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Background

I’m currently blogging about the first chapter of Part 2 of The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus by Gary Habermas and Michael Licona.

This chapter is numbered as Chapter 3, is titled “A Quintet of Facts (4+1)”, and is subtitled The First Two.

As a refresher, “minimal facts” are facts that:

• Are agreed on by nearly all scholars
• Are strongly supported by the evidence
• Collectively build a strong case for the bodily resurrection of Jesus

You are here

We covered the first minimal fact (“Jesus died by crucifixion”) previously…see post #10 in hyperlinked series outline above.

There is a quite a bit of material regarding the 2nd minimal fact (“Jesus’s disciples believed that He rose and appeared to them“), and this is our eighth post about it. The authors break this fact into two sub-facts:

1. They claimed it
2. They believed it

Most recently, we’ve been discussing the 2nd sub-fact, and I would like to continue today in the same vein.

How do you solve a problem like Bultmann, Fredriksen and Ludemann?

In the last two posts, we discussed how Peter’s and Paul’s lives and deaths demonstrated the sincerity of their resurrection claims. Today, we’re going to look at a handy section towards the end of chapter 3 regarding the scholarly consensus on this sincerity question.

In this section, the authors mention 3 prominent scholars and then discuss a broader survey of the scholarship. Let’s dive in!

The demythologizer

Rudolf Bultmann was a “leading 20th-century New Testament scholar known for his program to ‘demythologize’ the New Testament—i.e., to interpret, according to the concepts of existentialist philosophy, the essential message of the New Testament that was expressed in mythical terms.” That is the description provided by the Encyclopedia Britannica (1).

Regardless of your religious beliefs, if you know much about Christianity, then you know that the program described above was a fairly heretical program. The essential message of the New Testament is not mythical, but factual, and supported by, in the words of John, “many infallible proofs”.

So…if we didn’t have good evidence that the first disciples believed they saw the risen Jesus…if the idea that those first believers were sincere in their resurrection claims is actually just a myth, and they weren’t actually sincere…if that was the case, I would expect Bultmann the demythologizer to be all over it. But lo and behold, here are Habermas and Licona reporting Bultmann’s position on this:

“…Rudolf Bultmann agreed that historical criticism can establish ‘the fact that the first disciples came to believe in the resurrection’ and that they thought they had seen the risen Jesus”.

The agnostic

Highly credentialed…clearly skeptical of miracle claims in the Bible…and clearly in the camp that acknowledges the sincerity of the disciples: Paula Fredriksen earned a Ph.D. in the History of Religion from Princeton and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2013 (3).

As one demonstration of her skepticisim, in a recent interview on MythVision (4), her comment on the Good Friday rising of the saints in Matthew 28 was “I think his [the author], um, his allegiance to literary tropes ran away with him…”

So if it’s just a myth, just a “trope”, that the early disciples actually believed they saw the risen Jesus, we should be able to count on Fredriksen to let us know. Can we?

“I know in their own terms what they saw was the raised Jesus. That’s what they say and then all the historic evidence we have afterwards attest to their conviction that that’s what they saw. I’m not saying that they really did see the raised Jesus. I wasn’t there. I don’t know what they saw. But I do know that as a historian that they must have seen something.”

The atheist

He was an atheist New Testament scholar with a doctorate in theology from the University of Gottingen. So non-Christian was he that the university ultimately removed him from teaching the required courses for Protestant ministers in Lower Saxony (2)!

Again, if anyone could be expected to let us know there was scant evidence that Peter and the other disciples actually believed their resurrection claims, it would be Gerd Ludemann. So what is his comment?

“It may be taken as historically certain that Peter and the disciples had experiences after Jesus’ death in which Jesus appeared to them as the risen Christ.”

Not just the three amigos

But wait, there’s more! A lot more.

Habermas surveyed 650 post-1975 published resurrection studies in English, German and French, and comments that “…no fact is more widely recognized than that early Christian believers had real experiences that they thought were appearances of the risen Jesus.”

So, the scholarly consensus is that the early disciples were sincere in their claims of seeing the risen Jesus.

Options are narrowing…

In short, they believed they saw Jesus, which means that He either rose from the dead or there was some mass hallucination going on (more on that later).

Next time, God willing: What a difference a day makes!

God bless and thanks for reading.

TFOTF

Links:

1. Britannica on Paul
2. Wikipedia on Paul
3. Wikipedia on Fredriksen
4. Fredriksen on Youtube