Truth
The Resurrection of Jesus Christ: Myth or Reality?
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Tuesday, October 26, 1999
The Importance of the Resurrection
Christians are keen to answer affirmatively the question: “Did Jesus really rise from the dead?” The reason is that they follow the teaching of their senior apostle, Paul, who said:
If Christ be not raised, your faith is vain.1 Cor 15:17
Thus the whole of Christian belief depends on the resurrection being truly historical, and the greatest Christian propagandist said so. Christian apologists tell us that all scholars—even critical non-Christian scholars—accept certain facts about Christ’s resurrection as historical, and that the Bible is not the only source of evidence for Christ’s resurrection.
One apologist asserts that sources apart from the Bible confirm that Jesus was crucified, and he cites Thallus, a non-Christian Samaritan historian. Apparently, Thallus “regarded the crucifixion of Jesus as so significant that he included it in his History of the World, which he wrote about AD 52.” The apologists’ source for this information is F F Bruce, The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? Intervarsity Press, 1972, p 113.
But truthfully Bruce, unlike his dishonest disciple, points out that the writings of Thallus are no longer extant and we are dependent upon the word of Julius Africanus, a third century Christian writer, who says that Thallus tried to explain the darkness that fell when Jesus died on the cross as an eclipse of the sun. This is plainly not independent evidence because it is quoted by a Christian, and in any case, no one intelligent could claim that a solar eclipse was an explanation for the darkness at the crucifixion because a solar eclipse is impossible when the moon is on the opposite side of the earth, as it must have been at the full moon.
Bruce contradicts the apologist in that he says apart from this reference by Julius Africanus to the supposed theory of Thallus, “no certain reference is made to Christianity in any extant non-Christian writing of the first century.” Where then are these “sources” that our Christian apologist speaks of? He refers to Jewish sources mentioning Jesus’s crucifixion at Passover, citing however only The Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin, 43a, though the Babylonian Talmud was written hundreds of miles away and several centuries later. This is typical of Christian dishonesty.
Our apologist asserts that the nature of crucifixion ensures death, quoting an article in the Journal of the American Medical Society (March 21, 1986, p 1463) that concluded, “Interpretations based on the assumption that Jesus did not die on the cross appear to be at odds with modern medical knowledge.” People might be frightened to learn that even when doctors have the deceased person before them for examination, they misdiagnose death all too commonly. Examination of medieval graves proves that about of third of people were buried alive and even today about one in twenty people are declared dead when they are really still alive. Worrying though these facts are, the point here is that they can give no credence to “doctors” who presume to make a diagnosis 2000 years after the event based upon the hysterical observations of a few fanatics. The truth about crucifixion is that it was meant to be a slow and agonising death. Typically crucified men took five days to die. Jesus was supposedly dead in only six hours!
Where were the Apostles after the Resurrection?
The Christian apologist now tells us “Christ’s apostles did not go to some obscure place to begin preaching about his resurrection but instead went back to the city of Jerusalem, the very place of Jesus’s execution and grave.” He wants us to think that, if what the apostles were preaching had been false, it would have been evident to the people in Jerusalem, and Christianity more than likely would not have begun. Like most Christian apologists, though “economical with the truth” ours pretends to have the knowledge of God.
If he turns to his gospels he will find that it is far from certain where the disciples went after the death of their leader. The earliest gospel, Mark, from the instructions of the angel at the tomb, implies that they went to Galilee, a sensible course of action because it was out of the direct jurisdiction of the Roman Governor of Judah. Matthew repeats this, adding that the apostles met the resurrected Jesus in Galilee. No one has any idea how long they stayed in Galilee, but it would have been at least until Pilate was replaced in 36 AD. This is, even by Christian reckoning, a minimum of three years after a crucifixion in 33 AD or seven years after a crucifixion in 29 AD. If Jesus was crucified in 21 AD, the period out of Jerusalem could have been 15 years!
Luke in his gospel and in Acts of the Apostles, blatantly contradicts these two evangelists by stating that Jesus expressly told the apostles not to leave Jerusalem! He implies they were teaching only fifty days later but there is no real reason to think that the Pentecost spoken of was the very next one after the Passover of the crucifixion, and the vague expression, “in these days” might imply a space of several years.
