Dr. Lydia McGrew is a renowned Christian apologist and philosopher, who surely needs no introduction to viewers of this blog. Recently, she released her Elevator Pitch for the Resurrection of Jesus on Cameron Bertuzzi’s Youtube channel, Capturing Christianity. Here it is:
(For the benefit of viewers, I should explain that Dr. Lydia McGrew suffers from severe back pain.)
I decided to post a short six-minute reply, summarizing and rebutting her case. I conclude that the Resurrection of Jesus is something that believers have to take on faith. What do you think?
Here’s my transcript.
Hello everyone. Recently, acclaimed Christian apologist Dr. Lydia McGrew released her Elevator Pitch for the Resurrection of Jesus on Cameron Bertuzzi’s Youtube channel, “Capturing Christianity.” Today, I’d like to explain why an honest seeker after truth might not find Dr. McGrew’s Elevator Pitch convincing. Without further ado, here it is.
First, the disciples claimed, as we find in the Gospels, that they had lengthy conversations with Jesus after he died, that the had the ability to touch him, that he ate with them on more than one occasion, and that he stayed with them for several weeks. This is what the people who were in an original position to know claimed.
Second, the fact that they were risking their lives, as narrated in the Acts of the Apostles, shows that they were not lying.
Third, the fact that they interacted with Jesus in multiple ways – seeing him, hearing him and touching him – shows it’s very unlikely that they were mistaken.
Finally, the best explanation of what they claimed is that they were telling the truth.
So what’s wrong with this case? The hidden assumption in Dr. Lydia McGrew’s Elevator Pitch for the Resurrection is that the Gospels accurately record what the disciples claimed. In fact, none of the Gospels claims to have been written by a disciple who actually saw the risen Jesus. Only one Gospel – the Gospel of John – claims to have been written by people who knew one of the disciples who saw Jesus and who wrote down what he saw. However, we don’t know which disciple it was, or who the people who knew him were, and we don’t have his original account.
What about about Luke’s Gospel? Well, Luke doesn’t claim to have spoken to eyewitnesses to Jesus’ appearances. His Gospel merely claims to be a carefully investigated record of Jesus’ life, and to be familiar with other accounts of his life. Matthew and Mark don’t claim to be based on eyewitness reports, either.
Now, if the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ resurrection appearances were quite similar to one another, like the four Gospel accounts of the feeding of the 5,000, we might suspect that they were based on a shared recollection. But they aren’t. In fact, the only thing about the appearances that the Gospels all agree on is that Jesus appeared to Peter and the other disciples (“the Eleven”) somewhere, and sent them out to preach. (Mark’s Gospel doesn’t describe this appearance, but implies its occurrence in chapter 16, verse 7.) And that’s it. On every other point, the Gospel accounts diverge.
Given that the Gospels were written at least three decades after Jesus’ resurrection appearances, by unknown individuals who failed to record a single eyewitness report of these appearances by an identified individual, it’s reasonable for someone to doubt whether the disciples who saw the risen Jesus all saw the same thing, or conversed with him at length, or touched him and ate with him. And without these facts, you cannot establish the resurrection of Jesus. You have to take it on faith. Thank you.
I see that “elevator pitch” as unconvincing. It is just an observed fact that people make up stories that sound convincing — until you look more deeply into them.
I agree with your take, that belief in the resurrection can only be based of faith.
Are you advocating blind faith, vjtorley sir?
If we take faith to be evidence (as in Hebrews 11:1 KJV), then McGrew’s conjecture is reasonable. It’s the kind of evidence that confirms believers, not meant to sway the disbelievers.
For a believer, you have much work to do on your theology.
Hi Erik,
Hebrews 11:1 defines faith as “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (ESV).
To be perfectly clear, I’m not advocating blind faith in the Resurrection of Jesus. Believers can have reasons which confirm their faith, but which would probably not persuade a non-Christian to become a believer – e.g. the positive impact that Christianity has had on the world (e.g. charity and the abolition of female infanticide). [I should point out that Judaism is the ultimate cause of these highly beneficial changes.] There’s also the internal witness of the Holy Spirit.
That’s my own view, and of course, I could be wrong. Anyway, I’d like to get the conversation back on-topic. What do you think of Dr. Lydia McGrew’s Elevator Pitch for the Resurrection? Do you find my criticisms of Dr. McGrew’s argument persuasive? If not, why not?
Not exactly on topic, but this is a remarkably precise description of Trump’s position on voter fraud, right down to the inability to abandon this faith in the face of reality.
Way more than just those three possibilities. She needs to get out more.
There’s always that fourth explanation, that they were all wackadoodle. All aboard, next stop Roswell…….
Dawkins: “There is no sensible limit on what the human mind is capable of believing.”
Agree with the consensus here: McGrew makes too many hugely questionable assumptions in order to generate the conclusion she wants.
And as with apologetics generally, her argument isn’t about convincing those who are open to reasonable discussion. It’s about giving people who already have faith the flimsiest, most pathetic bit of “argument” needed to soothe their own troubled intellectual conscience.
chuckdarwin,
However many alternatives one might count here, certainly one ought to include a possibility that has been fairly popular among resurrection deniers for centuries. It was, e.g., pushed in publications by, among many others, Samuel Butler, George Moore, and George Bernard Shaw.
Whatever one may think about that heterodox view, knowledge of its existence should make McGrew’s confident suggestion that “these are the only three possibilities” seem silly/ignorant to anybody who hasn’t just been lying on her couch making up “elevator defenses” for the last decade.
