The Christian Delusion: Chapter Eleven--Why the Resurrection is Unbelievable

Chapter 11 in The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails (ed. John W. Loftus) is by Richard Carrier. Richard has a Ph.D. in Ancient History from Columbia University, was editor-in-chief of the Secular Web for several years and is the author of a number of journal articles as well as the author of two books, Sense and Goodness Without God: A Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism (2005) and Not the Impossible Faith: Why Christianity Didn't Need A Miracle To Succeed (2009). He is also a major contributor to The Empty Tomb: Jesus Beyond The Grave (2005), Sources of the Jesus Tradition: Separating History from Myth (2010), and of course The Christian Delusion. Richard served as an unofficial editor for TCD as well as contributing two chapters. His current research focuses on the modern philosophy of naturalism, the origins of Christianity, and the intellectual history of Greece and Rome. He has debated William Lane Craig, Mike Licona as well as other Christians and Muslims.

In chapter 11 of TCD, "Why The Resurrection is Unbelievable," Carrier attempts to apply the Outsider Test for Faith to the question of Jesus' resurrection. He argues that if one applies the same criteria in judging the historicity of the NT documents as one does in judging other ancient documents, then one will conclude that there is no more reason to believe the NT's miracle claims than the claims of other ancient documents.

He writes:

Fifty years after the Persian Wars ended in 479 B.C. Herodotus the Halicarnassian asked numerous eyewitnesses and their children about the things that happened in those years, and then wrote a book about it. Though he often shows a critical and skeptical mind, sometimes naming his sources or even questioning their reliability when he has suspicious or conflicting accounts, he nevertheless reports without a hint of doubt that the temple of Delphi magically defended itself with animated armaments, lightning bolts, and collapsing cliffs; the sacred olive tree of Athens, though burned by the Persians, grew a new shoot an arm’s length in a single day; a miraculous flood-tide wiped out an entire Persian contingent after they desecrated an image of Poseidon; a horse gave birth to a rabbit; and a whole town witnessed a mass resurrection of cooked fish! (pp. 291-92)

Carrier asks: Do you believe these things happened? Well, why not? Herodotus was an educated man, a critical historian, he consulted eyewitnesses, and he clearly saw nothing to doubt in these events (p. 292). He makes an excellent point. Herodotus is one of the best ancient historians and he is writing just 50 years after the events he reports. Yet, the fact is that virtually no one believes these events happened as described, including evangelical Christians. It is not just Herodotus either, as Carrier says in a footnote: Herodotus is just an example. Ancient and medieval literature was filled with incredible stories no one believes anymore. For examples, see Richard Carrier, Sense and Goodness without God, pp. 211-52 (p. 310).

Why don't we all just accept Herodotus' word that these things happened as he reported? Because we know from our experience and that of countless other people, especially after centuries of scientific research (p. 292) that these things are very unlikely. In addition, we also know people lie, even if for what they think is a good reason. They also exaggerate, tell tall tales, craft edifying myths and legends, and err in many ways. As a result, as we all well know, false stories are commonplace. But miracles, quite clearly, are not (p. 292).

But aren't the gospels different? Aren't they clearly historical as many evangelical apologists would have us to believe? Carrier opines:

I see no relevant difference between the marvels in Herodotus and the many and varied tales of the resurrection of Jesus. Even the most fundamentalist of Christians don’t believe half of them. When the Gospel of Peter (yes, Peter) says a Roman centurion, a squad of his soldiers, and a gathering of Jewish elders all saw a gigantic walking cross hopping along behind Jesus as he exited his tomb, and then saw Jesus grow thousands of feet tall before their very eyes, there isn’t a Christian alive who believes this. And yet that was among the most popular Gospels in the Christian churches of the second century, purportedly written by someone who was alive at the time of the events it reports. So why don’t Christians believe Peter’s Gospel anymore? Well, for many of the same reasons we don’t believe the marvels of Herodotus. But why then believe any of the other Gospels, those according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John? (p. 293).

He is right. If one were to treat the NT documents as one does the writings of Herodotus or the non-canonical gospels, the miracle claims of the NT would be dismissed as legends.

There is no good reason to treat these stories any differently than those we find in Herodotus, certainly not if these claims are to pass the OTF. Yet at least we know when and where he wrote, and know something of who he was and how he got his information, and that he was trying to report the facts as best he could find them out, and that he personally had no agenda here, no need for us to believe him, no great mission he was trying to accomplish by telling these tales. Not so for the Gospels. So when it comes to miracles, if we don’t believe Herodotus, we surely can’t believe the Gospels. That’s why I don’t believe Jesus rose from the dead: it simply isn’t a plausible event, and is not supported by any sources I trust. If this were any other religion, say the Heaven’s Gate cult or a growing sect of Victor Hugo worshippers, then that would be the end of it (p. 296).