The inference has to be that the interval was long enough for the immediate events of the death of a failed rebel to have been forgotten by the majority of people that had no direct contact with him. Nothing in the accounts implies that the supposed resurrection was known to many people besides the apostles themselves. In other accounts, nothing assures the reader that the disciples were preaching in Jerusalem immediately after the death of their master. Indeed, common sense dictates that they were not, and had laid low for long enough for the impact of the crucifixion to have faded.
Beliefs
Yet, Christian apologists can dictate: “This situation therefore demands that Jesus was no longer in his tomb.” He quotes Paul Althus as writing that the resurrection proclamation (kerygma) “could not have been maintained in Jerusalem for a single day, for a single hour, if the emptiness of the tomb had not been established as a fact for all concerned.”
Christians have a child’s respect for authority that comes of them thinking that all arguments are solved by a quotation from the bible. Modern Christians extend it to quotations from any source as long as they are favourable to the Christian view. Needless to say, a million quotations will not make truth out of falsehood. This statement by Althus is just nonsense.
Even today, otherwise rational people believe all sorts of incredible things quite apart from Christianity. Apparently, millions of American citizens believe in angels, and millions more believe they are being abducted nightly by monsters from outer space. Why should we believe Althus that the average proto-Christian was naturally skeptical in far more superstitious and less rational times. The plain truth is that the skeptical ones were not proto-Christians and were never converted. The gullible ones were proto-Christians, believed the fantasies they were told and became converted. Nothing is different today except that Christians now are so rich and in such a majority when it comes to propagating their lies that it is a remarkable tribute to human intellect that any skeptics remain at all.
Was the Body Stolen?
Our Christian moves on to assert that early Jewish testimony admits the empty tomb, citing Matthew 28:11-15 as saying that the Jews argued the disciples stole the body, and that this story was still being spread at the time when Matthew was writing. “This text could not have been written unless there really was a Jewish counter argument to the empty tomb; otherwise, this passage would have been exposed as a fraud.” Thus the Jews did not deny the empty tomb but rather admitted the empty tomb by trying to explain it away. The Christian apologist adds that Dr Paul Maier calls this “positive evidence from a hostile source, the strongest kind of historical evidence… If a source admits a fact that is not in its favor, the fact is genuine.” That, concludes our Christian apologist, is exactly the case with the empty tomb.
So what? There is nothing miraculous about a tomb being empty and there are lots of explanations, including the one that Jesus was not dead! If we accept what Christian apologist argues, he encourages us to know that plenty of people did not believe the Christian fantasy that a man had risen from the dead when he was writing his book at the end of the first century. That however does not tell us that many Jews in Jerusalem at the time knew anything about the empty tomb, let alone felt the same way.
Matthew is saying exactly why he puts this bit of mythology into his novel. People thought the corpse must have been stolen when Matthew was writing, so he invents a “proof” that God really did raise a man from the dead. Regrettably, the proof is more incredible than the event it purports to buttress. We are invited to believe that soldiers on watch that had witnessed whatever really ahppened were given money to tell the lie that disciples of Jesus had stolen the body while they slept on duty! They agreed and thus the story began. These soldiers had supposedly witnessed the miracle of God’s son being returned to life:
Some of the watch came into the city, and shewed unto the chief priests all the things that were done.
These were genuine witnesses of the very event that Christians regard as sufficient to persuade them of the truth of Christianity, yet were willing to suffer the extremely serious neglect of duty implied by kipping on the job. Why were these soldiers not instantly converted themselves by the miracle they witnessed? Why were they not the most important apostles of all—apostles that had actually seen the event happen with their own eyes? The Matthaean refutation of the counter-argument to the resurrection turns out to be proof of the opposite. None of the soldiers that had seen the miracle was impressed enough by it to use the money to buy his liberty and become an apostle for God! The truth is that the watch was invented by Matthew as his attempt to refute the allegations that the corpse had been stolen. It does not even have to be an admission that the tomb was empty. Christians were preaching that it was and the obvious question is: “How do you know the body was not stolen?”