Neither McGrew’s pitch or your criticism is persuasive. Apologetics is not meant to persuade non-believers. It’s meant to establish where the non-believer/collocutor stands and also to establish where the believer stands. That some people are persuaded to take or change sides in the process is secondary.
McGrew’s argument rests explicitly on the New Testament testimony, so the gospels are not a hidden assumption as you claim. Your misconstrual of the purpose of apologetics and your (hidden) assumption that it’s possible to build religious apologetics without scripture and without having a solid theological basis has been completely misguided from the beginning.
I agree. Apologetics is “meant” to sell books and tickets to pseudo-debates. Some aspects of Christianity never change. I’m guessing Jesus, if were he still around, would be appalled. But maybe not—as I recall, he was quite the showman himself…..
Is that why Christian apologist Cameron Bertuzzi’s video (shown above) is subtitled, “1 Minute Proof Jesus Rose?”
But if you don’t believe me, please consider the following definition given by Scott Wilson in his article, “What Is Apologetics?” (May 18, 2023) at ChristianMinistryEdu.org:
“Apologetics delivers persuasive evidence and arguments to convince non-believers to change their minds and commit to a life in Christ.” I rest my case. Cheers.
vjtorley,
If you go by Scott Wilson’s definition, you see that persuasion is the last point. You need to get the prior three points right first, and then maybe think about persuasion. (I don’t go by Scott Wilson’s definition, but that aside.)
Once you got the first three points down (which you don’t for now), you can start thinking who you are supposed to persuade. Most Christian debates take place between Christian denominations, which serves to highlight theological points of Christian denominations. It does nothing to convert proper non-believers, atheists.
You may think that it is more fun to persuade atheists, but then you should think what you are converting them to. Since you don’t have theology, I say God have mercy on the poor soul you might happen to convert. Anyway, seeing your actual history of “persuasion”, you are more busy rejecting and undermining philosophers of your own denomination, in this case calling McGrew out for using (gasp!) scripture in defence of resurrection.
Has it ever occurred to you that if you don’t use scripture, then there is no point in defending resurrection at all? So your refutation is utterly self-defeating and unpersuasive both for believers and non-believers alike. You say that resurrection needs to be taken on faith, but without scripture what would this faith be? How do you persuade a non-believer about resurrection without relying on scripture? How is this not obvious to you? Why do you need random internet commentators to spell these things out to you?
I don’t know. My reading is that Christian missionaries traveled all around the world, and effectively converted some Japanese, some Indians, some Chinese, most South Sea Islanders, many if not most Africans, etc., to some (often distorted) version of their faith. And they were missionaries. That’s what missionaries DO, that’s their purpose in life.
Certainly that’s the goal of the Seventh Day Adventests, the Mormons, and the Jehovah’s Witnesses who come to my door.
Flint,
I’ve been told that Ireland is the only country where mass conversion to Christianity happened without bloodshed.
Then again, it was a very drunk Irish Catholic who told me that, at a little bar in Donegal.
That’s surprising if true, considering the bloodshed that has occurred in Ireland between two branches of Christianity. I have a photograph I found on the net, of a graveyard with a high stone wall down the middle, so that Catholics can be buried on one side and Protestants on the other. And there are two very tall gravestones on either side of that wall, with carved arms reaching across and hands clasping. Seems husband and wife differed in this crucial respect, and are as united in death as rules permit.
I guess Irish Christians aren’t any more tolerant than True Believers anywhere. It becomes necessary to kill souls in order to save them.
Yes, that’s what missionaries do. Missionaries have a message that they take to people not of the same faith. Somebody with a non-message like “Let’s not look at scriptures” cannot be a Christian missionary.
Based on Torley’s history, he is a Catholic missionary full of ideas to de-convert Catholics who have a vastly more solid ground in Catholicism than himself. (Not that I care about Catholicism much. I’m positive that almost nobody here mistakes the current pope for a Catholic. He is indefensible.)
Hey, VJTorley. Mind if I ask you a question here — pertaining to another one of your posts, on natural law? I really liked that one, and I appreciate all the extracts from the summa; but what would you think of people who say, “well, Aquinas’ doctrine of agape or christian love is really wonderful, and proves non-catholics are just degenerate” in reply? Thanks
Are different styles of apologetics needed for convincing (1) members of other Christian denominations, (2) believers of non-Christian religions, and (3) atheists?
It seems to me that the strategy of not relying on scripture would be necessary with atheists. If your target already believes in some scripture*, then yes, another scripture* might have some persuasive power.
* Proper non-believers may wish to replace “scripture” with “magic book”.
Hi JuliusLander,
Aquinas’ writings on love are indeed profound, and interested readers might like to take a look at what he wrote here and here. David Gallagher has written an illuminating article titled, Thomas Aquinas on Self-Love as the Basis for Love of Others. I wouldn’t for a moment pretend to be able to fully understand Aquinas’ views on faith, hope and love, let alone critique them. I would point out, however, that C. S. Lewis’ book, The Four Loves, is also sublime, and Lewis, despite his close friendship with thinkers like Tolkien, was not a Catholic. I’ve also known non-Catholics whose Christian love is every bit as real as that of Catholics, so I have no sympathy with the view that non-Catholics are “degenerate.”