What would it take in order to believe the miracle claims reported in the NT? It would take extraordinary evidence. Carrier writes:

Denying that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence is among the rhetoric now resorted to by those who genuinely expect superman to fly down from outer space and kill me. So I have to say something about this first. If I tell you I own a car, I usually won’t have to present very much evidence to prove it, because you’ve already observed mountains of evidence that people like me own cars. But if I say I own a nuclear missile, you have just as much evidence that “people like him own nuclear missiles” is not true. So I would need much more evidence to prove I owned one, to make up for all the evidence I don’t have from any supporting generalization. Just think to yourself what it would take for me to convince you I owned a nuclear missile, and you’ll see what I mean. In contrast, the odds of winning a lottery are very low, so you might think it would be an extraordinary claim for me to assert “I won a lottery.” But lotteries are routinely won. We’ve observed countless lotteries being won and have tons of evidence that people win lotteries. Therefore, the general claim “people like him win lotteries” is already confirmed, and so I wouldn’t need very much evidence to convince you that I won. So “I won a lottery” is not an extraordinary claim. But “I own a nuclear missile” clearly is.

Now suppose I told you “I own an interstellar spacecraft.” That would be an even more extraordinary claim—because there is no generalization supporting it at all. Not only do you have tons of very good evidence that “people like him own interstellar spacecraft” is not true, you also have no evidence this has ever been true for anyone—unlike nuclear missiles, which you know at least exist. Therefore, the burden of evidence I would have to bear here is truly enormous. Just think of what it would take for you to believe I really did have an interstellar spacecraft, and again you’ll see what I mean.

Once you realize the common sense of this, it’s obvious that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. To deny that’s true is simply irrational. But there is no more evidence supporting the generalization that “people like Jesus get resurrected from the dead” than there is for people owning starships. Therefore the claim that Jesus arose from the dead is an extraordinary claim, and thus requires extraordinary evidence—more evidence, even, than I would need to convince you I own an interstellar spacecraft. For you actually have evidence confirming the generalization that “there can be an interstellar spacecraft.” We could build one today with present technology. But we have no comparable evidence at all confirming the generalization that “there can be miraculous resurrections from the dead.” That doesn’t mean miracles must be impossible. It only means we have less evidence that miracles are possible than we have that interstellar spacecraft are possible. And that means the claim that Jesus rose from the dead is even more extraordinary than the claim that I own an interstellar spacecraft. Think again of the kind of evidence I would need to convince you I had such a vehicle. I should need more evidence than that to convince you Jesus rose from the dead. Just as would be required to convince you a whole village witnessed a pot of cooked fish rise from the dead, or anything else as incredible(pp. 298-99).

The simple fact is that we don't have extraordinary evidence or even strong evidence to believe the gospel accounts. None of the evidence is extraordinary enough to justify believing an extraordinary explanation. All the evidence we have is ordinary, and has ordinary explanations. In fact, those ordinary explanations actually explain the evidence better (p. 307). What we find in the NT and early Christian history can all be explained better by naturalistic causes. Carrier argues:

Only an ordinary explanation can easily explain why Jesus only appeared to die-hard believers, and then, much later, to only one of millions of outsiders across the entire planet. If God Himself were really appearing to people, and really was on a compassionate mission to reform and save the world, there is hardly any credible reason he would appear to only one persecutor rather than to all of them. . . . [He] could have visited Pilate, Herod, the Sanhedrin, the masses of Jerusalem, the Roman legions, even the Emperor and Senate of Rome. He could even have flown to America (as the Mormons actually believe he did), and even China, preaching in all the temples and courts of Asia. In fact, being God, he could have appeared to everyone on earth. He could visit me right now. Or you! And yet, instead, besides his already-fanatical followers, just one odd fellow ever saw him.

If Jesus was a god and really wanted to save the world, he would have appeared and delivered his Gospel personally to the whole world. He would not appear only to one small group of believers and one lone outsider, in one tiny place, just one time, two thousand years ago, and then give up. But if Christianity originated as a natural movement inspired by ordinary hallucinations (real or pretended), then we would expect it to arise in only one small group, in one small place and time, and especially where, as in antiquity, regular hallucinators were often respected as holy and their hallucinations believed to be divine communications. And that’s exactly when and where it began. The ordinary explanation thus predicts all we see, whereas the extraordinary explanation predicts things we don’t see at all (pp. 308-09).