The Wrong Tomb
Another explanation is that the disciples went to the wrong tomb, and this too must have been an early criticism of Christian claims because Mark 15:47 is an obvious afterthought to refute the idea that the tomb had been mistaken. Christian apologist thinks that this cannot have been the case because the Jewish authorities, “since they were against Christianity,” would have wasted no time producing the body of Jesus from the proper tomb, putting an end to “Christianity.” Note that Christian apologist seems to think Christianity already existed from the time of the crucifixion. The Jewish authorities were not against “Christianity” because there was no such thing as Christianity. The followers of Jesus had the same name as the followers of John the Baptist. They were Nazarenes, not Christians, and Jesus taught Judaism. Christianity was a later invention of Hellenised Jews and gentile bishops.
More important though is the implication that the authorities (authority in Judaea at that time was actually held by the Romans not the Jews) could possibly know that the disciples of Jesus had made such a foolish error. Christians assume that the disciples went out into the streets in a large motorcade with brass bands, hooters and banners to pronounce to the eager throngs that Jesus had arisen. The “authorities” are supposed not to have liked this and to have quickly produced the evidence that it was a false claim. It is all part of the fantasy that Christians build up for themselves and then try to force on to the rest of us.
If the Nazarenes had mistaken the tomb, how would the authorities have known? Sensible Nazarenes were departing for Galilee to avoid the fate of their master, Romans not being noted for mercy towards rebels, as two of the synoptic gospels and John’s gospel admit. John’s gospel also makes it clear that the disciples had to hide in secure houses out of fear of the Jews before they departed for Galilee, so how were the “authorities” to find out that the disciples were dunces?
Even more probable is the belief of the skeptics in Matthew’s gospel—the disciples stole the body. Christian apologist’s argument against this is that then “the men who delivered to the world the highest moral standards it has ever known” were frauds, liars, and hypocrites. “Are these men, who helped transform the moral structure of society, consummate liars or deluded madmen? These alternatives are harder to believe than the fact of the resurrection, and there is not a shred of evidence to support them,” our apologist states, quoting some other unknown Christian source.
Sadly, if there is any truth in the claim that Christianity represents the world’s “highest moral standards,” it is belied by the history over almost 2000 years of Christianity in practice and Christians in power. Christians have been among the world’s greatest ogres and Christianity has kept people in untold misery for century after century. Once again we meet the Christian myth that this concocted religion is preternaturally moral. Christianity survives best among the most impoverished and oppressed people. The bishops were the first to realise this and have conspired to keep their flocks poor and oppressed ever since. It works a treat. The poorer and more oppressed believers are, the more they herd into the churches for the travesty of salvation called the holy communion.
The truth about Christianity is that it began as lies, conquered the western world as lies and continues as lies. The first gentile bishops were thoroughgoing liars and some church fathers even boast about it, as did Paul, the Christian archapostle. The dishonest garbage offered by this Christian apologist and people of his breed proves that pious Christian lying still goes on. Christians have never lost prestige by lying. Their morality is: “Never tell a lie… unless it is a big one!”
The Authorities Stole the Corpse
It is possible that the authorities stole the corpse, imagining that even the dead body of the Jewish rebel might be some sort of inspiration. Christian apologist thinks this quite impossible to believe because the authorities would have produced the body as soon as they realised their plan had back-fired, and the very disappearance of the corpse had had the effect they hoped to avoid. Christian apologist says: “If they had the body, why didn’t they put the corpse on a cart and wheel it through Jerusalem, thus eliminating for all time any belief in Christ’s resurrection? “ The Christians again assume that the authorities would have discovered the disciples’ reaction to the empty tomb. As we saw above, the disciples were in hiding for an unknown but long period and by the time the Christians emerged openly, there could have been no recognisable body remaining.
Christian apologist, getting outrageously dishonest, now adds his clincher: “Most scholars reject these natural theories because they all fail to explain that the disciples had real experiences with one whom they believed was the risen Christ.” This “is not widely disputed today, even among critical scholars because of the first hand testimony supporting it,” he declares quoting yet another anonymous writer that happens to suit his line of argument. Christian apologist’s argument is that the appearances of Jesus were to eyewitnesses, and the gospels were written by those who recorded this eyewitness testimony. Again he asserts that these claims are confirmed by other sources but he does not cite them—merely another spouting Christian. Finally, he maintains the reliability and trustworthiness of the New Testament has been confirmed by extrabiblical sources and archaeology. For these reasons, the conclusion that the gospels record eyewitness testimony, as they claim, cannot be denied.