Erik,
For someone who claims not to care about Catholicism, you do seem to write about it quite a lot. That’s fine, but you might want to ask yourself why. As for de-conversion: I regard apologetic arguments in the same way most Christians regard scientific and philosophical arguments for Intelligent Design. Even if you agree with the conclusion (Christ is risen; life was designed), the fact remains that truth is in no way bolstered by bad arguments. I might add that Aquinas and medieval theologians made no attempt to resort to resurrection apologetics. For them, the success of Christianity was miracle enough in itself.
You write, “How do you persuade a non-believer about resurrection without relying on scripture?” From a Catholic perspective, this has things backwards. The canon of the New Testament wasn’t decided until the late fourth century, and the canon of the Old Testament wasn’t fixed until the mid-sixteenth century. It was the Church that fixed the canon. If I were trying to persuade a non-believer, I certainly wouldn’t start with Scripture, as it’s very easy for non-believers to hold it up to ridicule. Instead, I’d begin with the early Christian community and examine its character and trustworthiness, before turning to Scripture and addressing the issue of its veracity. And I’d try to make my point modestly, without pressing it too hard. In the end, there is an element of choice in accepting the case for the Resurrection. That was all I wanted to say.
While it pains me a bit to agree with Eric, I don’t follow this at all:
The whole notion of “the Resurrection” is a scriptural artifact. So it seems to me you are starting with it if you are trying to get anybody to buy that story. You may veer off relatively quickly, I suppose, but you’re still starting with scripture.
Thank you very much for the answer, Dr. Torley; one more question, if I may, and I hope it isn’t impertinent or invasive to ask this: are you yourself a Protestant, or some other variety of Christian? Or are you an atheist, or agnostic. I’m asking because you’re writing on this blog, and your articles; also, however, you seem to have a very admirable and deep knowledge of Christian sources, and do have indeed some comments on Aquinas’ milder doctrines. Not saying this is bad, of course; if anything, it’s good. But that’s what provoked my question. Any answer is appreciated.
All the best,
I spent two years in Swaziland (Eswatini) as a Peace Corps volunteer teaching secondary science and math in the mid-70s and ran across a fair share of missionaries running the gamut from Salesian priests to Anglicans, Mormons, Jehovah’s, Seventh Day, Campus Crusade to super hard-core evangelical creationists. I don’t have any idea what their conversion rates were. I do know that the conversions seemed nominal because the vast majority of Swazis continued to practice polygamy, ancestor worship and animism. Women and children continued to be treated as chattel. Most church sponsored schools were boarding schools reserved for boys that were members of the extended royal family (King Sobhuza II had somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 to 70 wives and innumerable sons). The smarter missionaries followed what I call the “Jesuit Method” of attempting to insinuate themselves among the royalty as being more effective than teaching and proselytizing at the village level schools–those were reserved for US and UK volunteers. The Swazi royalty have never fully gotten on board. Polygamy and hard-core patriarchy are hard drugs to kick, so to speak. Ultimately, there was very little trust placed in missionaries. My students had a telling observation that they routinely posed: When the white man came, we had the land, and he had the Bible and now he has the land, and we have the Bible. That pretty much says it all……
JuliusLander,
In answer to your question, I’m a Catholic with a somewhat skeptical bent. I used to be heavily into apologetics. I now recognize that most of the standard apologetic arguments don’t work, and I wish to do my fellow Christians a service by exposing their flaws, before they find out the hard way. What they do with that information is entirely up to them. My hope is that they continue to believe for reasons of their own – for example, the internal witness of the Holy Spirit or signs of the working of God in history – but that they stop proselytizing non-believers, because their attempts to do so will backfire. I also hope that non-believers come to recognize that Christians are making an honest attempt to identify and reject bad arguments for their faith.
walto,
It’s a bit of both, I guess. You are right that Christians have to appeal to the documents of the New Testament when explaining their faith to non-believers, but I would argue that in order to establish the general credibility of those documents, they need to talk about the history and behavior of the early Christian community at that time, and why they think its testimony is a trustworthy one.
You realize this is a pretty steep ask. Because first, the non-believers have to accept the argument that your god is not imaginary, but all the other ones are. And the evidence for this is, well, moving right along…
This seems a bit odd to me. My understanding is that the vast preponderance of our knowledge of the early Christian community, including its history and behavior, is based on what is claimed in Acts, in Paul’s letters, and so on.
If that’s so, how can the history and behavior of the early Christian community be used to establish the credibility of Scripture?
The “general credibility of those documents” is not historical, but spiritual. As long as they do not make sense, they are not credible. As soon as they start making sense, they become credible. In apologetics context the best you can do is to demonstrate that they make sense to you. To do so persuasively, you need a solid grounding in theology and Christian philosophy. Without theology, e.g. assuming that scripture can be discarded, you are only fooling yourself, not anybody else.
I write about what I know. I happen to know a lot about Christianity, about many denominations. I have gone through my own programme of comparative studies of Christian, Hebrew, Islamic, Hindu and Buddhist religions.
Right. Then don’t make bad arguments. Discarding the scripture is in no shape or form an argument for Christianity. It’s fuel for atheists.
Of course I do not expect you to be convinced by me. The problem with you is that you have no systemic understanding of Christianity. A systemic understanding would give the scriptures a place with regard to other elements in the faith and, having the system, you would see that something like resurrection entirely rests on the authority of scripture. Your manner of trying to come across as “persuasive” indicates that you have no system, no clue how the elements of Christianity relate to each other. It’s not within the powers of any internet commentator to give you a system of the religion you supposedly already belong to.