Thus, as Carrier clearly demonstrates, when the OTF is applied to the story of the resurrection of Jesus, the only conclusion is that it is not historical. There is no more reason to believe that Jesus was raised from the dead than there is to believe the things Herodotus reported, the claim that Muhammad ascended to heaven on a winged-horse or that the angel Moroni gave Joseph Smith golden tablets. These are all inventions of the fertile imaginations of men.

The Christian Delusion: Chapter Ten--Jesus: Myth and Method

Chapter Ten in The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails (ed. John W. Loftus) is by Robert M. Price. Dr. Price holds two Ph.D.'s, one in Theology (1981) and one in New Testament Studies (1993) from Drew University. He is a former evangelical Christian and Baptist minister. He now attends the Episcopal church and describes himself as a "Christian Atheist." He is currently Professor of Theology and Scriptural Studies at Colemon Theological Seminary, the host of Point of Inquiry, the Founder and Editor of The Journal of Higher Criticism, a Fellow with The Jesus Seminar, a Fellow with The Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion and a Research Fellow with the Center for Inquiry Institute. He is the author of numerous journal articles and fourteen books including:

•Beyond Born Again: Towards Evangelical Maturity ( 1993)

•The Widow Traditions in Luke-Acts: A Feminist-Critical Scrutiny (1997)

•Mystic Rhythms: The Philosophical Vision of RUSH (1998)

•Deconstructing Jesus (1999)

•Incredible Shrinking Son of Man: How Reliable Is the Gospel Tradition? (2004)

•The Empty Tomb: Jesus beyond the Grave (editor, 2005)

•The Da Vinci Fraud: Why the Truth Is Stranger than Fiction(2005)

•The Reason Driven Life: What Am I Here on Earth For? (2006)

•The Pre-Nicene New Testament: Fifty-four Formative Texts (2006)

•Jesus Is Dead (2007)

•The Paperback Apocalypse: How the Christian Church Was Left Behind(2007)

•Top Secret: The Truth behind Today's Pop Mysticisms (2008)

•Inerrant the Wind: The Evangelical Crisis of Biblical Authority (2009)

•The Case Against The Case For Christ: A New Testament Scholar Refutes the Reverend Lee Strobel (2010)

In chapter ten, Price responds to the recent book, The Jesus Legend: A Case for the Historical Reliability of the Synoptic Jesus Tradition (Baker Academic, 2007) by Paul Rhodes Eddy and Greg Boyd. Price's position is that the Gospels contain myths not history. He doesn't believe there is any reason to think that Jesus of Nazareth ever existed.

Price maintains that Eddy and Boyd employ an apologetical methodology having assumed a priori that the Bible is the inspired Word of God. He contrasts his methodology (historical criticism) with theirs (historical apologetics):

What is the task of biblical criticism? It is to advance the understanding of the Bible by applying new methods to the study of the text. One hopes to learn more and new things about the text. By contrast, what is the task of Christian apologetics? It is essentially one of retrenchment. It wants to turn the clock back on criticism and in effect to learn less about the Bible, to undo all that critics consider progress. The apologist makes minimal concessions to critical method, using it opportunistically to try to vindicate the Bible as the kind of prop he needs it to be for the sake of his faith. One senses on every page that the Christian apologist wishes that the Higher Criticism of scripture had never been invented (probably by Satan) to confuse matters. (pp. 273-74).

While Eddy and Boyd are guilty of an a priori assumption of the supernatural, they accuse those who disagree with them of being guilty of an a priori assumption of naturalism. Price explains that it is not quite that simple. Historians, as scientists do also, employ methodological naturalism but that is not the same as metaphysical naturalism. Price writes:

Eddy and Boyd simply cannot bring themselves to grasp the difference between methodological and metaphysical naturalism. They insist that the only reason critics refuse to acknowledge any miracle stories as probably true is that said critics are a stuck-up elite with an anachronistic commitment to a quaint creed of naturalism and/or Deism. . . .

Naturalism as a philosophy has absolutely nothing to do with my historical methodology. . . . Troeltsch’s “principle of connection” does not say we know or believe that all events happen according to unbroken, immanent cause-and-effect. We weren’t there; we don’t know. That is why we have to try to devise methods like this to tell us what most probably happened. All we can do is to assume a cause-and effect nexus, just like the TV weatherman. We use the only guide we have. And experience tells us that whenever a scientist or historian has stopped short, shrugging and saying, “Well, I can’t explain it! I guess it must be a miracle!” he has later regretted it. Someone else was not willing to give up, and, like a detective on a Cold Case Files show on TV, he or she did manage to find the neglected clue. Willard Scott does not pretend to know for a fact that a sovereign God will not reach down and stop the lightning bolt from starting a forest fire tomorrow. He does not know that the nostrils of El Shaddai or Jupiter Pluvius will not stir up a Tsunami next week. He can do no more than extrapolate from current, known trends what is probably going to happen. Big news: we can trace only factors that we can trace, though for all we know there may be others.