Of course, all of this is tendentious nonsense. If “most scholars” do not dispute the gospels stories about the appearances then it is not on account of their scholarship but on account of their Christian beliefs. How is this evidence? Most people who are not Christians can find better things to do than to study primitive mythology. Those who do it are Christians or Jews intent on adding fresh lies to the accumulated heap already there, or people who have retired from gainful employment and wonder in astonishment how people can get comfortable livings for repeating unbelievable fictions as truth. They say every man has his price, it is simply that Christian’s is so small. They will say anything for a sip of wine and the illusion of a seat in the balmy place.
The First Christian Liar
Christian apologist, desperate to get God’s attention and register his own deckchair up there, says the testimony, that Jesus had appeared physically alive to his disciples after his crucifixion, is verified by 1 Corinthians 15:3-8, in other words by Paul, the first Christian liar. “In this passage, Paul is recording an early creed concerning the resurrection appearances, which, the majority of scholars believe, he received from Peter and James within six years of the crucifixion.” Christian apologist adds that since Peter and James are both mentioned in this creed as having seen Jesus alive after his death, we may agree with Jewish scholar Pinchas Lapide who says that this creed “may be considered the statement of eyewitnesses” Christian apologist concludes that the theory that the resurrection is a myth or legend can be ruled out because the gospels and this Pauline creed are the early testimony of trustworthy eyewitnesses.
Consider the facts. “Most scholars” still believe the earliest gospel is Mark’s. Mark’s gospel says nothing at all about the appearnces of the risen Jesus! In most Christian bibles however, the faithful will find at Mark 16:9-20 descriptions of the appearances. The reason? The last twelve verses of mark are bogus, as “most scholars” accept. They have been added precisely because the earliest testimony of the mission of Jesus had nothing about the all important appearances.
These last twelve chapters were added hundreds of years after the rest of Mark was written, when Christians were spreading their message by telling the fantasy of a man who returned to life, and appearances had become the main argument. None of the the Codex Vaticanus, Codex Syriacus or the Codex Bobiensis have the last twelve verses of Mark, though the latter two are copies as late as the fifth century, long after Christianity became the state religion. The Codex Sinaiticus dated to the fourth century is unmistakably ended by its copyist with a flourish and a repetition of the title—at verse 16:8. Christians insist with no foundation at all that the original ending with its accounts of the appearances has been lost. The gospel ends quite adequately at verse 16:8 and the talk of lost verses is solely because Christians cannot accept the thought that the appearances might be later additions to the gospel myth.
The origin of the appearance stories is likely to be the mind of the greatest of Christian liars, the self-confessed liar, Paul:
I am made all things to all men, that I might by all means save some.1 Cor 9:22
Paul is admitting quite openly that anything goes when it comes to saving (converting) people. Christians have never ceased to do the same. Paul was the evangelist to the gentiles and, because “most scholars” consider his epistles to be earlier than the gospels, they contain the earliest accounts of the appearances. The later gospels, written at least a half century after the epistles of Paul, took up this rewarding theme.
Martyrs or Liars?
Christian apologist accepts that one of the explanations of the appearances is that the apostles lied, but he cannot understand how Jesus’s disciples could have been liars and yet transformed into bold witnesses who died for their belief in the resurrection. Christian apologist knows that, of the twelve disciples, ten died for their belief in Christ’s resurrection and their belief in him as the Son of God. In fact, only the New Testament tells us there were twelve disciples. Jewish sources suggest Jesus had five disciples, and nothing certain is known about the subsequent careers of any one of them, even Peter. How then does Christian apologist know that ten died for their beliefs? In any case, how does he know that the apostles of Christ taught the same beliefs as the apostle to the gentiles—who spent much of his career decrying the work of the original apostles—upon whose work Christianity now stands?
Christian apologist thinks the myths that the apostles died for what he supposes are the same beliefs as his own “is significant because, if Jesus had not risen from the dead, his disciples knew it.” His case is that though people will die for a falsehood they believe to be true, they will not die for a falsehood they know to be false. One might have thought Christian apologist could have paused here and considered what he is saying. He accepts that people will die for a falsehood they believe to be true but discounts it in this case because he tells us the disciples must have known it was false, if it was indeed false. The clue to what happened ought to have surfaced at this point if no other.