Medieval scholastic theologians did not do comparative theology. Particularly Aquinas had not seen an atheist ever, never considered the contents of Jewish and Islamic religions. He treated the philosophers of other religions (such as Maimonides or Avicenna) as fellow Aristotelians, essentially in agreement with Christianity. So Aquinas is extremely uninformative for your purposes. Pre-Nicene Christian writers, in lively debate with Roman religion and politics, and Islamic philosophers writing about Christianity are far more interesting. But that would only be reading up on theology and history, it would not directly help with your probable intended focus — modern atheists.
This is Jesuit propaganda, not Christianity. A Christian would know that this is false. Assuming that Old Testament was fixed only in mid-sixteenth century requires you to believe that BC-era Jews had no scripture. But Jews had scripture, Christians built on it, and there is no ambiguity about the canon discernible among apostolic fathers.
My take about the canon is that there is dispute about minor appendices, the Old Testament apocrypha. Most Protestant denominations regard the dispute irrelevant, e.g. Lutherans and Anglicans always included the apocrypha in their published Bibles no problem. And they include it the way Catholics do, explicitly marked off as apocrypha. This is sufficient to regard the canon as universally fixed and there is no dispute.
It was not “the Church that fixed the canon.” The canon was fixed prior to the emergence of popery, and the Old Testament was fixed for Jews by Jews themselves.
There’s no “element of choice” about it for Christians. For non-Christians, sure. In your discussions with atheists, if you see no opportunity to mention resurrection, don’t mention it. But instead of keeping it in discussions with atheists, you made an anti-Christian youtube video about it. This is not how apologetics works.
My reading is that the situation is worse than you describe, and puzzlingly so. Outside of material written after the formation of the Christian church (often well after, and generally regarded as, shall we say, lovingly edited), material written about the first century church is rare and dubious, and material written during that period is almost entirely not preserved. Even material written by Greek and Roman historians of the day have conspicuous lacunae where one would expect them to present front page news if the gospels are even remotely correct.
So historically, we have a black box. Entering that box, we have a good many Jewish mystery cults and quite a few known self-proclaimed messiahs. And we have some of the letters of Paul considered “real”, and several considered forgeries, with hints of several other genuine letters not preserved for some reason.
Coming out the other end of the box we have the gospels, which are not written in the format of historical material (no authors, no sources). We have the book of Acts, widely regarded as a forgery. We have fantastical tales which, if true, would have merited a great deal of attention from historians outside the church. We have good Biblical evidence (like the two versions of genesis) of a political struggle resulting in an uneasy tacit compromise between versions of what theological and historical positions should be adopted, the most agreed-on feature is that, well, we won’t talk about it.
And outside of scripture, we have essentially nothing of informative value. Even scripture (at least the parts considered genuine) is silent about “the history and behavior of the early Christian community”. Our best hints today suggest there wasn’t really such a thing at all – there were multiple competing communities.
Flint,
I put it to you that non-believers are perfectly capable of recognizing that Christians are making an intellectually honest, bona fide attempt to identify and reject bad arguments for their faith, regardless of whether non-believers view the arguments for the Judeo-Christian God as convincing, plausible but unconvincing, or totally unconvincing.
Erik,
If that satisfies you, Erik, well and good. But if I were an apologist for the Resurrection of Jesus, it would never satisfy me, because what makes sense to me might not make sense to other people, such as skeptics. And a skeptic could also object that even if the Gospels make sense, that doesn’t make them true.
There was nothing even remotely anti-Christian about my video. Here’s what I said in the last paragraph:
“Given that the Gospels were written at least three decades after Jesus’ resurrection appearances, by unknown individuals who failed to record a single eyewitness report of these appearances by an identified individual, it’s reasonable for someone to doubt whether the disciples who saw the risen Jesus all saw the same thing, or conversed with him at length, or touched him and ate with him. And without these facts, you cannot establish the resurrection of Jesus. You have to take it on faith. Thank you.”
As you can see, all I said in my conclusion was that skeptical doubt as to the details of the Resurrection recorded in the Gospels was not unreasonable. That’s not anti-Christian; it’s just a recognition of the fact that the available evidence will never settle the matter, one way or the other.
I haven’t discarded it. I’ve simply been honest enough to recognize that Scripture is incapable of supporting itself. I invite you to do the same.
I’ve been studying apologetic arguments for Christianity and reading about Christian theology for the past 45 years. And you?
I was referring to the Christian canon of the Old Testament, not the Jewish canon. From the very beginning, Christians made it clear, in their disputes with the Jews, that they disagreed as to the text of several key parts of the Old Testament – e.g. the prophecies of the Messiah (see Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho, for instance). Regarding the O.T. canon, some Christians (e.g. Jerome) favored a short canon, like that of the Jews; others (e.g. Augustine) favored a longer one. For Protestants and Catholics alike, the dispute wasn’t resolved until the mid-sixteenth century, although the way in which they resolved it was quite different.
Allow me to quote from the Encyclopedia Britannica article, “New Testament canon, texts and versions”:
I rest my case. By the way, I didn’t claim that the Popes fixed the canon; I said the Church did. It was actually Church councils that fixed it.
I wish you a good day, and I hope you will stop regarding me as an enemy.
Flint,
I would invite you to have a look at other early Christian writings, such as the Didache, the first letter of Clement of Rome, and the letters of Ignatius of Antioch, as well as the other Apostolic Fathers. I would agree with you, however, that early Christian communities were quite diverse, as the existence of the Gnostic Gospels (e.g. the proto-gnostic Gospel of Thomas) reveals. That’s why a good deal of sifting and careful evaluation is required. That said, we can still know quite a lot about how the early Christians lived and what they believed. Cheers.