Likewise, with Troeltsch’s “principle of analogy." There is no claim here (nor in poor, much-maligned Hume) that nothing out of the ordinary happens or ever can happen. (“What? You mean a politician told the truth last night?”) There is no dogma, no certitude, that miracles do not and never can occur. We don’t have a time machine; we don’t know what did or didn’t happen. Again, that’s why we have to fashion these conceptual instruments, crude though they may be, to try to surmise what probably happened, which is all we can ever “know.” And analogy forbids us to deem “probable” any event without reliable corroboration from some analogy with present-day experience (pp. 274-75).

Price points out that the only reason why one would accept a supernatural explanation for a past event is because of one's prior faith commitment to the historical source which records the event. He writes:

So someone reports to you that he has seen his Uncle Mel alive again after his cremation. Are you going to believe him? Even if you believe Jesus rose from the dead, I think you will not be quick to conclude that Uncle Mel did, too. What would you say are the chances your friend is mistaken? Probably pretty high. If your friend introduced you to the living Uncle Mel, I bet you would immediately doubt whether it was really he who was cremated, as if it was all some kind of joke. Everybody would think you were pretty silly if you took to the streets proclaiming that Uncle Mel had risen from the dead.

This whole notion of granting that a miracle happened, or that the supernatural intervened, when we can find no adequate naturalistic explanation is headed in the wrong direction. Pretty soon any miracles the Bible says happened will fall into the same bag. Elijah called down fire from the sky to roast hundreds of Samaritan soldiers? Well, no naturalistic explanations are going to be able to account for that, but we’re still entitled to believe it anyway. Why? Because there’s compelling reason to say it happened. And what is that reason? I suppose, Socrates, it’s simply that the Bible says it happened! What other reason can there be if the normal pointers to historical probability are absent? We see in the long run that Boyd and Eddy just want us to believe what the Bible says, and when we don’t, they flog us with the wet noodle of “naturalistic presuppositions” (pp. 277-78).

Eddy and Boyd would have one believe that the ancients were just as incredulous of the supernatural as modern's are and only wound up believing in the resurrection of Jesus because of the overwhelming proof. Price writes:

For Boyd and Eddy will go on to argue in a later chapter that the ancients were not particularly credulous, were indeed just as skeptical of claimed miracles as moderns are! They need to argue this way just long enough to promote the idea that the early Christians must have had good reasons to believe in the resurrection, etc., rather than just believing any old rumor someone told them (pp. 64-66). It is a way of pretending that the ancients were critical historians who would never have believed in Jesus’ miracles if they weren’t forced to by the Humean caveat that miracle belief is preferable to far-fetched naturalistic rationalizations. So what were they? Critical moderns before their time (so we can accept their “analyses” of miracles we ourselves cannot witness)? Or were they easy believers in demons and spirits and wonders (which would forbid our being skeptical about them since we must embrace “democratized epistemology”)?(p. 280).

The simple fact is, as any student of history knows, the ancients were much more prone to believe in supernatural explanations for events than moderns are. That is not to say that moderns hold no superstitious beliefs for they surely do. However, they do so in opposition to the intellectual climate of the modern world as opposed to the ancients who did so in accordance with the climate of their day.

Price also shows how Eddy and Boyd, in their attempt to explain how the Gospels were written, actually sacrifice any reason to believe that they contain eyewitness testimony. He writes:

Form critic Dennis E. Nineham long ago pointed out how the gospel pericopes, short and sweet and streamlined as they are, just do not read like eye-witness testimony. For that we would expect the kind of “table talk” we get in, say the Acts of John: “Once I said to Jesus…, and he said to me…” Our gospel pericopes sound like they have been rubbed smooth by the currents of constant repetition. Boyd and Eddy are happy to point to ethnographic studies that show even actual eyewitness recollections may, the first time out, be put into traditional forms for transmission, verbal time capsules, and that in this manner vivid details and distinctive features may be sacrificed from the very beginning (pp. 274-275). Similarly, they aver, the dynamics of oral tradition dictate that what is actually stated, preserved in explicit wording, presupposes an informational background outsiders are unlikely to know, with the result that even good, on-the-spot recollections may not sound like it (pp. 285-286). Well, that helps a lot! Boyd and Eddy obviously imagine they have given themselves permission to read the clipped and stereotyped mini-narratives of the Gospels as eyewitness testimony despite appearances. But all they have actually shown is that, even if there should chance to be real eyewitness testimony in the Jesus tradition, we can no longer recognize it as such! Formal considerations will have obliterated any evidence of eye-witness origin (p. 284).

