquaintance
with the events they describe.

(2) Dates of the gospels:

Kee, Young, and Froelich (1965, p. 472): Mark (70), Matthew (85-100), Luke (85-100),
John (90-110)

24
Burton L. Mack (1995) : Matthew (late 80s) (p. 161). Luke (around 120) (p. 167), John
(90s) (1995, p. 176).

Editors of The New English Bible (Sandmel, et al. 1976): Mark (around 70); Matthew
(about 90); Luke (about 90); John ("Shortly before the end of the First Century").

As the above references show, New Testament scholars agree fairly closely on a rather
late date for the writing of the gospels. Mark, generally recognized as the earliest, was
seldom dated much before 70, approximately 40 years after the crucifixion. Lately there
has been a conservative backlash, an attempt to date the gospels prior to 70. For
conservative apologists, the advantage of an early dating are obvious: the gospels, or at
least the earliest of them, could have been written by eyewitnesses, thus greatly
increasing their credibility. Let us take a look at these conservative arguments.

Pamela Binnings Ewen, a Houston lawyer, has recently (1999) written Faith on Trial.
The book is described on the cover as "an attorney analyzes the evidence for the death
and Resurrection of Jesus." She argues for an early date of the composition of the gospels.
One argument is that the gospels reflect the circumstances prior to the destruction of
Jerusalem and the temple by a Roman army in the year 70:

The silence of the Gospels with respect to the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple is
strong circumstantial evidence that they were written before, not after, A.D. 70. The
Gospels reflect the social, cultural, and economic background of the period prior to the
destruction of Jerusalem and the Jewish Levitical system, not after. They reflect a
delicate but still tolerable relationship with Rome, not the hostile servility of a nation
enslaved and broken. Logic does not permit a conclusion that the Gospels could have
been written after the year A.D. 70 without mention of the Jewish revolt and the resulting
destruction of the city, the temple, the Jewish culture, and the new hostility with Rome
(Ewen, 1999, p. 39).

She claims further internal evidence of an early date:

[T]he Gospels affirmatively reflect the need to distinguish the new message of Jesus from
Jewish law as it existed prior to A.D. 70 on such subjects as fasting, the relationship to
the temple, and the requirement of sacrifices, all of which disappeared after the
destruction of Jerusalem. John A.T. Robinson, a well-known biblical scholar, has given
the example, among others, that the Gospel of Matthew seven times warns against the
influence of the Sadducees, a group whose power totally disappeared after the destruction
of the temple. The Gospel of Matthew also reflects a continued need to coexist with a
Jewish culture that was no longer in existence after the destruction of the temple in A.D.
70. Historians have recognized that after A.D. 70 Christians and Jews separated into two
completely different camps, and that fact is reflected in many Jewish and Christian
writings. Based on this reasoning, the situation described in the Gospels corresponds to
what is known about Christianity in Palestine prior to A.D. 70 (Ewen, 1999, p. 40).

She concludes:

25
The facts and analysis described above are completely inconsistent with a theory that the
Gospels were written at or near the end of the first century or in the early second century.
Reason requires a date prior to A.D. 70 for the writing of the four Gospels on that basis
alone (Ewen, 1999, p. 40).

Ewen must have an odd idea about what "reason requires." In my view, reason requires
that you at least consider the arguments for the other side before issuing such
pronouncements. Generations of New Testament scholarship have produced a very broad
consensus that the gospels date from around 70 to as late as the early second century. For
instance, The Oxford Companion to the Bible (1993) dates Mark from 65-70, Matthew
from 85-90, Luke around 80-85, and John around 85. Other standard sources are listed
above. Ewen dismisses the scholarly consensus with barely a nod to the evidence
underlying it.

First, are the gospels silent about the destruction of the Temple? Consider a passage from
Mark:

And as he came out of the temple, one of his disciples said to him, "Look, Teacher, what
wonderful stones and what wonderful buildings." And Jesus said to him "Do you see
these great buildings? There will not be left here one stone upon another, that will not be
thrown down (Mark 13:1-2)."

In verse 14, Jesus warns of a desecration in an unnamed sacred place. However, the
parallel passage in Matthew (24:15) specifically identifies the place as the one prophesied
by Daniel, i.e., the Temple of Jerusalem. Luke, in his version of these passages,
specifically refers to armies surrounding Jerusalem (Luke 21:20; see Kee, Young, and
Froelich, 1965, pp. 254-255).

Luke also speaks of Jerusalem as abandoned (13:35) and portrays Jesus as saying of
Jerusalem:

For the days shall come upon you, when your enemies will cast up a bank about you and
surround you, and hem you in on every side, and dash you to the ground, you and your
children within you, and they will not leave one stone upon another in you; because you
did not know the time of your visitation (Luke, 19:43-44).

In Matthew 22 a parable is given in which the king sends troops to burn a city whose
citizens have spurned his invitation to celebrate his son's marriage feast (22:7). Matthew
seems to be saying that the Jews deserved the destruction of Jerusalem because they
rejected God's son. These passages certainly seem to have been written with the
knowledge of the siege and destruction of Jerusalem. An account of these passages must
be given before we can conclude that the gospels are silent about the destruction of
Jerusalem and the Temple.

Of course, conservative Christians could say that such passages do refer to the destruction
of Jerusalem but are a faithful record of prophecies of Jesus which were fulfilled 40 years

26
later. However, this is not Ewen's claim. She maintains that the gospels make no
reference or allusion to the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple.

Ewen claims that the gospels reflect the social, cultural, and economic circumstances of
the time before the Jewish War (66-70). In fact, the gospels contain many hints that they
were written by gentile or Diaspora Jewish Christians after 70 rather than by Jews
residing in Palestine before that date. Mark occasionally pauses to explain Jewish words
or customs, and his knowledge of Palestinian geography is vague at best. This strongly
suggests that Mark was written for a community of gentile Christians living outside of
Palestine. As for Matthew:

[T]he author exhibits a theological outlook, command of Greek, and rabbinic training that
suggest he was a Jewish Christian of the second rather than the first generation.... Also,
Antioch of Syria commends itself as the place where he may have been at home, because
the social conditions reflected in his story correspond with those that seem to have
prevailed there: the city was Greek-speaking, urban, and prosperous, and had a large
population of both Jews and gentiles (Kingsbury, 1993, pp. 502-503).

The author of Luke, whoever he was, indicates in the opening address of his Gospel that
he is a latter-day compiler who is putting together traditions coming from the original
eyewitnesses (Luke 1:1-2). This and the above-noted apparent references to the
destruction of Jerusalem pretty definitely mark Luke as composed after 70.

Ewen makes a number of very dubious assumptions. She assumes that the gospel writers,
had they written after 70, would not have included material reflecting the cultural or
religious situation in Palestine before the Jewish War. However, this is highly
questionable. New Testament scholars have long recognized that the gospels draw upon a
variety of traditions and sources. The consensus view is that the gospels, written from
around 70 on, had access to a variety of oral traditions as well as a written, now lost,
"sayings gospel" referred to as "Q" (see Mack, 1993, for a reconstruction of "Q."). If the
gospels drew upon traditions that began to take shape well before the destruction of
Jerusalem, it is hardly surprising if they retain something of the flavor and tenor of those
earlier times. In particular, if some of the recollected sayings of Jesus were originally
directed against the Pharisees and Sadducees, it is not improbable that the gospels would
retain that information.

There is no reason to think that the intended audience of the gospels, whether Jewish or
gentile, would be wholly unfamiliar with or uninterested in the pre-70 context. The
Temple (and the associated Levitical system) played a fundamental role both for Jews in
Roman Palestine and in the Diaspora (Tanzer, 1993, p. 395). Further, the idea of the
Temple, as an ideal in the minds of the Jewish people, long outlasted its physical
presence. Long after the destruction of the Temple, the Mishnah continues to speak as if
it were still standing (Tanzer, 1993, p. 395). In general, the destruction of a religiously
important site only enhances its symbolic significance for believers.

27
So it is fair to say that in the decades immediately following 70, the Temple, the Law,
and the Levitical system remained prominent concepts in the religion of Diaspora Jews.
Therefore, the gospel writers contrast Christianity with those concepts because (a) that is
the tradition that they received and are passing on, and (b) those concepts remained
familiar and significant for Diaspora Jews after 70. In fact, the attempt by the gospel
writers to distance themselves from the Jews, which Ewen herself highlights, is itself
strong evidence of a later date for composition of the gospels. Jesus was a Jew. So were
the disciples and the earliest converts. However, as the Christian communities became
increasing gentile, and as confrontations with the Jews escalated, the anti-Jewish rhetoric
became shrill. The harsh, blatantly anti-Semitic diatribes in the gospels show that they
were written when the Church had become largely gentile and the schism between
Christians and Jews had already grown wide.

The main reason for thinking that the gospels are not eyewitness accounts is that many
years of critical scholarship, using the tools of source criticism, have shown the gospels
to be re-worked composites of earlier sources and traditions. The overwhelming
consensus is that the gospels were not firsthand reports, but products of a fairly lengthy
process of accumulation and synthesis of various oral and written sources.

Consider the famous "synoptic problem." The synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark, and
Luke, share many passages, down to small details of phrasing, as G. A. Wells notes:

[A]ny synopsis, where parallel passages are set out in adjacent columns, will show that
the first three of the four canonical gospels have passages which are identical, down to
the same Greek particles. For instance, Matthew's account, in the material it shares with
Mark, is abbreviated and Mark's 11,078 words are represented by 8555 yet of these 4230
are identical both in form and in sequence.... [T]he enormous number of identical phrases
is not to be explained as being due to the community's good memory of Jesus's teaching,
as more than half of such phrases are in the narrative, not the words of Jesus (Wells,
1996, p. 95).

Clearly, Matthew and Mark are not independent narratives. Any student submitting a
paper sharing so much with a published source would immediately be convicted of
plagiarism. So Matthew draws upon Mark, or Mark upon Matthew, or both from a
common source. Luke also shares large blocks of material with Mark and has some in
common with Matthew that is not found in Mark.

The standard solution is to view Mark, itself a synthesis of earlier materials, as a source
for both Matthew and Luke, which also have access to their own particular sources. It is
also thought that "Q," the hypothetical sayings gospel, was used by Matthew and Luke,
and accounts for materials they share with each other but not with Mark. The upshot is
that the synoptics cannot be independent, firsthand witnesses of Jesus's ministry or
Resurrection. This, of course, does not mean that they are wholly unreliable or worthless
as sources of historical information, but it does make the identification of a stratum of
pristine, original eyewitness testimony very difficult if not impossible.