This confuses me. What would you regard as an “intellectually honest” argument or apology FOR your faith, as opposed to a sincere attempt to reject bad arguments for your faith? Intellectually, I would regard arguments debunking your and every other god or messiah as bone fide criticisms, since there are no such things. I would also regard the faith, however sincere and devoutly held, as not being an argument either for or against your faith.
People are capable of believing nonsense without limit and without regard to any amount of contrary evidence, much less the lack of relevant evidence. I have no doubt of the sincerity of the faith of the devout, whether it be supportive of Jesus, Mohammad, Shiva, or Donald Trump. But arguing that vast multitudes believe nonsense and wrote about it at length is a genuinely bad faith argument.
Perhaps you are actually arguing that what makes a religion genuine is the number and/or sincerity of its believers, and whether those beliefs relate to anything in reality is simply beside the point?
Uh, wait a minute. If we agree that during the period of 1 C.E. to maybe 90 C.E. there were multiple and diverse communities (these were Jewish mystery religious sects), then knowing how they lived or what they believed tells us nothing useful about which one(s) of these communities eventually became what was later called Christians. My reading is that there is little consensus about which of the sources you mention were genuine and which were forgeries, or written after the fact, or redacted and rewritten almost beyond recognition.
Let me phrase it a bit differently. We know about the daily lives and routine practices of the people of that period from many non-biblical sources. What we do NOT know is how Christianity evolved into a more-or-less monolithic faith. Even Christian biblical scholars are conceding that the gospels are either largely or entirely fiction. We DO know that for the period of several centuries after the earliest gospel (Mark), writings during those years all passed through a religious bottleneck – a bottleneck with a strong agenda.
My intuition (and it’s nothing more than that) is that the religious history before the gospels was a bogglingly complex time. Multiple communities with different scriptures and beliefs, a major war that decapitated most of the Jewish leadership, and likely an enormous volume of writings the eventual political winners didn’t accept or preserve. “sifting and careful evaluation”, while the best we can hope to do today, is in reality a blind men and the elephant approach, almost like trying to reconstruct biological history from fossils knowing many if not most life forms did not fossilize – fossilization is rare because conditions for it happening are rare.
By analogy, Gould said that much of paleontology amounted to deciding which teeth descended from which ancestor teeth. I contend that for the first century, at best we have a few teeth, and careful sifting isn’t going to produce the actual factual data we’d love to have when we wish to reconstruct the whole organism.
What makes sense for a Christian is a theological system. What makes sense for skeptics is some other system, presumably atheist-materialist world view. It is quite expected that between these different world views there is little common ground.
The video attempts to refute a Christian argument. It is against Lydia McGrew who knows better than you. You are very mistaken about that this is not anti-Christian. You should know better.
I would be okay if your video offered a better alternative, but you are only inviting to forget the scriptures, as if this made arguments about resurrection any better. This is quite anti-Christian even if you fail to see it.
Which convinces a skeptic only at gunpoint. For a skeptic, you made McGrew’s argument into a non-argument.
Well, take it on faith that scripture is more capable than you can imagine. (Let’s see how this argument works for you.)
Instead of 16th-century Jesuit propaganda, here’s a better agrument for you, historically accurate too. Everybody accepted the same canon as we today, except that some had a bit longer Old Testament. Jerome demonstrated that those extra bits had no established basis in Israel and that they were not available in Hebrew.
When “the Church fixed the canon” in the 16th century, again, here’s what everybody (as in absolutely everybody!) agreed on: The contents of the canon and the contents of the apocrypha. Both the most ardent proponents of apocrypha agreed that such-and-such books are apocrypha and the most ardent opponents also agreed with it. What they disagreed about was what sort of spiritual status the apocrypha had, if any. Most Protestants were indifferent enough so that apocrypha were printed in Protestant Bibles no problem. But at the latest since Jerome everybody agreed that those were the apocrypha, a different category from (the rest of) the canon.
Whenever you say “the Church” you mean the Catholic Church, the one with the popes. And “the Church fixed the canon” after the Protestant split, specifically to annoy (some) Protestants. I know enough history so you won’t fool anybody.
Hi Erik,
In defiance of attempts to side-track this discussion, I’m going to return to the topic of this post: “What do you think of Dr. Lydia McGrew’s Elevator Pitch for the Resurrection? Do you find my criticisms of Dr. McGrew’s argument persuasive? If not, why not?”
When I pointed out that Dr. Lydia McGrew’s Elevator Pitch for the Resurrection assumes that the Gospels accurately record what the disciples claimed, you replied that any argument for the Resurrection has to begin with the Gospels. What you did not do was attempt to defend the assumption embedded within Dr. McGrew’s argument. You could have cited her her 2009 paper on the Resurrection, which she co-authored with Professor Tim McGrew, although even in this paper, the McGrews assume “that the Gospels were written, if not by the authors whose names they now bear, at least by disciples of Jesus or people who knew those disciples – people who knew at first hand the details of his life and teaching or people who spoke with those eyewitnesses.” Or (to quote the McGrews’ paper again) you could have mentioned archaeological discoveries which “indicate a level of accuracy incompatible with the picture of the development of the Gospels as an accretion of legend over the course of two or more generations,” although this argument overlooks the possibility that the Gospels are an accretion of legends built upon a core of facts. Or you could have posted Dr. Lydia McGrew’s interview with Ruth Jackson, in which she addresses the question, “Can we trust the Gospels?” Tell you what. I’ll even put it up for you:
In the interview (at 5:00), Ruth Jackson summarizes Dr. McGrew’s arguments for the reliability of the Gospels as follows: “locations, customs and culture, undesigned coincidences, unnecessary detail, unexplained allusions, unexpected harmonies, unified personalities.” However, as I pointed out in my video, these are features we don’t see in the Resurrection accounts, which diverge wildly, rather than dovetailing with one another, as some Gospel accounts of the same incident plausibly do (e.g. the feeding of the 5,000). It’s not enough to show that the Gospels are reliable accounts of the life of Christ. Christians need to show that they’re reliable accounts of his supernatural deeds – notably his Resurrection.
