Evaluating An Apologist’s Evidence For The Resurrection, Part 5: Did The Resurrection Belief Originate In One of Peter’s Trances?

I recently came across the blog of a Christian apologist who has posted ten very extensive articles on the “wealth” of evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. Is his claim correct? Is there a wealth of evidence for Christianity’s core claim? I am going to respond to his most provocative statements here, addressing his evidence post by post.

Here we go, part 5:

[M]ost scholars believe that Paul got this creed [the Early Creed found in First Corinthians 15] directly from the apostles Peter and James, just 5 years after his conversion. In Galatians 1, Paul is recounting his conversion from skepticism. He describes how he persecuted the church (verses 13-14) that God revealed his son to him (verses 15-16), and then he says that he went away into Arabia and then went to Damascus (verse 17). Paul then writes “Then after three years, I went up to Jerusalem to get acquainted with Cephas and stayed with him fifteen days. I saw none of the other apostles—only James, the Lord’s brother.” (verses 18-19). This seems like the most likely place and time for Paul to have received the 1 Cor. 15 creed. First of all, two of the explicitly named individuals that appear in the creed (Peter and James) are also the two individuals Paul was talking to. Secondly, As New Testament Historian Dr. Gary Habermas pointed out; “Paul’s use of the verb historesai (1:18), is a term that indicates the investigation of a topic.¹ The immediate context both before and after reveals this subject matter: Paul was inquiring concerning the nature of the Gospel proclamation (Gal. 1:11-2:10), of which Jesus’ resurrection was the center (1 Cor. 15:3-4, 14, 17; Gal. 1:11, 16).” ²

These seem like very good indications that this is indeed when and where Paul received the creed. In that case, the information in the creed dates to within just a few years of Jesus’ death! By the principle of early attestation, this makes 1 Corinthians 15:3-8 extremely reliable material. This is because there was no time whatsoever for legend or embellishment to creep in. The apostles were proclaiming that Christ rose from the dead within decades of His crucifixion!“

Not so fast. If Paul is telling the truth in Galatians about his trip to Jerusalem and his meeting with James and Peter just three years after his conversion, I agree that it is likely they discussed the circumstances of Jesus’ death and his (alleged) post-mortem appearances. Let’s see exactly what Paul said:

Then after three years [in Arabia], I went up to Jerusalem to get acquainted with Cephas^[b] and stayed with him fifteen days. ¹⁹ I saw none of the other apostles—only James, the Lord’s brother. ²⁰ I assure you before God that what I am writing you is no lie. -Galatians 1:18-20

But that is not what the author of the Book of Acts (Luke the physician, Paul’s traveling companion??) says:

Saul spent several days with the disciples in Damascus [after his conversion on the Damascus Road]. ²⁰ At once he began to preach in the synagogues that Jesus is the Son of God. ” …Yet Saul grew more and more powerful and baffled the Jews living in Damascus by proving that Jesus is the Messiah. ²³ After many days had gone by, there was a conspiracy among the Jews to kill him, ²⁴ but Saul learned of their plan. Day and night they kept close watch on the city gates in order to kill him. ²⁵ But his followers took him by night and lowered him in a basket through an opening in the wall. ²⁶ When he came to Jerusalem, he tried to join the disciples, but they were all afraid of him, not believing that he really was a disciple. ²⁷ But Barnabas took him and brought him to the apostles. He told them how Saul on his journey had seen the Lord and that the Lord had spoken to him, and how in Damascus he had preached fearlessly in the name of Jesus. ²⁸ So Saul stayed with them and moved about freely in Jerusalem, speaking boldly in the name of the Lord. ²⁹ He talked and debated with the Hellenistic Jews,^[a] but they tried to kill him. ³⁰ When the believers learned of this, they took him down to Caesarea and sent him off to Tarsus. –Acts 9

According to “Luke”, Paul was in Jerusalem days after escaping the Jews in Damascus, which was days or weeks after his Damascus Road conversion. What happened to the three years in Arabia?? I’m always suspicious when someone tells me something and then says, “I’m not lying. Really!” Why would the person need to assure me they are not lying…unless they had a reputation of being a liar! So who knows if Paul ever met with Peter and James or ANY of the Twelve. The only people who tell us he did are Paul and his sidekick Luke, or whoever the anonymous Pauline Christian author of the Book of Acts was.