28
Of course, Ms. Ewen will have none of this. She argues that each of the gospels is an
original and independent witness (Ewen, 1999, pp. 71-83). She contends: "As to the
assertion that the Gospels were copied one from the other, a more straightforward
response to this challenge is that the similarity among the three Gospels arose out of the
fact that they all derived from, or based upon, the same oral teachings of Jesus (Ewen,
1999, p. 73)." However, this simply ignores the point, made above by Wells, that more
than half the words identical in form and sequence in Matthew and Mark are in the
narrative, not the recorded words of Jesus.

Worse, the original words of Jesus were in Aramaic. Ewen's claim entails that each
synoptic gospel contains an independent Greek translation of those original Aramaic
sayings. It is simply absurd to think that three independent translations would agree in
wording and sequence to such a degree. To illustrate, consider three different English
translations of the same passage from Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound (lines 442-446):

Now listen while I tell of mortals' pain, how primitive they were till I fired their wits. I
tell you, not from disgust at men, but showing how much they owe me. Before then, they
had eyes that blankly gazed, ears hearing empty sound.

What I did for mortals in their misery, hear now. At first mindless, I gave them mind and
reason.--What I say is not in censure of mankind, but showing you how all my gifts to
them were guided by goodwill. In those days they had eyes, but sight was meaningless;
Heard sounds, but could not listen...

...but hear what troubles there were among men, how I found them witless and gave them
the use of their wits and made them masters of their minds. I will tell you this, not
because I would blame men, but to explain the goodwill of my gift. For men at first had
eyes but saw to no purpose; they had ears but did not hear.

That is how translation works: very different phrasing, different sentence structure,
shared words different in form and/or sequence. There just is no way to explain the
parallels in the synoptics other than collusion or interdependence of some sort.

Much of Ms. Ewen's case relies on what John Dominic Crossan calls "the mystique of
oral memory," the supposition that the original hearers of Jesus would have been
especially careful to memorize his exact words and pass them on verbatim. According to
Ewen, many of the shared passages are best explained by the allegedly meticulous habits
of memorization characteristic of cultures emphasizing the oral transmission of religious
teachings (Ewen, 1999, p. 73). Crossan demonstrates that such a view is simply at odds
with our scientific knowledge of the nature of memory and our anthropological
knowledge of how preliterate groups preserve oral traditions. This issue takes us to the
next sub-section.

(3) Gospels based on unreliable oral tradition:

29
This literature [the Gospels] was oral before it was written and began with the memories
of those who knew Jesus personally. Their memories and teachings were passed on as
oral tradition for some forty years or so before achieving written form for the first time in
a self-conscious literary work, so far as we know, in the Gospel of Mark, within a few
years of 70 A.D. But oral tradition is by definition unstable, notoriously open to mythical,
legendary, and fictional embellishment. We know that by the forties of the first century
traditions already existed which we would now label orthodox and traditions coming to
be recognized as heretical--teachings about what Jesus said and meant that even then
were being called (though in a different vocabulary) "fictional" (Helms, 1988, p. 12;
emphasis added).

If, as Ms. Ewen and other apologists insist, the gospels contain a pure, pristine Christian
message, preserved against corruption by the flawless memories of the original
eyewitnesses, scholars should be able to identify that message in the texts. Instead,
scholars find a welter of oral traditions, varying from place to place. It is highly doubtful
that all early Christian communities even proclaimed a unified kerygma, i.e., the basic
proclamation that Christ died for our sins and rose again on the third day. As one
standard textbook puts it: "It is not possible to identify even a short list of specific themes
or beliefs that are expressed in all forms of the kerygma preserved in the New
Testament.... The content of the kerygmatic statements varies with each writer and often
with the occasion. (Kee, Young, Froelich, 1965, p. 58)." In short, the idea that there once
existed a single, pure form of the Christian proclamation, untainted by myth and legend,
is itself a myth.

Crossan on the nature of memory:

[M]emory is creatively reproductive rather than accurately recollective.... [O]rality is

structural rather than syntactical. Apart from short items that are retained magically,
ritually, or metrically verbatim, it remembers gist, outline, and interaction of elements
rather than detail, particular, and precision of sequence. "Even in cultures which know
and depend on writing but retain a living contact with pristine orality, that is, retain a high
oral residue, ritual utterance itself is often not typically verbatim," as Walter Ong noted.
"The early Christian Church remembered, in pretextual, oral form, even in their
textualized rituals [words of the last supper], and even at those very points where she was
commanded to remember most assiduously".... That is a very striking example: the words
of eucharistic institution from the Last Supper are not cited word-for-word the same
within the New Testament itself (Crossan, 1998, pp. 54-55).

Experiments have shown that simply repeating a false statement over and over leads
people to believe that it is true. Likewise, when we repeatedly think or talk abut a past
experience, we tend to become increasingly confident that we are recalling it accurately.
Sometimes we are accurate when we recount frequently discussed experiences. But we
are also likely to feel more confident about frequently rehearsed experiences that we
remember inaccurately. Retrieving an experience repeatedly can make us feel certain that
we are correct when we are plainly wrong. The tenuous correlation between a person's
accuracy and confidence is especially relevant to eyewitness testimony. Witnesses who

30
rehearse their testimony again and again in interviews with police officers and attorneys
may become extremely confident about what they say--even when they are incorrect.
This consequence of rehearsal is especially important because numerous studies have
shown that juries are powerfully influenced by confident eyewitnesses (Daniel Schacter,
Searching for Memory, p. 111; quoted in Crossan, 1998, p. 59; emphasis added).

I do not suggest that we never remember anything correctly. That would be absurd.
Neither do I suggest that memory is but another name for imagination, or that we make it
all up under the influence of suggestion and society. That would also be absurd. But
[numerous cited cases have served] .... to mitigate the serene complacency of common
sense about memory and, second, to warn us that, while we do certainly remember, we
remember by a reconstructive process. That reconstructive process mixes recollected
facts from an actual happening with ones seen, heard, or imagined from similar
happenings. That reconstructive process recalls gist rather than detail, core rather than
periphery--and somebody must then decide which is which. (In an eyewitness
identification of a murderer, for example, is a beard gist or detail, core or periphery?)
That reconstructive process often claims equal accuracy and veracity for what we actually
recall and for what we creatively invent (Crossan, 1998, p. 67).

Even more significantly, Crossan recounts studies of illiterate Balkan singers of epics
(Crossan, 1998, pp. 69-78). These studies show that, in the absence of a written text
serving as an absolute criterion of accuracy, the oral transmission of epics is a creative
performance rather than a verbatim recounting. With the exception of certain formulaic
phrases, each singer delivers a different version of the epic, with very different details
and embellishments. Even the same singer will give different versions at different times.
Of course, there are mnemonists who can perform the trick of memorizing written texts
word-for-word. However, the very concept of a verbatim reproduction is a concept of
literate societies, not ones in which oral traditions prevail. The oral traditions of illiterate
peasants--like the original witnesses of the ministry and words of Jesus--preserve gist or
essence with many differences in precise wording.

Ewen thinks that the apostle Matthew, traditionally identified as a tax-collector, would
have been literate and must have had the ability to write shorthand. She speculates that
Matthew could thus have recorded Jesus's exact words (Ewen, 1999, p. 74). This
speculation is precisely that--a speculation. Her evidence for the apostolic authorship of
the Gospel of Matthew is extremely weak. For instance, she cites the confusing report by
Papias, supposedly writing around 130, that names "Matthew" as compiling sayings in
the "Hebrew dialect."

First, we do not have Papias's claim firsthand; he is quoted by Eusebius, bishop of

Caesarea in a fourth century work. Second, the quote implies that Matthew was originally
written in Hebrew or Aramaic, a view rejected by nearly all scholars. Further, Papias's
association of the name "Matthew" with gospel writings may have been based on nothing
more than the fact that the disciple Matthew is mentioned twice in the Gospel (Overman,
1993, p. 502). Ewen seems to think that Papias, whoever he was (we have none of his
writings), would have conducted a rigorous examination of the authorship of the Gospel

31
in the manner of a modern critical scholar or historian (see her treatment on pp. 54-56 of
her book). Needless to say, there is no basis for such an expectation.

It is important to remember also that there were a number of early Christian communities,
often in conflict and each with its own favored interpretation of Christ's message. One
way to promote one's own preferred gospel was to attribute it to apostolic authorship. The
attribution of anonymous works to historical figures was a very common practice in
Greco-Roman times (Mack, 1995, p. 7). Once a gospel became widely accepted, the
manuscript tradition of adding an attributive superscript, e.g., "According to Matthew,"
would have been hard to repudiate, no matter how tenuous the original association.

Ewen also stakes a great deal on Carsten Thiede's highly questionable redating of the
Magdalen fragments, three tiny papyrus fragments of Matthew 26, to the mid-first
century. Burton L. Mack points out the weakness of Thiede's claims and comments:

[T]he mass of detailed scholarship on the origins and history of early Christian
movements and their writings has been swept aside in the eager pursuit of a chimera.
From a critical scholar's point of view, Thiede's proposal is an example of just how
desperate the Christian imagination can become in the quest for the literal facticity of the
Christian Gospels (Mack, 1995, pp. 9-10).

At a common sense level it just is hard to see how anybody could mistake the Gospel of
Matthew for firsthand testimony. The Gospel does not claim to be written by an
eyewitness, and certainly not one named Matthew (Kee, Young, and Froelich, 1965, p.
274). It is a consciously crafted narrative composed from a well-thought-out theological
perspective and with a clear apologetic agenda (see below). Matthew is clearly an
interpretation, based on long reflection, of previously given materials, not a presentation
of raw data or unembellished eyewitness reports.

Finally, Kee, Young, and Froelich make an excellent point:

For the task of interpreting the will of God, first century Jews and Christians considered
the living word of oral communication preferable to the preparation of a written record.
As long as there were first-hand witnesses of the event of Jesus' ministry, who could
report personally on what he did and said, the living word was a preferred vehicle for
communicating the Gospel (Kee, Young, and Froelich, 1965, p. 252).

In short, written records of Jesus's words or ministry were simply not needed or wanted
until the end of the apostolic age with the martyrdoms of Peter and Paul in 64. The
writing of Gospels was a task for second-generation Christians.