But there’s more. In a podcast titled, “The Apostleship of Paul: Can we do without the Gospels and Acts?”, Dr. McGrew emphasizes how critical the Acts of the Apostles is to the case for Christianity (13:42):
“Well, the book of Acts is really crucial to our evaluation of Paul’s apostleship. I would say we’re really in a very shaky position if we are not prepared to argue for a pretty high reliability of the book of Acts. Let’s remember that even though Acts contains several different statements of Pal’s conversion, two of them in the mouth of Paul himself, the critical scholars are emphasizing the idea that supposedly, the author of Acts is modifying these… Acts is also crucial for the dating of Paul’s epistles.”
Dr. McGrew is not a “Paul-only” minimalist, when arguing for the Resurrection. On this point, her instincts are sound: you need the Gospels and Acts, in order to make a strong case that Jesus rose from the dead.
The problem is that there are powerful reasons to suspect that some of the episodes in Acts were simply made-up. I refer you to Dr. Richard Carrier’s lengthy but persuasive article, “How We Know Acts is a Fake History”. Alternatively, you might like to watch his interview with Derek Lambert at Mythvision, here:
Again, I’m not saying Dr. Carrier is right: all I’m saying is that he has put forward reasonable grounds for doubting the reliability of Acts. Read his article, and I think you’ll concede that he rebuts the apologetic arguments for the veracity of Acts very convincingly. And although he wrote his article back in April (which is three months ago), there hasn’t been a response posted online by any Christian apologist. To me, that suggests he’s made a strong case.
Another scholar who was written extensively on Acts (which he regards as a second volume of Luke) is John Dominic Crossan, who argues in a Mythvision video (“The Historical Fiction of Luke/Acts”) (21:00) that the author was not a Jew but a Gentile God-worshiper, who was attempting to argue that the early Christians were the true heirs of Judaism. Crossan takes the author’s historical claims about the Jews – e.g. that they guarded the city of Damascus – with a very large grain of salt. He concludes (24:55) that “there’s very little in Luke/Acts that Paul would agree with, except that I do think that Paul went to the synagogue to get the God-worshipers.” Here’s the video:
The upshot of all this is that any attempt to establish the Resurrection by going back to the original historical facts is doomed to failure, regardless of whether one is a minimalist or a maximalist. The Gospels and Acts were written by unknown authors who had a strong theological agenda, and who may well have made stuff up. You can’t prove a miracle from texts like that. The only remaining way of arguing for the Resurrection is a pragmatic one: instead of looking backward, look forward. Or as Jesus put it: “By their fruits ye shall know them.” I believe in Christianity because of the positive way in which it has transformed the world. Of course, I freely admit that a non-Christian might not find that way of arguing at all persuasive, but someone who believes that the broad sweep of history is guided by God might find it appealing. Some Jews, Muslims and theists would fall into this camp.
I hope you’ll see now why I was not being “anti-Christian” (as you put it) in raising the difficulties that I did, with Dr. McGrew’s argument. Nor will it do to assert that “Lydia McGrew who knows better than you.” Even is that’s true, the question is whether she knows better than people like Bart Ehrman, John Dominic Crossan, or Richard Carrier.
Re the Old Testament canon, there are a couple of things you need to know. First, it wasn’t fixed in Jesus’ day, even among the Jews. It seems not to have been finalized until the year 200 A.D., and possibly later. The Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes were the subject of vigorous controversy among Jewish rabbis in the second century. See this article: “How the Song of Songs became part of the Hebrew Bible”. As for the books of the Christian Old Testament, it wasn’t as simple a matter as you claim: shall we add the apocrypha/deuterocanonicals or not? Different Christian groups had their own lists of extra books, as the following table shows.
Regarding the New Testament, it should be mentioned that Luther counted Hebrews, James, Jude, and the Revelation as “disputed books.” Once again, we cannot say that the books we have today were recognized from the very beginning. Books such as 2 Peter and 2 and 3 John were also disputed in the early Church. There was broad agreement about the other 20 books from 200 A.D. onwards, and perhaps earlier. However, the first list (by Athanasius) of the 27-book New Testament that we use today dates from the year 367 A.D. The role of Church councils in settling the canon in the West cannot be overlooked, but even so, the list of books included in the New Testament varied. See this table.
Hi Flint,
I agree that on purely historical grounds, there’s much that remains uncertain about precisely what the Christians of the first century believed. Historians can make reasonable inferences, but in the end, an inference is just that: an inference.