“The creed cited in 1 Corinthians 15 dates back so early, well within the lifetimes of the eyewitnesses, that anyone curious about whether or not Paul was telling the truth could have traveled over to Jerusalem and interviewed the people mentioned in the creed to see if they really did believe Jesus appeared to them. If Paul were lying about these people and they really hadn’t seen Jesus, the cat would have been out of the bag and the resurrection would have been exposed as a falsehood. Given how fragile a faux resurrection would be in this case, the best explanation is that the twelve disciples, James, and 500 people actually did have postmortem Jesus experiences.“

If someone living in Corinth, Greece in the first century wanted to verify Paul’s claim about meeting two of the Twelve within 5 years of Jesus’ death, he would have been forced to book passage on a ship to Judea which is more than 800 miles away. The trip would have taken 8-10 days and was probably a fairly expensive two way boat ticket for the average peasant. So would someone go to that trouble to verify Paul’s claim? Who knows. But is it plausible that no one did? Is it plausible that this trip to Jerusalem was just a “vision” in Paul’s head just like his trip to a “third heaven”? Yes! Paul was not dealing with a full deck. Paul was one sandwich short of a picnic. Paul was one fry short of a happy meal.

(You get my meaning.)

As I said earlier, most scholars believe Paul got the 1 Cor 15 creed from Peter and James when he visited with them just a few years after his conversion, and I gave some of the reasons why scholars have come to those conclusions. But let’s say you disagree with the scholars. Let’s say you don’t think that the two arguments which are given in favor of a Paul receiving the creed during the trip mentioned in Galatians 1:18-20 are sufficient. Nevertheless, the creed still dates to no later than 50 A.D, just 20 years after the resurrection. The creed could have been received 2 years or 20 years, but no earlier and no later. So my arguments above still stand that this is an early source within the lifetimes of the eyewitnesses who could have falsified the postmortem appearances if they hadn’t occurred. Secondly, even if Paul didn’t receive the creed in the Galatians 1 trip, we still know that he had firsthand contact with the original twelve disciples and were therefore in the perfect position to know what they believed.

Once again, I don’t trust Paul. People who repeatedly deny that they are a liar are usually liars. And any guy who can’t make up his mind if he did or did not take an intergalactic space voyage to a third heaven is not, I repeat, not, a reliable source of information. Paul and the anonymous author of Acts are the only sources which tell us that Paul had contact with the Twelve. I suspect that he did not. I suspect that the Twelve remained devout Jews until their deaths, that is why they were still offering animal sacrifices in the Temple more than 20 years after Jesus’ death (Acts 21). I believe that the Twelve were the “Judaizers” whom Paul railed against in his epistles. He despised them. They were fishermen. Illiterate, ignorant peasants who still ate kosher. He was a pharisee. He was of the tribe of Benjamin. He was the “greatest” of all apostles, don’t you know!

How dare they force him to offer an animal sacrifice (Acts 21).

I think Paul lied up a storm to put himself into the Apostles’ Club. Why? He was nuts. Think about this: Jesus teaches the Twelve all there is to know about him for three years, then departs earth telling the Twelve to spread the Gospel to the entire world (to the Gentiles!), but then appoints a nobody rabbi from Tarsus, Asia Minor, to be his “greatest apostle to the Gentile world”??? Ridiculous. Jesus was an idiot or Paul was a mentally deranged liar.

Probably the best thing Paul contributes to our case is interviewing the other eyewitnesses and giving us the data. Paul said that he and the other apostles preached the same message. In Galatians 1 and 2, he’s talking with the twelve disciples and in Galatians 2:6-10, he affirms that what he’s teaching is what they’re teaching. If the disciples were not claiming that Christ had risen from the dead and had appeared to them, that would not be the case. Also, in 1 Corinthians 15:11, just after citing the creed, he basically says“I don’t care if you go to them, I don’t care if you go to me, we are preaching the same message about Jesus’ appearances.”

Baloney. Paul was preaching that neither Jews nor Gentiles needed to keep the Law while the Twelve and the Church in Jerusalem were still devout orthodox Jews following the Law of Moses, offering animal sacrifices to Yahweh in the Temple (Acts 21). They were still offering animal sacrifices in the Temple twenty years after Jesus’ death! Paul was not preaching the same message. Paul’s Christ and the Twelve’s Jesus were two very different people.

The early church fathers lived and wrote in the first, second, third, and fourth centuries. When you investigate the writings of these guys, you find that some of them had physical contact with the apostles. Given this fact, just as we can trace the disciples’ teachings back to them through Paul, we can trace the teachings of the disciples back to them through the church fathers!

I asked NT scholar Bart Ehrman this specific question: “Do most critical scholars believe that any of the Early Church Fathers knew or met Paul or any of the Twelve”. His reply: “No.” Now, Erhman is not god. He very well could be wrong. But his statement does indicate that this issue is disputed, so our apologist cannot claim it as fact just as I cannot claim it as false.

But what is the evidence that evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants use to make this claim? Answer: assumptions. For instance, they claim that “John the Elder” of Ephesus as mentioned by Irenaeus and Tertullian was John, the son of Zebedee, one of the Twelve. Their evidence? Assumptions.