The upshot is that, contrary to the claims of Ewen and other apologists, the word-for-
word similarities of the synoptic Gospels are very unlikely to be due to the verbatim
recollection of the original eyewitnesses. Oral traditions simply do not form that way.
Rather, those precise parallels are much more likely due to common use of written

32
sources. Hence, the synoptic gospels are not independent eyewitness accounts but
textually interdependent syntheses of earlier oral traditions.

(4) Gospels have theological bias and apologetic agenda:

[I]t must be acknowledged ... that they [the gospels] cannot be considered nonpartisan
reports about Jesus. They are in the truest sense of the term propaganda literature. If one
had to provide a single statement of purpose that would suit all four of the gospels he
could probably not find a better one than the explanation given by the author of the
Gospel of John: "These were written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the son
of God, and that believing you may have life in his name" (John 20:31). (Kee, Young,
and Froelich, 1965 p. 55).

As we have learned, the gospels do not claim to be (and in fact ought not to be) classified
as attempts at writing biographies. The intention of the Gospel is to flesh out the
kerygma--to show that the power of God that brings men of faith a foretaste of the life of
the Age to Come was already at work in the ministry of Jesus.... There was no interest in
preserving archives of Christian origins for posterity, since it was still believed that the
present age was very soon coming to an end. The writer was concerned rather to meet the
needs of the Church--that is, to provide Christian preachers and teachers, as well as
interested inquirers into the faith, with a document that would show forth in Jesus' words
and works the redemptive meaning that faith discerned in him (Kee, Young, and Froelich,
1965, pp. 252-253).

[The gospels] can no longer be read as direct accounts of what happened, but rather as
vehicles for proclamation. Such was their original intention (Reginald H. Fuller, 1971, p.
172).

(5) Containing fictional forms:

The gospels are clearly not biography in the modern sense:

First, it must be acknowledged that neither the gospels nor any other source provides us
with the kind or quantity of information about Jesus that would make possible the
preparation of a biography. A serious modern biography tries to understand a man not
only against the background of the times in which he lived, but in the light of the specific
personal and psychological forces which helped to shape his decisions and to affect his
response to the challenges and opportunities that confronted him. No such materials are
available to us for preparing a psychological study of Jesus. We cannot determine with
any certainty the order of events that are reported by the tradition, apart from the obvious
fact that his baptism by John the Baptist came toward the beginning of his public career
and the Crucifixion came at the end. It is impossible, therefore, to trace with any
confidence a pattern of development or change in the life or thought of Jesus--another
factor which would be indispensable in writing a biography (Kee, Young, and Froelich,
1965, p. 59).

33
Each of the four canonical Gospels is religious proclamation in the form of a largely
fictional narrative. Christians have never been reluctant to write fiction about Jesus, and
we must remember that our four canonical Gospels are only the cream of a large and
varied literature. We still possess, in whole or in part, such works as the Gospel of
Thomas, the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of Philip, the Secret Gospel of Mark, the Gospel
of Mary Magdalene, and such anonymous gospels as those according to the Hebrews, the
Egyptians, the Ebionites, and so on. Jesus is the subject of a large--in fact, still growing--
body of literature, often unorthodox or pure fantasy, cast in the form of fictional narrative
and discourse (Helms, 1988, pp. 11-12).

And many [miracles] ... are narrated according to a stereotyped form. Kasemann ... notes
that miracles of healing include such motifs as: i. the insistence on the long duration of
the illness and the previous unsuccessful striving after a cure (for example Mark 5:25-26,
apropos of the woman with a issue of blood); ii. an action which demonstrates the success
of the healing (as when Peter's mother-in-law, cured of her fever by Jesus, is immediately
able to wait upon him, Mark 1:31) or the astonished cry of witnesses, which serves the
same end--or both, as when the paralytic takes up his bed and walks, to the astonishment
of all (Mark 2:12). Nineham ... instances as a close pagan parallel, Lucian's story that
"Midas himself, taking up the bed on which he had been lying, went off into the country."
And Kasemann ... observes that "the adaptation of pagan motifs becomes particularly
obvious when the woman with the issue of blood is healed through the mere grasping of
the virtue-laden garment of Jesus, or healing power is ascribed in the setting of Acts to
Peter's shadow or Paul's handkerchief" (Wells, 1996, p. 66).

[A]ll the death scenes were constructed to show Jesus dying the model death and so "in
fulfillment" of Scripture.... [T]he scenes have a religious and moral purpose disguised as
a historical one; we are, with these scenes, in the literary realm known as fiction, in
which narratives exist less to describe the past than to affect the present. In De Quincy's
phrase, "the Gospels are not so much literature of knowledge as literature of power"
(Helms, 1988, pp. 15-16).

(6) Inconsistent with each other:

A careful study of the four gospels in comparison with each other will show that there is
little agreement among the gospel writers as to the order in which Jesus said and did what
is reported of him. John depicts him as cleansing the Temple at the outset of his public
ministry; in the other three gospels, the incident occurs at the end of his career. Sayings
placed at the opening of his teaching ministry by Luke are located toward the end of it by
Matthew. The nearest we can come to an outline of Jesus' public life is the one offered by
Mark and followed with some modifications by Matthew and Luke. John goes his own
way in complete independence of the other three gospels. But Mark's outline is not really
much help, since a close analysis of Mark shows that the framework is contributed by
Mark himself, and was not part of the tradition he received. Almost all the chronological
and geographical references in Mark are vague or even artificial in nature. The tradition
reached Mark in the form of independent story or saying units; Mark arranged them on

34
his own narrative line. As someone has expressed it, Mark began his gospel writing with
only a heap of unstrung pearls (Kee, Young, and Froelich, 1965, p. 59).

A striking discrepancy concerns the accounts in the synoptics of Jesus's resurrection

appearances to his disciples. Matthew, following hints by Mark, sites in Galilee the one
appearance to them that he records: the risen one has instructed the women at the empty
tomb to tell the disciples to go to Galilee in order to see him (28:10). They do this, and
his appearance to them there concludes the gospel. In Luke, however, he appears to them
on Easter day in Jerusalem and nearby on the Emmaus road eighty miles from Galilee)
and tells them to stay in the city "until ye be clothed with power from on high" (24:49).
Acts 2:1-4 represents this as happening at Pentecost, some fifty days later). They obey,
and were "continually in the temple" (24:53). Luke has very pointedly changed what is
said in Mark so as to site these appearances in the city. (Luke omits Mark 14:28), "after I
am raised up I will go before you into Galilee"; and he replaces Mark 16:7, "he goeth
before you into Galilee" with a message which deletes any such suggestion.

[J.W.] Montgomery harmonized the accounts by arguing that the risen Jesus could have
moved from Galilee to Jerusalem in a series of appearances spread, according to Acts 1:3,
over forty days. This hypothesis does not reconcile the movements of the disciples--
immediately to Galilee in Matthew, and not beyond Jerusalem and its environs in Luke.
All the forty-day appearances of Acts are sited in Jerusalem (1:4). Nor does
Montgomery's proposal account for Luke's deliberate alteration of the Marcan material,
effected so as to bring it into line with a theological principle of great importance to him,
namely that Christianity had not broken lightly or readily from its Jewish foundation: It is
for this that he insists that it was "beginning from Jerusalem" that the Christian mission
went forward to "all the nations" (Luke 24:47), so that the disciples tarried there and did
not return to Galilee (Wells, 1996, pp. 100-101).

On reconciling John with the synoptics:

[J.W.] Montgomery's position is that, unless it is possible to point to actual contradictions

between John and the synoptics, they can be regarded as complementing each other.
From this premise we should have to suppose that--as E.P. Sanders puts it apropos of the
discrepancies in the teachings--"Jesus spent his short ministry teaching in two such
completely different ways, conveying such different contents, and that there were simply
two traditions, each going back to Jesus, one transmitting 50 per cent of what he said and
another one the other 50 per cent, with almost no overlaps." Hence, he adds, scholars
have almost unanimously concluded that the fourth gospel "represents an advanced
theological development, in which meditations on the person and work of Christ are
presented in the first person, as if Jesus said them" (Historical Jesus, pp. 70-71). (Wells,
1996, pp. 103-104).

On the inconsistency between Matthew's and Luke's genealogies:

Only one conclusion can be drawn from this discrepancy between the two supposed
genealogies: both Matthew and Luke are determined to trace Jesus's descent from King

35
David. Indeed, they have to do so in order to maintain that he was the Messiah predicted
by the Jewish prophets. But, it is quite clear that they had no evidence of the actual
descent, so each simply invented a lineage to link him with Zerubbabel and thus with
King David.

Needless to say, this problem of the irreconcilability of the two lineages has not gone
unnoticed. So desperate did some Christian commentators become that they resorted to
the claim that the two genealogies were not meant to be the same. Matthew's family tree,
they maintained, is that of Joseph, while Luke's is that of Mary. In this way it was
presumably hoped not only to solve the problem of the irreconcilable differences between
the two genealogies but also to invest Mary as well as Joseph with Davidic ancestry.
Unfortunately for them, however, the texts themselves are only too clear. Luke's
genealogy does not mention Mary's name at any point but makes it quite plain that this is
Joseph's lineage (3:23) (Arnheim, 1984, p, 16).

Matthew and Luke make the same three major claims about Jesus' birth: that it was a
virgin birth, that it took place in Bethlehem, and that Jesus was of Davidic descent. But
the evidence to back up these claims is quite different in the two accounts. In Luke, the
annunciation of the birth is made to Mary; in Matthew it is made to Joseph. Matthew has
Joseph and Mary marry; Luke does not. Both offer genealogies to prove Jesus's Davidic
lineage, but there are more differences than similarities, especially in the names of the
ancestors nearest in time to Jesus, notably Joseph's own father. Luke uses an elaborate
story about a Roman census to explain the presence of Joseph and Mary in Bethlehem;
Matthew gives the impression that they lived there permanently.

Then ... Matthew recounts stories of a star, three wise men, and a massacre, while all
Luke offers are a few simple shepherds inspired by angelic visions. In addition, where
Matthew has Mary, Joseph, and Jesus fleeing from Bethlehem to Egypt in order to escape
Herod's death edict (2:13-14),Luke has them stay in Bethlehem for forty days and then
return to Nazareth via Jerusalem (Luke 2:21-39). When Matthew brings them to Nazareth,
it is (in keeping with his version of the birth story though at variance with all the other
Gospels) as though they now go there for the first time (Matt 2:19-23) (Arnheim, 1984, p.
30).