At a minimum, a religion has to cohere well, intellectually, and to put forward a decent set of answers to life’s big questions (“Whence came we? What are we? Whither go we?”). In my response to Erik above, I also outlined how a pragmatic argument for Christianity could be put forward. As I acknowledged, I would not expect this kind of argument to impress someone like yourself, who does not believe in gods or Messiahs, let alone a God Who guides history. And yes, I am well aware of the atrocities perpetrated in the name of Christianity, too. I do not wish to minimize them, and I can appreciate how they may be an insurmountable stumbling block for many.
Yes, that and more. I would love to know which Jewish sects were directly influential, and how the Jewish War changed things, and how the political forces within these tribes, and between them, led to which compromises as to acceptable doctrine. What train of thought, if any, was followed between the extant (accepted as genuine) letters of Paul and the gospel of Mark? As Dr. Carrier argues in considerable detail, Paul’s Jesus and Mark’s Jesus are not even distant relatives. They differed in origins, in purpose, in context, even in location (Paul’s Jesus never actually descended to earth). So how did we get from Point A to Point B?
Well, the keyword there is “decent”. Maybe for many, “answers” like “it was god’s will” or “that’s the way god chose to do it” are decent, but I imagine you understand that when a child asks why the sky is blue, saying god wants it that way is sufficient. For an adult, not so much. For a curious adult, what’s required is a deep dive into optics and refraction and absorption and Rayleigh scattering. To me, that is what a decent answer looks like.
I understand that “life’s big questions” cannot be answered in that way, and I would argue that the big questions you present are semantically vacuous – like asking how high is up.
“Pragmatic” is a slippery word here. Perhaps we could find some way to associate the actual histories of parts of the world with the predominant religions in those regions, but I have my doubts. I suppose one could select numerous events in history where religion played a key role, and numerous common cultural practices deriving from the prevailing religious doctrines. But overall, I think history is driven by too many other significant variables.
Pshaw! Sure, atrocities have been perpetrated in the name of every religion, every conceivable excuse (like maybe greed, or bigotry, or competing self-interests). To me, that counts neither for nor against any particular faith. And conversely, notable acts of mercy, altruism, foresight, kindness etc. have been motivated by all religions and by no religion at all (it is said there are few atheists in foxholes and few atheists in prison either). Personally, I think viewing the world through religious lenses imposes on the viewer both tunnel vision and confirmation bias.
And getting back to the resurrection, any serious discussion cannot happen unless the participants have already bought into some serious context. One has to accept that there is a god, and only one, and that only one faith has identified it properly, and that there was a Jesus, and that the gospels have any semblance of historical accuracy, and that there is/was an Adversary this Jesus character died to fool or trick (at least Paul’s Jesus), who then returned from the dead, more or less. You have little choice but to swallow all of that first, before you can find the tales of resurrection to be meaningful. I admit I can’t get past step one, so to me you just look silly.
If you are critiquing from that angle and aiming at a positive outcome for Christianity, then it is important for you to be better than Bart Ehrman, John Dominic Crossan, or Richard Carrier. This makes your failure even bigger than I assumed.
The table shows, correctly, that when it comes to the canon debate between Catholics and Protestants, the matter was exactly as simple as I said.
He expressed his doubts in his personal notes. When he published his translation, he included them all without marking them off in any way.
The early variations in the canon are more complicated due to manuscript tradition. And this can be the solution: The variations exist because of the nature of the material history of the manuscripts (e.g. part of the original manuscript is lost along the way. Manuscripts being precious, they may have included only what the scribe had time for, such as the four gospels, or included whatever else he deemed important if he had time for it, such as some works of Plato and Aristotle. Yup, such manuscripts exist, gospels and philosophers together. Are you going to say that those were in the same canon in someone’s mind because they were in the same manuscript? And many synagogues did not have the entire canon not because they disputed the canon, but because they either had never manage to acquire some scrolls or had lost some, but then they may have had pieces of Mishnah or rabbinical commentaries – they had whatever they had.). It does not necessarily reflect disputes, unless there is direct evidence of bishops proclaiming such-and-such books or sections to be part of the canon and others disputing it, which is the case with regard to heretics.
Also, note that the tables do NOT indicate that “the Church fixed the canon” at any point, late or early. Because, as everybody knows, including you, in your statement “the Church” means the Catholic Church, the papist branch. Whereas the Orthodox branch little cared for the disputes between papist Jesuits and newly emerged Protestants in some obscure West European provinces – the canon had been fixed from the beginning and did not change.
Late to the party, but I’ll add this: It isn’t just that the arguments for the Resurrection are weak. The very fact that God allows the arguments to be so weak is further evidence against the truth of the Resurrection account, and indeed against the truth of Christianity generally.
Suppose the Christian God exists, and that Paul is correct when he says
If God wanted us to believe in Christ’s resurrection and be saved, then he would make it possible for us to do so reasonably and rationally based on the evidence. He would see to it that leaps of faith would be unnecessary, because the evidence on its own would be sufficient to warrant belief.
God clearly hasn’t done this, despite being perfectly capable of it. Why? Doesn’t he care whether we are saved? Does he hate rational people and prefer the gullible? Is it that the Resurrection never happened, that Christianity is false, and that God doesn’t want to mislead us? Is it that God doesn’t exist at all?
If an omniscient, omnipotent Christian God wanted to convince reasonable people of the truth of Christianity, he could do so easily. He hasn’t done so, and the implications are dire for Christians and for the Christian faith.
Yup, it could help if God spoke out more clearly. However, why would atheists listen? They are atheists and they presuppose that God does not exist, so whatever God says atheists would attribute it to someone or something else. As they do. If they started to listen to God, they would not be atheists.