“But!” the skeptic may object “Just because the disciples were claiming that Jesus rose from the dead, that doesn’t mean that He actually did. Maybe the disciples were making the whole thing up! Maybe they were lying about having seen the risen Jesus”. I have never found any attempt by non-Christians to make the disciples out to be bald face liars very convincing. This is because church history is unanimous in claiming that all of the disciples (with the exception of John) died brutal martyrs death. Why would they die for a lie? Why would they die for something that they knew wasn’t true? I could believe someone would die for a lie that they believed was true, but I can’t bring myself to believe that someone would willingly die for something they knew was false.

I too doubt that the Resurrection Belief is based entirely on lies. Do I think the disciples knew it was a lie but were still willing to die before denying it? No. People do not die for lies. But history is replete with examples of religious people being willing to die for the dumbest of false beliefs. One example is the mass self-immolation of Old Believers in Russia in the 1600s. The Russian Orthodox Church had introduced reforms into the Church liturgy. One reform was a change in the manner one makes the sign of the cross. The old way was with two fingers, the new way was with three. Old Believers chose to burn themselves alive by the thousands rather than cross themselves with three fingers, which they believed to be a sign of the Devil.

Stupid.

I believe that the earliest Christians sincerely believed that Jesus had been bodily resurrected and had appeared to them. But they were mistaken. In reality, they had experienced false sightings (cases of mistaken identity), illusions (bright lights, shadows, etc.) , delusions based on mass hysteria (see the alleged Appearance of the Virgin Mary at Fatima, as an example), or individual hallucinations. Superstitious human beings have very fertile imaginations.

Now, just put yourself in their shoes [the Twelve] for a moment. What could make you believe that someone you loved rose from the dead and made you so confident of this, that you would be willing to die for proclaiming that? I know how I would answer this question: seeing him with my own two eyes.

My answer: Seeing him with my own two eyes…or, thinking that I had seen him with my own two eyes. Both are equally as powerful and convincing.

The synoptic gospels (Luke 24:36-43), The Gospel of John (20:19-20), and the 1 Corinthians 15 creed all mention postmortem appearances to the twelve disciples. It is highly unlikely that three independent sources would all make up the same lie, therefore, on the basis of the principle of multiple attestations, we have good reason to believe that the disciples saw the risen Christ.

Nope. No two Gospels or I Corinthians describe the same postmortem appearance. The Gospels describe completely different appearances. And First Corinthians only lists individual witnesses and groups of witnesses who allegedly received an appearance but does not give any details about any specific appearance to any of them. No locations. No dates or year. No details. First Corinthians 15 doesn’t even claim that any of the witnesses saw a body! Maybe what they all saw was a burning bush… and believed it was an appearance of Jesus! There is no multiple attestation. It is no different than multiple second hand stories of different sightings, in different locations, at different times and even different days, of allegedly the same ghost, but none of the stories ever tell us one single thing about what the damn ghost looked like!

Ridiculous.

John 20:24-29 records the postmortem appearance to Thomas. All of the other disciples had seen Jesus alive and were rejoicing at his resurrection, but Thomas was so skeptical of the resurrection that he said that he wouldn’t believe it until he placed his fingers in Jesus’ hands and side. Verses later, we read that Jesus appeared to Thomas and Thomas was convinced. However, why would the writer of the gospel of John depict Thomas in such a bad light? John 20 doesn’t depict one of the apostles in a very good light by making him out to be a hard-headed skeptic, disbelieving the testimony of the rest of the apostles. It seems to me that Thomas’ skepticism is unlikely to be a Christian invention on the basis of the principle of embarrassment. Therefore, this passage is very likely to be telling us a historical fact.

The Gospel of John was written at the end of the first century. Any eyewitnesses to the crucifixion in c. 33 CE were dead or soon dead by that time. Time was running out for Jesus to return during the lifetimes of his original disciples, as he had promised. If Jesus didn’t return soon, the Church would be forced to admit Jesus was a failed prophet. But cognitive dissonance (and the fear of public humiliation) would not allow that. Another option was too simply reinterpret Jesus’ prophecy. They decided that Jesus didn’t really mean what he had literally said. Jesus would return but not necessarily soon. But how could they convince the masses to continue to believe in a Second Coming? Answer: Promise them extra blessings to believe without seeing the resurrected Jesus. The original disciples had all demanded to see the resurrected body of Jesus to believe. But now, you are deemed “blessed” for believing without seeing, unlike the slow to believe Peter, Andrew, James, John, and Thomas who demanded visual and tactile proof! You believe without any proof! You believe by blind faith! You are such a good Christian!

And that is why the Doubting Thomas Story was invented!

Why would [the author of] John make the men (which would include John himself if he’s really the author of this book) be hiding like a bunch of wusses and write that only a woman follower of Christ [Mary Magdalene] had the guts to go down to the tomb? This paints the disciples in an embarrassing light and exalts a person who, back then, had low social status. By the principle of embarrassment, we can conclude that this account is historical.