(7) Gospels inconsistent with known facts:

Luke's nativity story demonstrably false:

One little snag, though, is that the Roman census would not have affected Nazareth in
any case, as Galilee was not under Roman rule but had its own ruler, the "tetrarch" Herod
Antipas, son of King Herod.

But that is not the only problem connected with the census. Luke is obviously very
anxious for us to accept his story about Jesus being born in Bethlehem, so he gives us a
lot of detail in explaining it. He actually goes so far as to specify the name of the Roman
governor under whom the census was held: Cyrenius. There certainly was a governor of

36
that name (or Quirinius, to put it in its proper Latin form) and, what is more, he is known
from Roman sources to have held a census. But the mention of him by Luke in
connection with the birth of Jesus creates more problems than it solves. Above all, there
is the problem of date. Quirinius certainly conducted a census--but at a time when Jesus
would have been ten years old. As it happens, Quirinius' census can be precisely dated by
means of the very detailed account given by the historian Josephus. According to him,
Quirinius was sent to conduct his census shortly after Judea had been annexed by Rome,
which occurred in the year 6 or 7 of the current era. This census was obviously intended
to be an initial "stock-taking" now that Judea was to be governed directly by Roman
officials...

Aided by an inscription describing an unnamed Roman military official, apologists have

rushed to suggest that perhaps Quirinius had an earlier--and totally unrecorded--tour of
duty in the area and that the anonymous official was none other than himself in this role,
conveniently dating to the time of Jesus' birth. Besides the total lack of evidence for
jumping to so improbable a conclusion, there is another little snag: the generally accepted
date of Jesus' birth was at a time when Rome had no jurisdiction either in Bethlehem or
in Nazareth, so there could have been no census to coincide with Jesus's birth.... This is
because Jesus was born during the lifetime of King Herod "the Great." Herod died in 4
B.C.E. (Arnheim, 1984, pp 10-11).

Luke clearly is not a historian and evidently is not above spinning a tale or two to
accomplish his propagandistic purposes.

Burton Mack comments on Mark's passion narrative:

The usual approach to Mark's so-called passion narrative has been to regard it as a
historical account of what really happened, but then to fret about features of it that are
difficult to accept. The list of improbable features is quite long and includes such things
as the trial by night, which would have been illegal; the basis for the charge of blasphemy,
which is very unclear if not completely trumped up; the failure of the witnesses to agree,
which would have called for a mistrial; the right of the Sanhedrin to charge with death, a
sanction that they probably did not have at the time; the insinuation of crucifixion taking
place on Passover, which would have been an outrage; Jesus' anticipation of his death as
a covenant sacrifice, which might be all right for a bacchic god, but hardly for the
historical Jesus; the disciples falling asleep in the midst of it all; Pilate's having Jesus
executed as the "king of the Jews" without a good reason to consider him so; the high
priests (in the plural!) joining in the mocking; and so on. The better approach is to
recognize the whole story as Mark's fiction written forty years after Jesus' time in the
wake of the Roman-Jewish war. If we first read Josephus' account of the war, we can see
that Mark's retrospective on Jesus in Jerusalem would not have sounded a bit far-fetched
(Mack, 1995, p. 158).

(8) No independent support of Gospel claims:

37
[P]agan sources do not confirm the resurrection. As has already been noted, Tacitus, in
one well-known passage in his Annals (15:44), reported that Pontius Pilate ordered the
execution of Jesus. However, there is good reason to suppose that this passage, if not a
later Christian interpolation, was written nearly ninety years after the alleged death of
Jesus and was based not on independent historical research but on information provided
by Christians of the second century. In any case, even if one takes this passage as
providing independent historical evidence, it would only provide evidence of Jesus' death,
not his resurrection.

Other pagan writers such as Suetonius and Pliny the Younger provide no support for the
Resurrection of Jesus since they make no mention of it. However, Thallus, in a work now
lost but referred to by Africanus in the third century, is alleged to have said that Jesus'
death was accompanied by an earthquake and an unusual darkness that he, Thallus,
according to Africanus, wrongly attributed to an eclipse of the sun. However ... it is
unclear when Thallus wrote his history or how reliable Africanus's account of Thallus is.
Some scholars believe that Thallus wrote as late as the second century and consequently
could have obtained his ideas from Christian opinion of his time. Clearly, then, Thallus
cannot be used to support the Christian account of the Resurrection (Martin, 1991, p. 86).

Non-Christian evidence is too late to give any independent support to the gospels. When
Tacitus wrote (about AD 120) that "Christ" was executed under Pontius Pilate, he was
merely repeating what Christians were by then saying.... The other pagan writer
commonly adduced is Suetonius who wrote also around AD 120, that Claudius (who
reigned AD 41-54) expelled Jews from Rome because "they constantly made
disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus." Many commentators think that, by
"Chrestus," Suetonius really meant "Christus" (the Messiah); and Watson has
convincingly argued that the disorder to which Suetonius here refers was caused by
controversy between orthodox Jews and Jewish Christians at Rome about the truth or
falsehood of Christianity. No more about the "historical" Jesus need have been included
in this Christianity of Claudius's day than what extent Christian writers (Paul and others)
were saying on the subject before the gospels became established much later in the first
century; and that, as we saw ... does not confirm the gospels' portrayals of Jesus...

Rabbinic references to Jesus are entirely dependent on Christian claims, as both Christian
and Jewish scholars have conceded (Wells, 1989 p. 20).

(9) Testifying to things beyond belief:

Gadarene (or Gerasene) swine (Matthew 8:28-32; Mark 5:1-13). The withering of the fig
tree (Matthew 21:18-20). Feeding of 5000 (or 4000), Mark 6:35-44, and Mark 8:1-9, etc.
The gospels are full of miraculous tales that, in any other context, would be taken to
completely destroy the author's credibility. What would we think of an alleged witness
who swears that he saw Ms. Smith commit the murder and then abscond quickly on her
broomstick? Why not regard reports of walking on water or raising the dead in the same
light? Religious people often employ a curious doublethink here that permits them to
treat reverently stories that, encountered anywhere else, would get very short shrift.

38
Chapter Four: Craig's Case for the Resurrection

This chapter responds to specific claims made in Craig's case for the Resurrection.
Craig's claims are given in the headings and sub-headings (in bold), and my rebuttal
follows.

(1) The post-mortem appearances:

i) Paul's list of witnesses in I Corinthians 15 is reliable:

Paul reports many eyewitnesses to Jesus postresurrection appearances: Cephas, the

twelve, more than five hundred brethren, James, the disciples, himself.... How seriously
should we take these reports? First, we have no reason to suppose that these eyewitnesses,
including Paul himself, are reliable or trustworthy. Moreover, we have no information
about how Paul got his information about the eyewitness reports of others. Were they
reported to him directly? Were they passed on by third parties to Paul? If they were, were
the intermediate sources reliable? Unlike the Gospel stories we have no details of Jesus'
appearances to the eyewitnesses. For example did Jesus appear in bodily form or were the
appearances [visionary]?... The reliability of Paul's sources would certainly be impugned
if these stories were not confirmed by an independent source (Martin, 1991, p. 83).

Not only is Paul apparently unaware of the resurrection narratives recorded in the
Gospels, but his own list of appearances is irreconcilable with those of the evangelists
written later. Paul has it that the first appearance of the risen Lord was to Cephas (he
always calls Peter by his Aramaic name, and apparently knows no stories about him in
Greek). The Gospels describe no initial resurrection appearance to Peter (some women,
the number varying from three to two to one, see him first), though Luke says that Peter
did see him. According to the equally irreconcilable accounts in the Gospels, the first
appearance was to Mary Magdala alone (John) or to Mary Magdala and the other Mary
(Matthew), or to Mary Magdala, Joanna, and Mary, the mother of James (Luke). Again,
Paul declares that the second resurrection appearance was to the "twelve," whereas both
Matthew and Luke stress that the appearance before the disciples was to the "eleven,"
Judas being dead. Either Paul did not know the story about the defection and suicide of
Judas Iscariot or else the "twelve" meant something different to him (Helms, 1988, pp.
130-131).

ii) Paul's "eyewitness" testimony is credible:

Paul's claim to have encountered the risen Jesus (I Corinthians, 15:3-9 is especially
important because it is very early and it is a first-person report (the only undisputed first-
hand report of an encounter with the risen Jesus in the Bible). However, it is unclear
whether Paul is claiming to have physically witnessed the risen Christ or whether it was a
vision. The Greek text is ambiguous. Apologists have claimed that the Greek verb horao
employed by Paul in verses 5-8 always refers to physical sight and not visions. However,

39
Paul himself, in Colossians 2:18, uses the same verb to denigrate false visions. Also, as
Reginald Fuller says: "The appearances [in I Corinthians 15:5-8] are characterized by the
verb ophthe [the aorist passive form of horao] literally 'was seen' ... but when used with
the dative, 'appeared.'" Fuller notes that this verb is used in the Septuagint (the Greek
translation of the OT) to describe theophanies and the appearance of angels. He
comments on the angelic appearances:

The emphasis rests on the revelatory initiative of the angel of God, who desires to make
himself manifest, not upon the experience of the recipient. Thus the question as to how
they see, whether with the physical eye or with the eye of the mind or the spirit, is left
undetermined and unemphasized; it lies entirely outside the horizon of interest (Fuller,
1971, p. 30).

Further, if the encounter of Paul with the risen Jesus was the famous "road to Damascus"
experience (Acts 22:6-11), this is clearly a vision. Those traveling with Paul saw no one,
heard no voice, and were not blinded by the light as he was. John K. Naland offers
several possible explanations of such an experience:

It is possible that Paul suffered from an organic disease such as epilepsy, which would
account for his collapse and the visions. (Paul might have been referring to this malady
when he wrote that 'a thorn was given me in the flesh ... to keep me from being too elated.
Three times I besought the Lord about this, that it should leave me.') Or perhaps the heat
and exertion of a walking journey under the midday sun in the Middle East could have
led to a heat stroke.... In any event, Paul's physical collapse was only the outward
manifestation of a crucial emotional collapse and rebirth that turned the persecutor of
Christianity into its greatest missionary (Naland, 1988, p.15).