Price compares the Islamic "hadith" to the gospel narratives:

Closer to home, there is the well-known mass production of spurious tendential hadith falsely ascribed to the Prophet Muhammad. The early guardians of hadith felt it was their job to shepherd the growing tradition into the directions they thought best by making up opinions and deeds of the Prophet. We do not know if early Christian tradents engaged in such activities, but neither do we know that they behaved like Serbian shepherds or African lore-masters! Given the choice, the Islamic paradigm would seem a lot more likely, if only because it is closer to home historically and religiously (and, given the contradictory messages of the different gospel Jesuses even within the canon, it seems directly confirmed in the evidence). At any rate, the wholesale hadith-forging industry is at least as attractive an option for understanding the developing Jesus tradition. It is based on a well-known oral-traditional matrix and matches perfectly the model adopted by Bultmann and the form critics. If oral tradition “really” worked as Boyd and Eddy say it must, we cannot explain the phenomena of the hadith. (p. 287)

The arguments that Eddy and Boyd put forward for the historicity of the canonical gospels would require one to believe that the Nag Hammadi Gospels were historical too. Price writes:

They simply would not exist, or else we must accept them as historical, too. They, too, claim to stem from eye-witnesses. They, too, offer us many sayings ascribed to Jesus. If we admit they are historically spurious, we admit that it was nothing for early Christians to ascribe their own best thoughts and revelations to their Lord. (p. 287).

So, Price demonstrates that in order to accept the canonical gospels as literal history, one must first adopt a priori the belief that they are accurate and then explain away all the historical criticism of the Bible for the last 300 years. Were Eddy and Boyd successful in their attempt? Price concludes: One may render the following verdict on the case the authors have made on rehabilitating the historical reliability of the Synoptic Gospels: nice try (p. 289).

The Christian Delusion: Chapter Six--The Bible and Modern Scholarship

Today I continue my trek through The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails (ed. John W. Loftus). Chapter six is by Paul Tobin, the author of The Rejection of Pascal's Wager: A Skeptic's Guide to the Bible and the Historical Jesus (2009). Tobin is a former Christian who decided to investigate the claims of the Bible for himself and his investigation led him to reject his former beliefs. He holds degrees in engineering and business administration and maintains a website, The Rejection of Pascal's Wager, where much of the information in the book was originally published.



His chapter in The Christian Delusion is entitled, "The Bible and Modern Scholarship." He maintains that modern scholarship has shown that the Bible 1) is inconsistent with itself, 2) is not supported by archaeology, 3) contains fairy tales, 4) contains failed prophecies, and 5) contains many forgeries (p. 148).

Tobin gives a few samples of contradictions in the Bible, such as the two diverse creation reports in Genesis 1 and 2, the two accounts of how many animals Noah brought into the ark, one saying that Noah brought one pair of each kind of animal into the ark and another account in which he brings in seven pairs of clean animals, Paul saying that salvation is by faith alone and James saying it's not by faith alone, and so on. Massive books have been written by Christians in an attempt to deal with the discrepancies in the Bible, for example Gleason Archer's New International Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties (480 pages) and Norman Geisler's Big Book of Bible Difficulties (624 pages), thereby demonstrating how many contradictions there really are in the Christian Scriptures.

Archaeology used to be cited by apologists as "proving" the accuracy of the Bible, but that argument has pretty much disappeared in the last 20 years. The reason is that recent archeological studies have shown that the Hebrew Scriptures have little or no basis in historical fact. Tobin writes: Since the last decade of the twentieth century there is a growing consensus in modern scholarship that the major elements of the Exodus tale (the Israelites living in Egypt for 430 years, the exodus of this large group out of Egypt into Canaan, and the intervening forty years of wandering in the Sinai Peninsula) are also myths, not history (p. 154). This is the conclusion of such leading archaeological scholars as William Dever (Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From?, 2003), Eric H. Cline (From Eden to exile: unraveling mysteries of the Bible, 2007), and Israel Finkelstein and Neil Silberman (The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts, 2002). In addition, there is little archaeological evidence for any of the events recorded in the Hebrew Scriptures until after the time of Solomon. Finkelstein and Silberman write:

If analyzed from a purely archaeological standpoint, Jerusalem, through those intervening centuries--including the time of David and Solomon--was probably never more than a small, relatively poor unfortified hill country town, no larger than three or four acres in size (David and Solomon: In Search of the Bible's Sacred Kings and the Roots of the Western Tradition, 2006, p. 274).