We can accept, that the disciples learnt that the tomb was empty and perhaps some of them confirmed the fact. According to the gospels, Jesus had repeatedly told the disciples that he would die, but would rise again. The traditional Christian myth is that the apostles were too stupid to understand, yet, if they were expecting Jesus to rise from the dead and then found or even heard that his corpse had disappeared, wouldn’t these superstitious Palestinian natives have thought: “It really has happened. It’s a miracle!?” In short, the Nazarenes had been primed to imagine that Jesus might arise from the dead, then something happened that made them believe it was true—the body disappeared!
Christian apologists do what they always like to do to gain self-awarded brownie points in their apologetics—they set up a straw doll to knock over. There is nothing in the skeptical case against the resurrection that stops the immediate followers in Jesus from believing it. Obviously someone came to believe it at some stage, and it seems likely to have happened at the beginning. The truth however is stronger than the Christians would have us believe.
The Truth
Jesus did not wander around prophesying his own death and resurrection. He was leading a band of seditionists and knew they were on a dangerous path. Some might have to die in the battles ahead. But his goal was the complete renewal of the world as the kingdom of heaven when “all righteous people” would be resurrected, not just himself! It was this concrete hope of resurrection for all his followers as righteous people that was such a powerful force. The empty tomb proved to their own satisfaction that Jesus had risen as the first fruits of the dead. As long as they remained righteous, they too could expect to join him. That hope was what founded Christianity on the disappearance of a corpse. No appearances were initially, if ever, involved.
Christian apologist offers the option that the disciples hallucinated the bodily risen Christ, but discounts it because “psychological principles governing the appearances of hallucinations are against it.” The disciples also record touching Jesus and giving him food (Lk 24:39-43), which Christian apologist assures us cannot be hallucinated (though quite why these particular acts cannot be imagined in an hallucination, it is hard to understand). Oh, and “this theory fails to account for the empty tomb.”
Christian apologist only seems to think with half his brain. Could the recent traumas of the death of their leader followed by the loss of his corpse from the tomb have made some of his followers hallucinate, or dream certain events that later they told as if it were real? There seems nothing fanciful in such an idea. Perhaps more likely however, is that at some later date, perhaps when they had returned from Galilee, they met Jesus’s successor as leader of the Nazarenes. It seems Nazarenes were bearded, ascetic and had long hair. It is quite possible that simple people, as Christians always tell us these followers of Jesus were, might easily have miunderstood when they were later introduced to a man in the same position as their erstwhile leader. They thought they were meeting a resurrected Jesus when they were meeting a man playing the same role.
James, described in the stories as the brother of Jesus seems to have been his successor, not Peter. If James really had been the blood brother of Jesus the mistake might be even more plausible—brothers would have had features in common. In fact, though, James was probably the brother of Jesus only as another senior member of the brotherhood, and the similarities were for cultic reasons.
Christian apologist concludes:
Christianity requires a historic cause. It did not exist until about AD 30, when it suddenly burst to life, spread like wildfire, and changed the world. What could have started this if not the resurrection, as the early Christians claimed?
Christian apologist also quotes as ever an authority, Josh McDowell: “The Church was founded on the resurrection, and disproving it would have destroyed the whole Christian movement. However, instead of any such disproof, through the 1st century, Christians were threatened, beaten, flogged and killed because of their faith” It would have been much simpler to silence Christianity by putting forth evidence disproving the resurrection, but this could not be done, we are told.
What started Christianity was the belief of some simple followers of Jesus, the Jewish rebel, that their leader, who had been expecting to open the gates of heaven as the kingdom of God on earth had been the first of the righteous to be resurrected when they discovered his body had disappeared from its tomb. Their belief was sincere, but a whole raft of later bishops and missionaries saw it as a great way of introducing Judaism into the Roman Empire without its concomitant requirements like circumcision, and dressed up with some of the doctrine popular in the empire at the time—that of the dying and rising god.
Deception?
Still dishonest or incomprehending, Christian apologist says:
If there was no resurrection, then Paul deceived the other apostles of an appearance of Christ to him, and they in turn deceived Paul!