Craig insists that Paul does make a distinction between the appearances of the risen Jesus,
which are physical, and visions of him which, though veridical and caused by God, occur
purely within the mind (Craig, 1994, p. 286). Craig says that this distinction is
"conceptual (if not linguistic)," which seems to concede that Paul's language is
ambiguous and therefore the distinction is not explicit (p. 286). Where, then, is the
evidence for this conceptual distinction? I'm afraid I just can't find it in Craig's argument
here.

Craig contends that Paul conceived of the resurrected body as a physical body (Craig,
1994, pp. 285-286). That is, for Paul, saying that Jesus's resurrected body is "spiritual"
means only that it is "dominated or oriented towards the spiritual," in the same sense that
a (nonresurrected) person can be called "spiritual." G. A. Wells strongly disagrees with
Craig's interpretation:

Paul.... in a context where he was discussing Jesus's resurrection, [declared] that "flesh
and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God" (I Corinthians 15:50). He believed that the
dead are raised not in a physical body, but "in glory" (verses 42-43), and with their lowly
bodies changed to be like Jesus's "glorious" one (Philippians 3:21).... Paul never suggests
that Jesus tarried on earth after his resurrection, and never places any interval between his

40
rising and his being at the right hand of God (Romans 8:34; Colossians 3:1;
Thessalonians 1:10). He seems to have assumed that the risen Jesus ascended into heaven
immediately, with a body of radiance; and so he will naturally have supposed that the
subsequent appearances he lists were made by a descent from heaven (Wells, 1996, pp.
56-58).

Paul's own words show that Craig simply misunderstands the whole purpose of the
passage:

If there is such a thing as an animal body, there is also a spiritual body. It is in this sense
that Scripture says "The first man, Adam, became an animate being," whereas the last
Adam has become a life-giving spirit. Observe, the spiritual does not come first; the
animal body comes first, and then the spiritual. The first man was made "of the dust of
the earth": the second man is from heaven (I Corinthians 15:44-47).

The plain emphasis of the passage is on the reiterated distinction between the animal and
the spiritual or the earthly and the heavenly. Paul's aim is to address the doubts of the
Corinthians about bodily resurrection. As the commentators in the Oxford Study Edition
of The New English Bible put it:

The Corinthians seem to have balked at the idea of bodily resurrection. Paul agrees that
the flesh has no part in the kingdom (v. 50), arguing that there are many kinds of bodies
and that Christians will receive bodies made not of flesh, but of spirit (Sandmel, et al.,
1976, p. 217).

Clearly, in such a context it is most implausible to suggest that Paul only meant by
"spiritual" a body "dominated by or oriented towards the Spirit." Had he only meant that
the resurrected body was "spiritual" in that weak sense, he would have failed even to
address the Corinthians' concerns and made inexplicable his reiterated emphatic contrasts.

Even if Craig is right that Paul conceived of Jesus's body as in some sense physical, this
is beside the point. The question is whether Paul conceived the appearances as an
encounter with a physical body, detected by ordinary senses, or whether it was a vision of
a heavenly being. Again, there simply is nothing in Paul's language to show that this
distinction was significant for him at all. As Fuller points out, the whole emphasis of such
passages rests on the revelatory initiative of the divine being, not the experience of the
recipient. Whether these epiphanies were detected with the physical eye or the eye of the
mind or spirit was simply of no concern (Fuller, 1971, p. 30).

Craig next argues that all of the gospel appearances were physical and bodily:

If none of the appearances were originally bodily appearances, then it is very strange that
we have a completely unanimous testimony in the gospels that all of them were physical
with no trace of the supposed original non-physical appearances (Craig, 1994, p. 287).

41
However, this argument overlooks a crucial fact: Mark, the earliest gospel, ends with no
account of the appearances of the resurrected Jesus at all (scholars agree that the original
text of Mark ended at 16:8 and that 16:9-20 were added by a later writer). Thus, in the
earliest gospel account, there is no tradition of appearances. This strongly implies that the
stories of physical appearances were inventions of later gospel writers, perhaps based on
earlier traditions of visionary appearances, in response to the anti-Christian polemic of
the day. That polemic charged that Christian accounts of the Resurrection were mere
ghost stories.

Further, some delusory mental states, such as hypnagogic or hypnopompic hallucinations,

are extremely vivid and lifelike. Consider the recent, widespread phenomenon of "alien
abductions." Without exception those who have had these experiences emphasize how
"real" they were--not dream-like or hallucinatory at all. They are convinced that real,
physical aliens took them aboard real, physical spacecraft. In fact, throughout history,
people have had bizarre experiences of witches, angels, demons, fairies, etc., that seemed
very "real" to them.

(2) The gospels were written down early and under scrutiny of eyewitnesses.

If the gospels were written early, under the scrutiny of accurate and honest eyewitnesses,
why do they differ in so many crucial details (see above)? What could be more crucial
than the testimony concerning Jesus's passion and resurrection? Yet these accounts
diverge widely in the Gospels. In fact, the Gospels contradict each other on many points
and can only be reconciled by the most outrageously ad hoc and implausible scenarios.
For instance, sayings placed by Luke at the beginning of Jesus's ministry are placed by
Matthew at the end. Worse, John places the cleansing of the Temple at the outset of
Jesus's ministry. The synoptics place it at the end. The only way to reconcile these is by
the desperate means of postulating two cleansings! G. A. Wells sums up:

Conservative apologists admit what they call "apparent discrepancies" in the [gospel]
evidence for the Resurrection, but point out that certain cardinal facts are independent of
them: all the accounts agree, for instance, that Jesus was crucified and subsequently
raised. But this amount of agreement is frequently found in stories admittedly mythical.
Historians agree that Wilhelm Tell is a legendary figure, but there are chronicles enough
telling discrepant stories of how he founded the Swiss Confederation ....the conservative
position implies that [concerning a street accident], although those who claim to be
witnesses disagree even as to where it happened, and although there are no injured people,
damaged vehicles, or indeed any evidence apart from their discordant testimony, we are
nevertheless to believe that an accident did occur (G. A. Wells, 1989, pp. 26-27).

(3) The empty tomb:

(i) The gospel burial stories support the empty tomb:

Acts 13:29 states simply that Jesus was buried by those Jews who had asked Pilate to
execute him, i.e., representatives of the Sanhedrin. Their motivation would hardly have

42
been charity; rabble-rousing blasphemers and troublemakers deserved no such
consideration. In their eyes Jesus was a criminal who had been executed in the most
shameful possible way. The burial was done to prevent the pollution of the Sabbath by
the public exposure of the corpse (as John 19:31 attests). There is no reason to think that
Jesus's body was treated any differently than any other executed criminal's--probably
unceremoniously dumped in a common grave. The next verse (Acts 13:30) is "But God
raised him from the dead." So the tradition recorded by the Acts author contrasts the
dishonor of Jesus's burial with the glory of his resurrection.

The gospels, on the other hand, tell a charming story about Joseph of Arimathea and how
he gave Jesus's body a decent burial. However, this story contradicts the tradition,
preserved in Mark and Luke, of women going to the tomb on the Easter morning for the
purpose of anointing the corpse. This story presupposes that the body had been
dishonorably buried, i.e., without the proper rites and ceremonies. Had Joseph of
Arimathea buried the body honorably in accordance with Jewish custom, as the gospel
burial pericopes imply (and as John states outright, 19:40), there would have been no
reason for the women to undertake such a task. Such considerations lead noted NT
scholar Reginald Fuller to argue that the bare-bones Acts account is an older stratum than
the gospel elaborations and that the tales about Joseph of Arimathea were pious legends
invented by Christians ashamed at the disciples' failure to treat Jesus's body more
honorably (Fuller, 1971, pp. 54-56).

Craig claims that Joseph of Arimathea was a real person:

It seems very unlikely that Christian tradition would invent a story of Jesus' honorable
burial by his enemies, or even that it could invent Joseph of Arimathea, give him a name,
place him on the Sanhedrin, and say the was responsible for Jesus' burial if this were not
true. The members of the Sanhedrin were too well-known to allow either fictitious
persons to be placed on it or false stories to be spread about one it its actual members'
being responsible for Jesus' burial. Therefore, it seems very likely that Joseph was the
actual, historical person who buried Jesus in the tomb (Craig, 1994, p. 273).

On the contrary, we can watch the Joseph of Arimathea legend grow in the gospels. In
Mark (15:43), the earliest source, he is just a "respected member of the Council, a man
who looked forward to the kingdom of God." In Luke (23:51) he is described as "a
member of the Council, a good, upright man, who had dissented from their policy and the
action they had taken." In Matthew (27:57) he has become "a man of means, ... [who] had
himself become a disciple of Jesus." In John (19:38) he is described as "a disciple of
Jesus, but a secret disciple for fear of the Jews..." Thus in the gospels Joseph goes from a
good and pious Jew, to one who actively dissented from the Sanhedrin's policy, to an
actual follower of Jesus, to a secret disciple. Clearly, we have a growing legend, one that
can be explained by the early Christians' embarrassment at the failure of the disciples to
properly care for Jesus's body. Further, legends often name actual historical persons. The
legends surrounding the 1947 "saucer crash" at Roswell, New Mexico, name many actual
historical persons.

43
As Gerd Lüdemann notes, the burial itself is represented in increasingly positive tones:

Whereas Mark merely says that it was a rock tomb, the parallels not only presuppose this
but also know that it was Joseph's own tomb (Matthew 27:60) ... (John 20:15) and Gospel
of Peter 6:24 even locate it in the garden, which is a distinction.... Finally, Matthew
(27:60), Luke (23:53) and John (19:41ff) describe the tomb as new; this is a mark of
honour for Jesus and also excludes the possibility that Jesus was put, for example, in a
criminal's grave (Lüdemann, 1995, p. 21).

Clearly, the gospel writers have created an elaborate legend of Jesus's honorable burial to
mitigate early Christians' shame at what in all likelihood was the dishonorable fate of
Jesus's corpse.

Apologists claim that the formula of Paul and the gospel records of resurrection "on the
third day" are best explained by the discovery of the empty tomb on the third day.
However, Paul says in I Corinthians 15:3-4 that Christ was raised in accordance with the
scriptures. The three-day expectation came from a misinterpretation of an OT passage
(Hosea 6:2): "After two days he will revive us; on the third day he will raise us up, that
we may live before him." Also, in Matthew 12:40, Jesus ties in the prediction of his
resurrection after three days to the three days and nights Jonah spent in the fish's belly. Of
course, Jesus probably never said this. Matthew attributed it to him because he was
desperate to find any OT verses that seemed to prophesy Jesus's career.