Are there any other possible explanations for why the author of the Gospel of John might depict the male disciples of Jesus as cowardly? I can think of one: Christians were being kicked out of the synagogues in the late first century. They were being “persecuted”. Telling fearful new converts that the original disciples were at one time cowards too, but by placing their faith in the resurrected Christ they became brave fearless preachers of The Way, this might encourage the new converts to follow this example. Just a thought.

But it gets even better! For the specific words Jesus said to Mary were “Go instead to my brothers and tell them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’” (verse 17). John’s gospel puts more emphasis on the deity of Christ than any of the other 3, yet he says that God the father is “His God”. When you’ve told your readers from verse 1 that Jesus is God, it’s odd to have him say that The Father is His God, as though Jesus is somehow an inferior being. If Jesus has a God, how can he be God? Now, just like with “Why have you forsaken me” which we examined in part 3 of this series, I think a plausible explanation for this sentence can be given. I don’t think Jesus’ words here in any way diminish His deity. However, the point here is that they seem to. Therefore, rather than having to go through the trouble of explaining this saying, it would have been much easier for John if he had just omitted that part altogether. The fact that it’s in here gives us reason to believe that John is making this up, this is actually what Miss Magdalene heard the postmortem Jesus say. Once again, the principle of embarrassment gives us reason to believe this account is historical.

Maybe. Or, maybe the author of the Gospel of John did not have the high Christology that you believe he had, dear apologist. Maybe the author of John believed that Jesus was the Son of God, a participant in creation, but not Yahweh himself, and that is why he has Jesus refer to Yahweh as “my God”.

We’ve seen that as with Jesus’ death by crucifixion and Jesus’ empty tomb, there is an astounding amount of historical evidence for the postmortem appearances to the disciples. Now, you can try to explain these appearances in some way other than to say Jesus really rose from the dead, but you have no grounds on which to deny that the disciples really believed they saw Him post-crucifixion.

I agree that early Christians believed that Jesus had appeared to some of them postmortem.

As the agnostic historian, Bart Ehrman said “We can say with complete certainty [emphasis added] that some of his disciples at some later time insisted that he soon appeared to them. . . . Historians, of course, have no difficulty whatsoever speaking about the belief in Jesus’ resurrection, since it is a matter of public record”¹³ The atheist historian Gerd Ludemann put it this way: “It may be taken as historically certain that Peter and the disciples had experiences after Jesus’ death in which he appeared to them as the risen Christ.” ¹⁴ For a historian, who is an atheist no less, to say that something like this is historically certain speaks volumes! The atheist scholar E.P Sanders said “That Jesus’ followers (and later Paul) had resurrection experiences is, in my judgment, a fact. What the reality was that gave rise to the experiences I do not know.”¹⁵

Yes, most non-Christian Bible scholars believe that the disciples had experiences in which they believed that Jesus appeared to them, in some fashion. I accept that as historical fact.

Do we have enough evidence now to infer that Jesus rose from the dead? Actually, I think we do. In my experience, skeptics have a hard time coming up with a naturalistic theory that can account for both Jesus’ empty tomb and Jesus’ postmortem appearances to the disciples. However, I think we can make our case for the resurrection even stronger by examing postmortem appearances of Jesus to two specific individuals: Paul and James. It is these appearances that we will examine in the next blog post.

Most non-Christian Bible scholars and historians doubt the historicity of the Empty Tomb, so this “fact” is disputed. Please be honest and admit that. So we can dismiss your demand to explain both the empty tomb and the claims of postmortem appearances. So, all we are left with are the postmortem appearance claims.

My naturalistic theory for these postmortem appearance claims is this: The disciples of Jesus were emotionally devastated by Jesus’ unexpected death. They had expected him to establish the New Kingdom of Israel. Some of them expected to rule in this new kingdom as princes. They had given up everything to follow “the Messiah”. But now he is dead. No Jew had ever conceived of a dead messiah. All was lost! But then, someone saw Jesus. Maybe it was Peter. Maybe Peter experienced another of his trances (vivid dream/vision), but instead of seeing animals floating on a sheet he saw Jesus. Jesus told Peter that he forgave him for denying him three times. He told Peter that he still loved him and still believed in him. He tells Peter that the New Kingdom is still “on”. He (Jesus) has to go up to heaven to gather an army of angels to defeat the Romans, but he will return. He will return to establish the New Kingdom, just as he promised. He will return at any moment on the clouds accompanied by a great, powerful army. Peter is beside himself with relief and with joy. He is on the verge of hysteria. The next day, he tells the other disciples that Jesus has appeared to him and that he really is the Messiah. “Jesus is coming back…soon. Sell everything you have and move to the city of David. The end is near!”

And from there, mass hysteria took over.

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End of post.