Obviously, if the stories of the Patriarchs, Moses, the Exodus, the Conquest, and everything else up to the time of Solomon has no basis in history, then it must be mythology or legend. Fables are also a part of the Hebrew Scriptures including a talking serpent (Gen. 3) and a talking donkey (Num. 22). Tobin argues that the NT too contains myths or legends including the virgin birth, Herod's slaughter of the babies in Bethlehem, Mary's and Joseph's trip into Egypt, the Roman census, the wisemen, the star of Bethlehem, and so on (pp. 157-63).

"Fulfilled" prophecies have also been cited often by Christian apologists as proof that the Bible is of divine origin. Tobin (pp. 164-65) maintains that the NT writers used their fertile imaginations to draw parallels between the life of Jesus and the OT prophecies (e.g., compare Matt. 2:14-15 with Hosea 11:1-2). The fact that the details of the prophecy could not be understood until after its fulfillment speaks volumes. What good is a prophecy if it is not understood before its fulfillment? Apologists have also frequently cited the prophecies in the book of Daniel as proof of divine inspiration. The fact is, though, as Tobin shows, many of the prophecies in Daniel were written after the event they pretended to predict. They were really "postdictions" instead of "predictions." Most scholars believe that Daniel was written sometime around 165 BCE. The events it "predicts" prior to this time are remarkably accurate but the ones it predicts for later are off the mark. Evidence of this is found in the book of Daniel itself where God allegedly told Daniel "to seal up the book until the end time" (12:4).

Lastly, Tobin discusses the forgeries in the Bible. Modern scholarship agrees that the book of Daniel, the later part of Isaiah (chs. 40-66) and portions of the Psalms are forged. There is also consensus in rejecting Paul as the author of the Pastoral Epistles (1 and 2 Timothy, Titus) and Peter as the author of the second epistle of Peter. In addition, much doubt exists that Colossians, Ephesians, 2 Thessalonians, 1 Peter, James and Jude are authentic. Conservatives, aware that the existence of forged documents in the Bible would be damaging to their insistence that it is from God, have attempted to mitigate this damage in three ways.

The first is to avoid using the word "forgery" at all cost and use abstruse words like "pseudepigraphy" and "pseudynomity" instead. The second step is to claim that the disciples of Paul (or Peter or James or Jude) wrote under their master's name because the letter "was intended as an extension of his thought--an assumption of the great apostle's mantle to continue his work." The final step is to then say that the ancients accepted pseudepigraphy as something normal and would not consider it negatively as we would today (p. 167).

Tobin shows this last point to be false. Greek and Roman authors warned their audience about forgeries written in their names. The famous Greek doctor Galen actually wrote a whole book telling his audience how to distinguish his work from forgeries (p. 168). Paul himself, if he is the real author of 2 Thessalonians, warns that there could be a letter circulating that falsely purports to be from him (2 Thess. 2:2). In addition, Tertullian records that in his day (2nd century CE), a presbyter had been tried and convicted for forging a document (The Acts of Paul) pretending to be from Paul (see Bart Ehrman, Lost Christianities, pp. 31-32).

Though Tobin does not mention it, one of the principles used by those who selected the books to be included in the canon was authenticity. If modern scholarship is right in its conclusions, much of the NT and some of the OT should have never been included. Furthermore, two of the major "proof texts" for the divine inspiration of the Bible, 2 Timothy 3:16 and 2 Peter 1:20-21, would not have been included in the canon thus nullifying their impact on the doctrine of inspiration.

Tobin conclusively shows through the five points made in this chapter that modern scholarship has dealt a death-blow to the idea that the Bible is the Word of God.

Psychological Factors Influencing Eyewitness Testimony--Part Two

In a prior post, I began a discussion the psychological factors influencing eyewitness testimony. The point of the discussion is to counter the claims of Christian apologists who argue that since the reports contained in the gospels were either directly from eyewitnesses (or from those who interviewed eyewitnesses) and that since some eyewitnesses would have been alive still when the gospels were written, then the accuracy of the gospels is guaranteed. To be clear, I am not arguing that eyewitness testimony is always wrong but I am arguing that eyewitness testimony is not always reliable as the apologists would lead one to believe.

The recent book by Richard Bauckham, Professor of NT Studies at St. Andrews University in Scotland, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony makes a strong claim that the gospels should be seen as reliable due to the influence of the eyewitness testimony contained therein. An article by Judith Redman, ("How Accurate Are Eyewitnesses? Bauckham and the Eyewitnesses in the Light of Psychological Research"), appearing in the most recent issue of the Journal of Biblical Literature (Spring 2010: 177-97) challenges Bauckham's thesis.

To recap, she indicates that psychological studies show that: Remembering involves a three-stage process of acquisition (encoding), retention (storage), and retrieval. Changes in content can be introduced at all of these stages, and there are significant numbers of different factors that can cause these changes.