(ii) Paul's I Corinthians testimony supports the empty tomb:

There has been much discussion about the place and function of the statement "he was
buried" within the kerygmatic formula. Should it be taken closely with the previous
statement "he died," as in the common phrase, "he died and was buried?" If so, its
function would be to underline the conclusive reality of Jesus's death. Or should it on the
other hand be taken closely with the following statement "he was raised?" In this case its
function would be to imply the empty tomb.

Now it must be noted that the phrase "he was buried" occurs within its own hoti clause
and must be taken therefore as an independent statement standing on its own and
summarizing an earlier form of the burial pericope found in a later and developed form in
Mark 15:42-46.... it cannot be used to imply a knowledge by Paul or by the pre-Pauline
tradition of the story of the empty tomb (Fuller, 1971, pp. 15-16).

In short, trying to get support for the empty tomb from Paul's meager formula is truly an
exercise in trying to get blood from a turnip--no matter how hard you squeeze it just
won't come out.

(iii) The empty tomb story is part of the pre-Markan passion story and is therefore
very old:

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According to Fuller, the oldest empty tomb tradition seems to be the bare statement that
Mary Magdalene discovered an empty tomb (Fuller, 1971, p. 56). Jesus is said to have
cast seven devils out of Mary Magdalene. This hardly implies a stable or reliable
personality. Clearly, the testimony of one quite possibly deranged individual is a very
slender reed on which to base anything.

The gospel writers are aware of the weakness of Mary's testimony because they embellish
the story by depicting the disciples as initially skeptical until they confirmed her report.
Of course, whether the disciples really did check Mary's story--and, if so, when and how
carefully--are all matters of speculation.

(iv) The earliest Jewish polemic presupposes an empty tomb:

It is clear that Matthew and the other gospel writers were responding to Jewish polemics
of their day, i.e., 55-60 years after the crucifixion. By the time Matthew was written, ca.
85-90, any Jewish memory of the details of Jesus's burial were certainly long forgotten.
There is no reason for thinking that the Jews by that time really were aware of where
Jesus's tomb had been and that it had been found empty. Why not interpret the Jewish
polemic as conceding, purely for the sake of argument, that there was an empty tomb?
I.e., they said "If there was in fact an empty tomb, as you guys say, how do we know the
disciples didn't steal the body away?" Matthew responds by making up his story about the
Roman guard (a story found only in Matthew). To the argument that experiences of the
risen Jesus were mere ghost stories, Luke (24:39-43) has the risen Jesus invite the
disciples to touch him, showing he is not a wraith. Also, he eats a piece of fish, as no
ghost would. These later additions to the primitive Markan account were probably
fabrications created by the later evangelists to answer the critics of their day.

(v) The Church could never have gotten started without belief in Jesus's
resurrection:

The actual occurrence of the Resurrection is not the best explanation for the fact it was
believed. We have by now a very thorough understanding of how belief in paranormal
phenomena can become firmly entrenched even though no such phenomena occurred.
The article "Hallucinations" in the Encyclopedia of Psychology, 2nd ed., says that 1/8 to
2/3 of the normal population experiences waking hallucinations (Hall, 1994, pp. 101-102).
Causes of hallucinations in normal persons include social isolation, rejection, and severe
reactive depression. The disciples were very likely to be experiencing a strong sense of
rejection, isolation, and depression after the execution of Jesus. It is not at all unlikely
that more than one of them experienced vivid hallucinations of Jesus.

People greatly underestimate the influence of hallucinations on history:

Caesar is said to have taken orders from "voices" to invade countries. Drusus was said to
have been deterred from crossing the Elbe by the sudden appearance of a woman of
supernatural size. Atilla's march on Rome was checked by the vision of an old man in
priest's raiment, who threatened his life with a drawn sword.... Constantine fought a battle

45
in the year 312 because of hallucinations and was converted to Christianity by "voices"....
Mohammed had auditory and visual hallucinations ... which were used by him in his
calling as a prophet ... the Christian emperor Charlemagne was thought to be directly
inspired by the angels (F.H. Johnson, 1978, pp. 12-13).

Recent studies of perception and memory and the psychology of anomalous experience
show that miracle reports are very likely in many circumstances where no miracle has
occurred. Human perception is not passive; we are not biological camcorders. Rather,
perception is complex, much prone to error, and easily influenced by background beliefs
and expectations. In other words, we often "see" what we expect to see, want to see, or
fervently hope to see rather than what is actually there. Predispositions bias our
observations--this is one of the best-established principles of psychology. We all know
that second or third hand accounts are unreliable--mere "hearsay evidence." But any good
trial lawyer or stage magician will tell you just how fallible eyewitnesses can be.

Likewise, psychologists have shown that memory is not a passive recorder but highly
susceptible to influence by circumstance, bias, and suggestion. We also know that sane,
rational people sometimes suffer extraordinary delusions that convince them that they
have been abducted by aliens, seen ghosts, or witnessed miracles. It follows that even an
honest, educated, and rational person who claims to have seen a miracle can easily have
misperceived or misremembered.

Chapter Five: Legend

"Legend" is defined by American Heritage Dictionary as "An unverified story, handed

down from earlier times, esp. one popularly believed to be historical." How early can
legends develop? As the expression "a legend in his own time" implies, not much time at
all has to pass. In fact, there are numerous instances of legends that have grown around
historical events just since World War II. Consider the legend of Flight Nineteen--the
dive bombers that disappeared in the so-called Bermuda Triangle in December 1945. By
the 1970s a whole literature of legends had grown up around this incident, despite the
strenuous opposition of debunkers. Or consider the millions of people who believe that
space aliens crashed in New Mexico in July 1947; in this case some of the witnesses
helped to spread the legend of a saucer crash.

It is easy to show that legends can and do arise and spread within a few decades of a
remarkable person's death, despite the opposition of eyewitnesses. Consider the famous
"Darwin Legend." Charles Darwin died on April 19, 1882. Almost immediately stories
began to circulate suggesting that Darwin, the agnostic and author of the godless theory
of evolution, had repudiated his theories and confessed his faith in a dramatic deathbed
conversion. With meticulous scholarship, historian James Moore has shown how quickly
these false stories spread (Moore, 1994). His research shows that one week after Darwin's
burial a Welsh minister preached a sermon claiming that Darwin had confessed his faith
on his deathbed (pp. 113-114).

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By 1887, five years after Darwin's death, a reporter with the Toronto Mail contacted T.H.
Huxley, Darwin's close friend and ally, and reported that a local evangelical minister had
claimed that on his deathbed Darwin "whined for a minister and renouncing evolution,
sought safety in the blood of the Saviour." Huxley consulted with Darwin's son Francis,
who was present at his father's death, and responded to the Toronto reporter that the story
was utterly false (pp. 115-117). However, despite the repeated efforts of the Darwin
family to squelch the story, it continued to spread.

In 1915, thirty-three years after Darwin's death, probably less than the time between
Jesus's crucifixion and the writing of the earliest canonical gospel, one "Lady Hope"
published an account of her interview with Darwin six months before his death (pp. 91-
97). In this anecdote she falsely claimed that Darwin appeared to regret his theory of
evolution and professed faith in Christ. Moore records that Lady Hope's story swept
through the evangelical magazines "like wildfire" (p. 99).

Of course, the story grew in the telling. Inflammatory tracts appeared with titles like
"Darwin on His Deathbed" and "Darwin's Last Hours." As Moore records, hardly anyone
bothered to check these stories with the Darwin family. When they did, the stories were
denounced in no uncertain terms. As late as the 1930s Leonard Darwin, the last of the
Darwin children, continued to assail Lady Hope's account as a "hallucination," a "lie," an
"absurd fiction," and "purely fictitious." Yet the story continued to spread. Thus legends
can proliferate in a few years' time despite the stringent opposition of the eyewitnesses.

Chapter Six: Kreeft and Tacelli on the Hallucination Theory

The indefatigable Kreeft and Tacelli offer thirteen (!) arguments against the claim that the
appearances of Jesus could have been hallucinations. Methinks they protest too much. I
give (in bold) and rebut each of their objections:

(1) There were too many witnesses. Hallucinations are private, individual, subjective.
Christ appeared to Mary Magdalene, to the disciples minus Thomas, to the two
disciples at Emmaus, to the fishermen on the shore, to James (his "brother" or
cousin), and even to five hundred people at once.... Even three different witnesses
are enough for a kind of psychological trigonometry; over five hundred is about as
public as you can wish. And Paul says in this passage (v. 6) that most of the five
hundred are alive, inviting any reader to check the truth of the story ... he could
never have done this and gotten away with it, given the power, resources, and
numbers of his enemies, if it were not true (pp. 186-187).

There are so many things wrong here it is hard to know where to begin. Hallucinations
are not always private. As far back as 1852, when Charles Mackay published his
Memoirs of Extraordinary Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, it was known that
people in crowds are often more susceptible to visual or auditory delusions than they are
individually. Mass hallucinations are extremely well documented phenomena. In 1914,

47
British newspapers were flooded with reports of the "Angels of Mons," supposedly seen
in the sky leading the troops against the godless Huns. The simultaneous hallucinations
by several witnesses at the Salem witch trials are too well known to merit further
comment.

Most importantly, mass delusions may be directly witnessed as they occur. When, a few
years ago, a woman in Conyers, Georgia, began to claim regular visitations from the
Virgin Mary, tens of thousands of the faithful would gather monthly to hear the banal
"revelations." While the Virgin was allegedly making her disclosures many of those
attending claimed to witness remarkable things, such as the sun spinning and dancing in
the sky. A personal friend, Rebecca Long, President of Georgia Skeptics, set up a
telescope with a solar filter, and demonstrated--to anyone who cared to look--that the sun
was not spinning or dancing. Still, hundreds around her continued to claim to witness a
miracle.

We noted earlier that neither the gospels nor Acts specifically mentions an appearance to
500, as they certainly would have if their authors had known about it. Their silence
makes the story deeply doubtful. As for Paul's statement that many of the 500 were still
alive, and so their testimony could be checked, this claim was made in a letter to the
Corinthians (i.e., in Greece). How many of the Corinthian Christians would have had the
means or the disposition to travel to Palestine to track down the witnesses (more than 20
years after the supposed event) and check the story? Paul was making a pretty safe claim.

