Was the resurrection simply the recasting of ancient mythology, akin to the fanciful tales of Osiris or Mithras? If you want to see a historian laugh out loud, bring up that kind of pop-culture nonsense.
One by one, my objections evaporated. I read books by skeptics, but their counter-arguments crumbled under the weight of the historical data. No wonder atheists so often come up short in scholarly debates over the resurrection.
That’s from Lee Strobel’s article in the Wall Street Journal on how Easter killed his faith in atheism.
Earlier this week, The Office funnyman and atheist Ricky Gervais opines on “Why I’m A Good Christian.” Gervais spends most of the article saying he has kept all Ten commandments, but his main point is here:
Jesus was a man. (And if you forget all that rubbish about being half God, and believe the non-supernatural acts accredited to him, he was a man whose wise words many other men would still follow.) His message was usually one of forgiveness and kindness. These are wonderful virtues, but I have seen them discarded by many so-called God-fearers when it suits them.
Perhaps because I spent more of my life as an atheist (or at least a highly skeptical agnostic) than as a Christian, I find myself listening to Scripture on Sundays and imagining, “What would account for that story being written in that way, other than that it really happened?” The Gospels read in a way that I associate strongly with eyewitness accounts. That doesn’t mean they couldn’t have been distorted in the re-telling before they were committed to writing, and it certainly doesn’t explain away any possibility of exaggeration or wishful thinking or confusion in the witness. But the Gospel stories are nothing like a myth. They’re chockful of the kind of detail you find in concrete, individual human experiences. No folklore reads that way.
As one of the commenters to the WSJ piece said, if you categorically refuse to rely on “eyewitness testimony from dead people because we can’t cross-examine them [then] we should just dismiss all history that didn’t happen in our lifetimes.”
Yes. When a person learns a few details about the kind of thing written in Jesus’ time period or even compares it to something a few centuries younger, like The Gospel of Thomas, then he’ll see there are many things in the Gospels that make no sense if they were written as propaganda pieces for cult founders. For example, women’s testimony was worthless in that day. To have women be the first witnesses of Jesus’ resurrection is unthinkable. Another example, the gospels were written close enough to Jesus’ life that it would dangerous to fabricate the claim that hundreds of people saw him alive after he was known to be dead or that several people rose from the dead when he died. There would be several people alive who had seen Jesus or known people who saw him or the other people who came back from the grave, and the gospel account would have been discredited.
Temple leaders would likely have pulled up Jesus’ bones at some point to be a permanent display of his persistent death. But they couldn’t, because there were no bones.