In the last post, I dealt with the first step, the acquisition or encoding process, today I want to look at the other two steps and then draw conclusions relative to the alleged eyewitness testimony in the gospels.

Redman writes:

Losses of, and changes in, memory come about in part through what happens during the passage of time. As time passes, details and even whole events may disappear from the memories of eyewitnesses. In addition, the way a witness thinks about an event over time can affect the way s/he recalls it. A witness's thoughts tend to bend in a direction that would be advantageous to her/his purposes

She continues:

. . . a significant amount of what affects memories during storage and retrieval is a function of the individual as part of a community. Eyewitnesses can be provided with information after the event (postevent information) from a variety of sources. This may reinforce their memories, but it may also alter them and even cause things that did not take place to become incorporated into a memory. Talking to other people who also witnessed the event may change how each individual recalls it, and people are not very accurate in their ability to remember whether it is something they experienced or something they were told about. There is also evidence that many people do not remember previously held attitudes or beliefs when they come to a new position. All these factors make postevent information a common source of alteration of eyewitness testimony, especially given the likelihood that the oral tradition about Jesus originated as groups of people touched by his ministry talked to each other about it.

In addition, most people, most of the time, are not concerned about preserving an accurate record of what happened in their past. Memories help people to make sense of the world and of themselves, and the stories they tell tend to focus on what happened to them and what that event meant to them. In fact, one purpose of reconstructing autobiographical information, as is done in eyewitness testimony, may be to construct and reconstruct the story we wish to be known because it justifies our being, our culture, our way of life. This is done at a subconscious rather than a conscious level--eyewitnesses do not consciously develop an account that fits how they wish to be known.

In light of these facts, even if the stories in the gospels originated with actual eyewitnesses and some of these eyewitnesses were alive when the gospels were written, it does not guarantee the accuracy of the gospels. Psychologists have clearly shown that there are too many variables along the way where the memories can be distorted. At this point, I can hear some apologists saying, "But wait a minute, you are forgetting about how accurately oral traditions were passed down in oral societies and especially among the Jews." Redman also addresses this issue.

Hence, the assumption that Bauckham makes about the accuracy of oral transmission needs to be nuanced in view of the kind of material that is found in the Gospels. In addition, Bauckham fails to take into consideration in his work that inaccuracies can, and almost inevitably will, arise in eyewitness testimony before it becomes valuable community tradition that is seen to be in need of preservation. If Scripture is to be believed, most of the people who witnessed Jesus' teaching, especially those close to him, were not skilled oral tradents but ordinary members of first-century society with varying abilities to remember and retell their experiences. Although they were doubtless accustomed to using memory rather than written notes to retain information, and thus their memories were likely to be more efficient than those of twenty-first-century literate people, they are unlikely to have had the training and experience required for the high levels of accuracy produced by the storytellers observed by Parry, Lord, and others.

What Redman points out is that 1) certain types of material, such as poetry, is more easily and accurately memorized verbatim than other types of material; 2) inaccuracies can creep in even before the material reaches the stage to be passed down as official oral tradition; and 3) individuals need to be trained in the art of memorizing and passing along oral tradition and there is no indication that any of Jesus' original disciples were.

If one insists that Jesus' disciples would have been skilled in the techniques used by followers of other rabbis' in collecting and passing along tradition, then, according to Redman, due to the differences among the gospels, one would have to conclude one of three things has happened: they were far less successful students than the trainee rabbis; the authors of the Gospels did not receive their material from one of these trained disciples; or it has been significantly changed by the author of the Gospel (redacted) to fit the theological purposes of the Gospel. The gospels just do not reflect the carefulness and precision seen in the oral traditions passed along by students of other Jewish rabbis.

Another factor to consider, which Redman does not address, is that eyewitness testimony is most valuable when 1) the eyewitnesses can be cross-examined by the other side; 2) the eyewitnesses can be isolated and allowed to give their testimony without collaborating with other witnesses; and 3) the underlying motivations or possible ulterior motives of the eyewitnesses can be discerned. All three of these are considered very important in our modern courts of law. None of these items is possible with regard to the alleged eyewitnesses of Jesus life and ministry.

Therefore, what is one to make of Bauckam's thesis and of the claims of Christian apologists? I will let Redman answer:

Bauckham appears to take the position that if an eyewitness is deemed trustworthy, we should trust (that is, accept as accurate) his or her testimony in its entirety. This is at odds with psychological research, which shows that, although trustworthy witnesses would have no desire to deceive their audience, their particular interests, experiences, and personalities would result in testimonies that were more likely to be accurate at some points than at others. This is especially the case when we are presented with information from someone who is known to have a vested interest in or bias toward a particular position or outcome.If it is the only information we can access, we must rely on it, but we should certainly not trust it to the point where we accept it uncritically. We should still question those aspects of the testimonies of trustworthy witnesses that strike us as unusual. They are reliable in that they tell us what they believe to be true. This does not necessarily make it true.