Kreeft and Tacelli (hereafter "K & T"), like almost all apologists, repeatedly beg the
question by assuming the 100 percent truth of Biblical reports (at least, when it is
convenient for them to do so). There is no reason whatsoever to think that every claimed
appearance of Jesus actually took place. In fact, as noted earlier, the numerous
inconsistencies in the appearance stories, and the fact that the original text of Mark
mentions no appearances, casts many of these stories in doubt. It is perfectly reasonable
for skeptics to regard all the appearance stories as legendary accretions, but if we do
concede that some of the disciples experienced an "appearance," there is no reason they
could not have been hallucinations or visions.

(2) The witnesses were qualified. They were simple, honest, moral people, who had
firsthand knowledge of the facts (p. 187).

The disciples were simple, honest, and moral, eh? Why then do the gospels so often
portray them as unbelieving, disloyal idiots? Jesus constantly rails against their
incomprehension and lack of faith. They are depicted by Mark as so dense that they
witness a miraculous feeding of 5000 in chapter six and 4000 in chapter eight and are
scolded by Jesus because they are still worrying (verses 14-21) about how to get bread!
When Jesus was arrested, the disciples decided that discretion was the better part of valor.
In short, they denied him or ran into hiding. According to the gospels, only the women
followers had enough courage to attempt to honor the body of Jesus.

48
Supposing that the disciples were decent, honest people, why does this make them
unsusceptible to hallucinations? Decent, honest people have been having delusions and
hallucinations for thousands of years and interpreting those experiences as real. It is not
at all unlikely that several of the disciples experienced vivid postmortem visions of Jesus
and that this was the basis of the appearance stories.

(3) The five hundred saw Christ together, at the same time and place. This is even
more remarkable than five hundred private "hallucinations" at different times and
places of the same Jesus. Five hundred separate Elvis sightings may be dismissed,
but if five hundred simple fishermen in Maine saw, touched and talked with him at
once, in the same town, that would be a different matter (p. 187).

Sometimes apologists say things that are so strange that it makes me doubt my faith that
we have enough rational principles in common to have a fruitful dialogue. This is one of
those occasions. If 500 Maine fisherman claimed to have seen, touched, and talked to
Elvis, I would say they were fooled by one pretty darn good Elvis impersonator. As for
the "500" mentioned by Paul, Paul says nothing about them touching or talking to Jesus,
and, as noted earlier, the word for "appeared" used by Paul is ambiguous with respect to
physical or visionary "seeing." How did Jesus supposedly appear to this crowd so that
they would all recognize him? Did each person in the crowd know Jesus personally, so
they could reliably identify him? Did each person get close enough for a good look?
Unfortunately, Paul is silent on these issues. He just does not tell us enough about the
"appearance" to draw any conclusions about its trustworthiness.

(4) Hallucinations usually last a few seconds or minutes; rarely hours. This one
hung around for forty days (Acts 1:3) (p. 187).

There is no reason to think that Jesus was literally physically present for a continuous
forty-day period. The "40-day" motif is repeated in both the OT and the NT: It rained for
40 days and nights in Noah's flood, Moses was on the mountain 40 days and nights, Jesus
went into the desert for 40 days, etc. The author of Acts was using the 40-day formula to
indicate that for a limited time after Jesus's crucifixion he "presented himself" to a
number of the apostles. The nature of these appearances and "proofs" is left quite vague,
and the wording hints that they were sporadic visitations rather than a continuous
presence.

(5) Hallucinations usually happen only once, except to the insane. This one returned
many times, to ordinary people (p. 187).

This claim is backed by no references to the psychological literature on hallucinations.

How do K & T know that normal people don't get more than one hallucination, especially
when they are undergoing enormously stressful or onerous circumstances?

(6) Hallucinations come from within, from what we already know, at least
unconsciously. This one said and did surprising and unexpected things ... like a real
person and unlike a dream (p. 187).

49
Maybe K & T have really boring dreams. In my dreams people say and do lots of unusual
things. Who knows what surprises lurk in the unconscious? Where is Freud now that we
need him?

Aside to the reader: You have probably noticed by now that K & T's objections to the
hallucination theory are pretty thin and that my tone is becoming increasingly
contemptuous. Be warned that the remaining objections do not improve and neither does
my tone.

(7) Not only did the disciples not expect this, they didn't even believe it at first--
neither Peter, nor the women, nor Thomas, nor the eleven. They thought he was a
ghost; he had to eat something to prove he was not (p. 187).

By the time the gospels were written, they had to address the anti-Christian polemics of
their enemies. The Jews charged that the Christians were telling a ghost story when they
talked about the resurrected Jesus. In response, Christians made up the stories about him
eating and being touched by Thomas. Enemies also accused them of gullibility, so they
reacted by depicting the disciples as initially skeptical of the empty tomb reports. It is a
very common rhetorical device used by True Believers in anything (UFO's, monsters, the
occult) to claim that they started out as skeptics and were convinced by overwhelming
evidence.

By the way, it is very odd that the gospels depict the disciples as skeptical of the
Resurrection. After all, the disciples had supposedly seen Jesus raise others from the dead,
walk on water, turn water into wine, cast out demons, cure the sick, the lame, and the
blind, feed thousands with a few loaves and fishes, and appear in glistening raiment with
Moses and Elijah while a divine voice boomed "This is my beloved son..." By this time it
should have been clear even to the slowest disciple that Jesus was a supernatural being
possessed of awesome miraculous powers. After all that it would surely be a pretty
simple trick to come back from the dead. So something is out of place here. Either the
disciples, dumb as they were, could not have been so skeptical of the resurrection, or they
had not witnessed the miracles they allegedly did. Either way, the credibility of the
gospels is undermined.

Most crucially, K & T ignore the fact that a powerful vision experienced by one or more
disciples could have overcome the initial skepticism. Reginald Fuller, perhaps the leading
authority on the resurrection narratives, says that the post-resurrection appearances
should be regarded as "visions" rather than "hallucinations" (Fuller, 1993, p. 648). A
hallucination may be silly or trivial. A vision, while it may certainly involve auditory or
visual elements, also conveys a profound sense of epiphany. According to Fuller, due to
the ineffable nature of the experiences, the early community asserted that God had raised
Jesus but did not tell appearance stories (Fuller, 1993, p. 648). The appearance stories
entered the tradition when later Christians tried to express in earthly terms what was
originally indescribable (Fuller, 1993, p. 648).

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(8) Hallucinations do not eat. The resurrected Christ did, on at least two occasions.

(9) The disciples touched him.

(10) They also spoke with him, and he spoke back. Figments of your imagination do
not hold profound, extended conversations with you, unless you have the kind of
mental disorder that isolates you (p. 187).

Again, one looks in vain for references to the psychological literature that document the
claim that sane people cannot hallucinate someone touching them or dining or conversing
with them. Further, the people who had these experiences, the disciples, wrote nothing so
far as we know. These strange experiences, whatever they were, were recorded years later,
shaped by the creative and imaginative processes of individual and collective memory,
and then incorporated into self-conscious literary narratives (the gospels).

The earliest appearance account, Paul's testimony in Corinthians, is a bare formula, a

kerygmatic assertion wholly lacking in detail. Only much later, with the writing of
Matthew and Luke, do we find fleshed-out appearance narratives with details of time,
place, and circumstance. In their worked-out gospel forms, these stories are tailored to
address the doubts and polemics of non-Christians of the late first century. Thus for Paul
and the earliest Christians it was not important to distinguish between a visionary and a
physical encounter with the risen Christ. Only later, in response to anti-Christian
polemics, did it become important to emphasize that the appearances were physical and
not visionary. Clearly, the appearance stories grew in the telling, and the telling may well
have obscured their original nature.

(11) The apostles could not have believed in the "hallucination" if Jesus' corpse had
still been in the tomb. This is a very simple and telling point; for if it was a
hallucination, where was the corpse? They would have checked for it; if it was there,
they would not have believed (pp. 187-188).

The logic of this argument seems a bit hard to grasp. I shall set it out semi-formally as I
understand it:

1. If the appearances were visionary or hallucinatory, Jesus's body would still have
been in the tomb (premise).
2. If the body had still been in the tomb, the disciples would have seen it there
(premise).
3. If the disciples had seen the body in the tomb, they would not have believed that
Jesus had risen (premise).
4. The disciples did believe that Jesus had risen (premise).
5. The disciples did not see the body in the tomb (from 3 and 4, by modus tollens).
6. The body was not still in the tomb (2 and 5, by modus tollens).
7. Therefore, the appearances were not visionary or hallucinatory (1 and 6, by modus
tollens).

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The first premise assumes that Jesus's body was placed in a tomb, but this is doubtful.
The honorable burial of a crucified person was possible; bodies were sometimes released
to relatives as an act of mercy (Crossan, 1995, p. 167). However, such clemency was rare.
Of the thousands of persons crucified in the Jerusalem area in the first century, only one
crucified body has been found preserved in an ossuary (Crossan, 1995, p. 168). Marianne
Sawicki gives the most probable explanation of the paucity of remains of victims of
crucifixion:

The Gospel stories mention a gentle enshrouding, a magnanimous laying out, and a
loving tombside vigil ... but a limed pit is more probable.... Lime eats the body quickly
and hygienically. Therefore we find virtually no skeletal remains of the thousands
crucified outside Jerusalem in the first century (Sawicki, quoted in Crossan, 1998, p.
xxvii).

Assuming that Jesus's body was placed in a known tomb, by the time the disciples would
have checked, and we don't know when that would have been, any number of things
could have happened to the corpse. Maybe Joseph of Arimathea had second thoughts
about placing the body of an executed miscreant in his own tomb. So, as soon as the
Sabbath is over, he sent servants to remove Jesus's body to another site. Any number of
such scenarios can be generated to account for the missing body.

The second premise assumes that the disciples knew where Jesus was buried, but this is
doubtful. The disciples ran into hiding with Jesus's arrest. If they thought they knew
where Jesus was buried, they had to depend on the reports of one or more women who
supposedly saw the burial site. As noted earlier, that report might not have been reliable.
The second premise also assumes that the disciples would have checked for the body had
they known the site. Even this is not clear. Grave desecration was a serious crime, and the
disciples were in plenty of trouble already.