Paul says that it was an appearance of the risen Christ that convinced him that Christianity is true. Quoting yet again Christian apologist asks:
Even worse, what could have motivated him to “sell out” to his former “ministry” of persecuting the Christians when he was convinced that it was God’s will? From his point of view, why would he risk the damnation of his own soul by converting to what he perceived as anti-Jewish beliefs?
One could more pertinently ask questions like these of the alleged betrayer, Judas, who was a personal friend of Jesus and one trustworthy enough to have been trusted with the bag—the Nazarene communal funds.
In his talk about mutual deception, Christian apologist is taking the New Testament as “gospel truth.” Doubtless there is truth in it but we do not know for sure which bits they are. Paul and the apostles of Jesus were certainly in disagreement, and the modern Christians on the whole follow the line of Paul. Yet the apostles of Jesus, who all disappeared from history without writing down their important story, knew their leader personally, while Paul knew him only through the hallucinations that Christian apologist disparages. The implications of Acts of the Apostles and the epistles of Paul are that Paul was a loose cannon that the real apostles were glad to see the back of.
As for the question that follows, there are several answers. The Ebionim, who were Christians, regarded Paul as a liar and a falsifier of the Nazarene message. they said he was not even a native born Jew but a proselyte who sought to ingratiate himself with the Jewish ruling class. Even the Christian books show him to have been a friend of nobility and the Roman occupiers, and a man who escaped from difficult situations not by miracles but by practical string pulling. He returns to Rome nominally as a prisoner but apparently as the senior figure on the ship. Only Christian belief and not a cold look at the facts stops anyone from realising that Paul was a Roman and Herodian agent provocateur.
Rational Explanation
Christian apologist will quote another of his experts in a final effort to win us over: “The only rational explanation for these historical facts is that God raised Jesus in bodily form.” Well, the explanation given here in opposition to the claims of Christian apologists, is more rational because it requires no such irrational idea as the supernatural. Based on the evidence, you have to conclude that Christian faith is unreasonable, being founded on a simple misunderstanding created by a fancy that the world was about to end as a sinful place and be renovated as the uncorruptible kingdom of God. Gullible people mistook the disappearance of the body of Jesus as his resurrection as the first of the righteous. This explanation accepts the basis of Christianity as a sincere belief in the resurrection of Jesus, but it explains it in terms of the history and beliefs of the time.
Christian apologist concludes that Jesus has transformed millions of lives throughout history. He is quite correct but in most cases no one can say the transformation was for the better, least of all those who were given the tortures of hell before God had had time to judge them for himself, unless it is to admit that for much of the time Christianity could not be opposed, it was better to be dead than to live. The evangelists of Middle American suburbia ought to read a little objective history about the godly behaviour of their predecessors in the Holy Spirit.
Still, for Christian apologist, who like most Christians cling to their belief because they are scared of death, “we can be sure that life does not end at the grave.” It is not an argument that either Christian or skeptic can answer with certainty because neither will ever come back to tell us. The myth of the resurrection of Jesus does nothing to dispel this uncertainty or confirm that Jesus is God or any other such nonsense.
Christians should take care, though, because if they really do enter into a “personal relationship with the living God,” they had better be sure that to have “the certainty of eternal life, and experience his abundant life” they are not just making themselfves easy for him to recognise as blatant and crass liars on Judgement Day. If god truly is goodness and perfection, it follows that lying, however pious it might be, whatever its good intentions, is manifestly not what this good God wants. Indeed, if this God truly expects his followers to lie to spread his influence, he is plainly not the good God at all. Think about it, Mr C Apologist, when you next confess your moral guilt before the holy and just God.
Christian apologist gives us a final thought: “The Bible says that this relationship with God and eternal life are gifts and therefore cannot be earned by good moral behavior (Eph 2:8-9).” It seems Christians take it that the answer therefore is immoral behaviour, lying through a megaphone just like their founders. These are the same Christians that are never content to let God judge and punish sinners—they always want to save him the job. Plus ça change.
Further Reading
- More on Jesus crucified
- More on the Jewish idea of resurrection, Jesus is Risen, belief in the resurrection of Jesus Christ
- More on secular Christianity