Erik,
Despite your unpleasant attitude towards people who do not share your faith, I just wanted to point out that this sentence:
Is flatly contradicted by the stuff you typed after:
You might want to take some time to construct a coherent argument.
Just separate the argument from what is not part of it. Wishing you a good reading comprehension.
You are not really one for introspection, are you? Suit yourself.
I could be wrong, since I’m not a theologian, but I got the impression that Paul’s Christ was perfectly well aware that he would be resurrected. That seems to have been part of the deal when the spirit (who would take on the body of Jesus and become the messiah upon resurrection) came down to the firmament, though not all the way to earth.
Which is curious, because what sort of sacrifice did he make, if he knew it would simply be erased?
Flint:
I don’t know about Paul, but the gospels explicitly state that Jesus knew of his impending death and resurrection. For example:
Flint:
Death by crucifixion is a pretty horrible way to go, even if you know you are going to be resurrected, so I think it’s reasonable to see Christ’s death as a sacrifice. However, many people have suffered far worse. Apparently there was some minimum threshold of suffering that Christ had to meet in order to win our salvation, but no need to suffer any more than that, and no need to match the worst suffering of those he was saving. I wonder what that threshold was, why it was set there, and who set it.
The whole notion that God needed to torture himself to death — in a horrible way, but not the worst way possible — in order to save us is ridiculous. Christian notions of salvation are not something to be taken seriously by thinking people.
Erik:
Why doesn’t he, then?
Um, because many if not most atheists are open to changing their minds. Their disbelief is conditional. It’s no different from any other belief that can be revised in the face of new evidence.
Atheism isn’t a presupposition (at least for most of us). It’s a conclusion based on an evaluation of the evidence, and new evidence can alter that evaluation.
Untrue. It is possible to listen to God, if he speaks, while still being an atheist — that is, without knowing or believing (yet) that it is God who is speaking.
Interestingly, while Jesus predicted his coming death and resurrection, he was unaware of the time of his own Second Coming:
This fits pretty poorly with trinitarian theology. The Father knows the time. The Son, who is also supposedly omniscient, does not. Neither does the Holy Spirit.
The Father, Son and Holy Spirit are all God (singular). Thus, God both knows and does not know the time of the Second Coming. Awkward.
Once again, note the projection. The True Believer not only enjoys unalterable presupposition, but can’t imagine what it might be like to change his mind based on mere evidence. Erik has described religious faith with great insight, but substitutes “atheism” as though it’s just one more faith, albeit false.
Not so awkward when you consider that Matthew was writing about a (fictional) past, and therefore could put “predictions” into the mouth of his protagonist. But the time of the second coming had to be still in the future, so Matthew couldn’t create it. It would have been difficult to write that the second coming had already happened but nobody noticed!
Flint:
The biblical accounts, whether true or fabricated, actually create the awkwardness by assigning different states of knowledge to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This wouldn’t have seemed problematic to the authors, since the concept of the Trinity hadn’t been invented yet, but it later became an issue and remains one to this day.
Christian theology is an exercise in contortion — taking things that don’t cohere and twisting and forcing them into an unnatural fit. The Trinity, in particular, creates all sorts of problems. Jesus prays to the Father throughout the gospels, meaning that if trinitarianism is correct, God prayed to himself on all of those occasions. Worse still, when Jesus prays to the Father in the Garden of Gethsemane, he says “not my will, but thine, be done”. The Son’s will differs from the Father’s, meaning that God’s will is not God’s will. Or alternatively, that there is no such thing as God’s will (singular), but God instead has at least two and maybe three wills. Multiple personality disorder.
Interestingly, a subset of Christians believe that the Second Coming has already occurred. They associate it with the sacking of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 CE.
vjtorley:
It’s not clear to me that Christianity’s influence on the world has been a net positive, but even if we assume that it has been, the following question remains: are such positive effects actually evidence that Christianity is true?
You’ve implicitly assumed that if Christianity were false, then these positive consequences would not likely have followed. Earlier in the thread you mentioned charity and the abolition of female infanticide. Is there anything about those that, in your opinion, requires Christianity to be true? Isn’t it possible for Christianity to be false but nevertheless influence believers (and society) in certain positive ways, such as these?
You note that your argument might not convince non-Christians. If it isn’t persuasive to open-minded nonbelievers, should it be persuasive to you? If a particular argument for Christianity is compelling only to those who are already Christians, isn’t their reasoning circular?
I understand your point. I was trying to say that it’s not hard for a character in your book to make an accurate prediction of something that occurs later on in the same book. Yeah, the trinity notion is incoherent.
All of that strikes me as a sharpshooter fallacy. Look around world history, find things that occurred that are positive, and find the predominant religion in those regions. Attribute the good historical trends, events, victories, inventions, or other developments to those religions. You can’t miss, so long as you don’t try to drill down to one-to-one relationships.
If you know what listen means, then no, it’s not possible to listen to God and not know it was God. If you don’t know, then you are not sure what you heard and also cannot be sure whether to listen.
You can of course act as if you knew that it was God who spoke to you, but then you would definitely not be acting as an atheist.
Maybe it is possible to say something like, “God speaks to me a lot, but I will never listen!” This would perhaps more accurately be termed anti-theist.
There’s the doctrine of smaller fulfillment and bigger fulfillment in Christian theology. And some see “foreshadowing” in many things daily. It hardly ever was that when a prophecy is fulfilled then let’s forget about it.