It is essential not to project onto the disciples the mind-set of a modern critical historian.
Whatever state of mind the disciples were in following the "appearance" experiences, it
certainly was not a spirit of critical, much less skeptical, inquiry. The ineffable quality
and psychologically overwhelming nature of these experiences would have left little
room for doubt and no motivation for rigorous investigation. There was only one task: to
go forth and proclaim the Good News of the Risen Christ. Rigorous empirical scrutiny is
the last thing on the mind of one in the grip of a powerful vision.

(12) If the apostles had hallucinated and then spread their hallucinogenic [sic] story,
the Jews would have stopped it by producing the body (p. 188).

After Jesus's crucifixion, the disciples absconded, probably all the way back to Galilee. If
any remained in Jerusalem, they went underground. How long they remained in hiding is
unclear. Eventually, emboldened by the "appearances," whatever they were, the disciples
returned to the streets and the Temple, proclaiming the risen Christ. By this time, even if
only a few months after the crucifixion, the body of Jesus, even if the Jewish authorities
could recover it, would have been in an advanced state of decay. Had the authorities

52
produced the badly decomposed body of a crucified man, the disciples would simply
have denied that it was Jesus's.

(13) A hallucination would explain only the post-resurrection appearances; it would

not explain the empty tomb, the rolled-away stone, or the inability to produce the
corpse. No theory can explain all these data except a real resurrection (p. 188).

Only real ET's in real extraterrestrial spacecraft would explain all the claimed phenomena
associated with UFO's. Strange lights in the sky, vivid abduction experiences, cattle
mutilations, and hosts of other weird phenomena are most economically explained by
postulating real flying saucers piloted by real aliens. Otherwise, separate accounts would
have to be given for each of these things, and this would be a less simple explanation.

In fact, just about everything K & T have said about the "appearances" of Jesus could be
said about the various "close encounters" with ET's. Large numbers of people, far more
than 500, have witnessed UFO's on given occasions. People "abducted" by aliens
reported that their captors did all sorts of things we don't normally think of hallucinations
as doing. Maybe hallucinations don't usually eat or converse, but neither do they insert
anal probes or levitate people through the air. The ET's are often reported to materialize
through solid walls, just like the resurrected Jesus. Many of the people who have had
"close encounters" claim not to have wanted such experiences or expected them. Many
were former UFO skeptics. "Contactees" are usually simple, honest, moral (and sane)
persons who have nothing to gain by reporting these phenomena.

Further, K & T try to saddle the skeptic with the burden of explaining every detail of
every appearance story (the stone rolled away, etc.) in terms of hallucinations. There is
no reason the skeptic should accept such a burden for the simple reason that skeptics do
not have to accept the appearance stories as 100 percent accurate. Apologists are
constantly assuming as "data" what skeptics rightly regard as hearsay. I conclude that it is
perfectly reasonable and rational for skeptics to regard all of the genuine postmortem
"appearances" of Jesus as visions.

Appendix: C.S. Lewis on Sex Outside of Marriage

Perhaps the most respected, surely the most read, Christian apologist is C. S. Lewis. I
remember hearing twenty years ago that his books had sold more than 50 million copies.
Now it must be closer to 100 million. One of Lewis's virtues as an apologist for
Christianity is that he does not flinch from stating and defending even the most unpopular
and difficult items of doctrine. Here is no milk-and-water, secularized, liberalized version
of pop-Christianity but old-time religion presented without compromise.

With respect to the Christian demands concerning sexual morality he is admirably frank
and succinct:

53
Chastity is the most unpopular of the Christian virtues. There is no getting away from it:
the old Christian rule is, "Either marriage, with complete faithfulness to your partner, or
else total abstinence" (Lewis, 1943, p. 75).

Lewis admits that this rule is contrary to our sexual feelings, but he thinks it is our sexual
feelings that are wrong, not the rule (more on this below).

But just why is it wrong, always and everywhere, to have sex outside of lifelong,
completely faithful (heterosexual) marriage? The closest Lewis comes to giving an
answer is this:

The Christian idea of marriage is based on Christ's words that a man and a wife are to be
regarded as a single organism--for that is what the words "one flesh" would be in modern
English. And Christians believe that when He said this He was not expressing a sentiment
but stating a fact--just as one is stating a fact when one says that a lock and its key are
one mechanism, or that a violin and a bow are one musical instrument. The inventor of
the human machine was telling us that its two halves, the male and the female, were made
to be combined together in pairs, not simply on the sexual level, but totally combined.
The monstrosity of sexual intercourse outside marriage is that those who indulge in it are
trying to isolate one kind of union (the sexual) from all the other kinds of union which
were intended to go along with it and make up the total union. The Christian attitude does
not mean that there is anything wrong about sexual pleasure, any more than about the
pleasure of eating. It means that you must not isolate that pleasure and try to get it by
itself, any more than you ought to try to get the pleasures of taste without swallowing and
digesting, by chewing things and spitting them out again (Lewis, 1943, p. 81).

Besides apparently implying that chewing gum is a sin, there are a number of puzzling
things about this passage. For a writer celebrated for his lucidity, Lewis is not terribly
clear here. What does it mean to say (more than metaphorically) that man and wife are
"one flesh" or that male and female are a "single mechanism" designed to make up a
"total union?" How total is that total union supposed to be? Absolutely total? In that case,
it sounds like marriage as defined by Ambrose Bierce: "The state or condition of a
community consisting of a master, a mistress and two slaves, making in all, two." What
about those who do not or cannot marry? Must they conceive of themselves as somehow
incomplete, less than whole persons?

Interpreting Lewis's words charitably, I take him to mean that in the Christian ideal of
marriage, the partners not only share a bed but all the duties and responsibilities that
come with having a home and family. They share the work, the discipline and nurturing
of the children, the management of finances, the planning for the future, and all of the
thousand-and-one nitty gritty details that make up domestic life. They not only share the
fantasy of moonlight and roses, but the reality of daylight, dishes, and diaper changes.

Now I regard marriage so described as admirable. Further, I regard adultery as very bad
under nearly all circumstances. Let's call two people "unmarried" if they are not married
to each other or to anybody else. Why is it always and everywhere bad (indeed, a

54
"monstrosity") for two such unmarried persons to have sex? The answer Lewis gives is
that sex is "intended" to go along with the "total union" and not to be enjoyed in isolation
from all the commitments and responsibilities that make up a marriage.

How or by whom "intended?" Intended by God? If this is Lewis's meaning, it is, of

course, completely question begging if addressed to nonbelievers. When people as smart
as Lewis beg the question so blatantly, something funny is going on. Usually such
persons have such strong feelings about their views that they think the truth will be
manifest once clearly articulated. It hardly even occurs to them that someone might really
have completely different intuitions.

My intuition is that, in general, there is nothing wrong with responsible, mutually

respectful sex between two unmarried adult people. From Augustine to Lewis, the
Christian view has been that sex is bad unless it is motivated by or incorporated into
some "higher" purpose (e.g., having babies or achieving a "total union"). In my view,
sexual pleasure does not need to be included in anything else or justified by any "higher"
aim or purpose; it is good per se. Of course, there are many prudential considerations
about when or where or with whom it is wise to have sex, but to say that an action is
unwise is not the same as saying it is wrong.

Exercising charity once again, I put a naturalistic interpretation on Lewis's talk of

intentions. I take him as meaning that sex between unmarried persons is in some sense
unnatural. It is an attempt to separate into parts what by nature is an organic unity. The
human organism is "designed" (by evolution, let's say) to have sex only with a permanent
partner.

It is hard to see how Lewis could argue this. Some animals do mate for life and
apparently desire only their mates. Clearly, if humans were genetically programmed this
way, it would be unnatural to have sex with any but one's permanent partner. But humans
just do not seem wired that way. Men and women are often, apparently spontaneously
and "naturally" (whatever that means with respect to human beings), sexually aroused by
persons with whom they would not want to spend their lives. Is such desire unnatural?

As mentioned above, Lewis does think that our present sexual feelings are distorted and
unnatural. The evidence he gives is that some men like to watch striptease (p. 75). He
argues, by analogy, that surely something would be wrong if an audience cheered and
hooted as a plate of food was slowly revealed to contain a mutton chop. I think the
implied point is that it is odd to enjoy the tantalizing sight of food without being allowed
to immediately proceed to satisfy the appetite.

The most this proves is that the sexual appetite is not exactly like hunger for food. Sexual
arousal itself can be pleasurable, even if not immediately gratified. For those who are not
the ideological heirs of Augustine, it is hard to see anything perverse in this. In fact, if
anything, it seems to me that the shoe is on the other foot, i.e., that it would be unnatural
for a healthy, heterosexual man not to be pleasantly aroused by striptease (I'm sure Lewis
would attribute this statement to my own depravity).

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Besides, though knee-slapping funny, the analogy does not hold. Many people enjoy
watching food being prepared on cooking shows and looking at the pictures of food in
magazines. If there is nothing wrong with this, then, using Lewis's own analogy, there is
nothing wrong with looking at striptease or Playboy centerfolds. (I'm sure Lewis would
still disapprove, however.)

Allow me to emphasize that I do not disdain marriage. On the contrary, I think a marriage
in which partners share life's burdens and joys, as described above, is entirely admirable.
But it is not for everybody. Some people, due to a variety of circumstances, cannot have
traditional marriages. Others, for perfectly good reasons, for at least a part of their adult
lives, choose not to get married. Does this mean that such persons are to do without sex
so long as they cannot or do not get married? To insist that they must would require a lot
of justification, and I do not see that Lewis or any other apologist has provided it.

As I see it, the bottom line is this: if two responsible, unmarried adults decide to have sex,
it just is not anybody else's business--not C. S. Lewis's, not Dr. Laura's, not God's.
Minding thy neighbor's business has long been a prime preoccupation of Christians,
despite the salutary warnings from their religion's founder about removing the beam from
one's own eye before noticing the speck in another's.

I conclude with a quote from Bertrand Russell's classic Marriage and Morals:

The Christian view that all intercourse outside marriage is immoral was ... based upon the
view that all sexual intercourse, even within marriage, is regrettable. A view of this sort,
which goes against biological facts, can only be regarded by sane people as a morbid
aberration. The fact that it is embedded in Christian ethics has made Christianity
throughout its whole history a force tending towards mental disorders and unwholesome
views of life (Russell, 1929, p. 48).

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Copyright ©2000 Keith Parsons. This electronic version is copyright ©2006 by Internet Infidels, Inc. with
the written permission of Keith Parsons. All rights reserved.

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