In contrast, psychological research into eyewitness testimony makes it clear that Bauckham's work in Jesus and the Eyewitnesses does not provide strong evidence for the historical accuracy of the content of the Gospels. Although it is clear that transmission of stories in oral cultures is remarkably accurate once a community decides that something should be preserved and skilled oral tradents are entrusted with the task of preserving it, many of the inaccuracies in eyewitness memory come into being within hours, days, or weeks of the event being witnessed. Furthermore, these eyewitness accounts come from within a faith community formed around the subject of the stories, which adds a particular source of bias not present in other histories of the time.

Psychological Factors Influencing Eyewitness Testimony--Part One

I have done a couple of prior posts on eyewitness testimony (here and here). Christian apologists make a big point of saying the gospels are reliable and trustworthy historical records because there would have been eyewitnesses still around to counter any errors or misrepresentations in the documents. The most recent treatment of this subject from a conservative, evangelical viewpoint is Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (2006) by Richard Bauckham, Professor of New Testament studies at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

Bauckham maintains that the gospels are reliable history because the accounts contained in them are either from eyewitness testimonies or very close to eyewitness testimonies. While there has been considerable debate in the scholarly community as to whether the gospels really do record eyewitness testimonies (e.g., an entire issue of the Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus , Volume 6, Number 2, 2008 ), the point of a new article by Judith Redman is that even if the gospels do record eyewitness testimony, that is no guarantee of their accuracy ("How Accurate Are Eyewitnesses? Bauckham and the Eyewitnesses in the Light of Psychological Research,", Journal of Biblical Literature [Spring 2010]: 177-97).

Redman says that eyewitness memory is typically called autobiographical memory in the psychological literature. She writes:

Autobiographical memory has three major components: verbal narrative, imagery, and emotions. Autobiographical memories are often recalled as stories told to others. The images associated with them lead to the specific, concrete details that make them seem more accurate and believable, while the emotions associated with them can have profound effects on how effectively people can retrieve autobiographical memories. Remembering involves a three-stage process of acquisition (encoding), retention (storage), and retrieval. Changes in content can be introduced at all of these stages, and there are significant numbers of different factors that can cause these changes.

First, Redman deals with aspects of memory acquisition or encoding. This is how the eyewitness experiences the initial event and there are at least five variables that impact his or her ability to perceive the event accurately.

1. Expectations. What witnesses expect to see or hear can affect the way they perceive an event. Expectations can be shaped by culture, stereotypes, past experience, or personal prejudice. . . .

2. Type of fact. People tend to find it more difficult to remember things that they need to estimate such as height, weight, distance, numbers of people in large groups, and duration of activities or events. . . .

3. Event significance and detail salience or prominence. In order to remember something, a person needs to attend to it, and, since it is impossible for an individual to attend to all the stimuli in his or her environment at any given time, s/he selects those things to which s/he will attend, often unconsciously. . . .

4. The personality and interests of the witness. Both of these factors affect how significant and salient particular events and the details of those events are to a particular eyewitness. All people are better at remembering some things than others, but the strengths and weaknesses vary from person to person. . . . The personalities and interests of eyewitnesses will determine what each finds interesting, surprising, potentially important, and therefore more memorable . . . . Material pleasing to the witness is likely to be elaborated on while displeasing material is likely to be distorted . . . . Events that are very surprising and have a high level of importance or emotional arousal give rise to "flashbulb memories" that are especially vivid and appear to be frozen in time, as though in a photograph. People may have flashbulb memories of where they were and what they were doing when they heard about public events like 9/11 or the first moon landing, as well as similarly significant but more private events like the birth of a baby or the tragic death of a loved one. Eyewitnesses to Jesus' miracles and to his postresurrection appearances would be expected to have formed flashbulb memories of these events. Flashbulb memories are often considered to be exceptionally accurate, yet research indicates that, like other memories, they deteriorate over time and are not always as accurate as the person remembering thinks they are. Indeed, recent evidence suggests that flashbulb memories actually develop over the first week after the event, taking into consideration what is learned from discussion with others.

5. Observational point of view and perceptual adequacy, or how well the observer can see and hear what is happening.

All of the above 5 points are important in understanding the potential problems with eyewitness testimony and how inaccuracies can develop but #4 if of particular significance. Many apologists would maintain that the resurrection appearances would have been so unique and unexpected that the disciples would have retained vivid and precise memories of the events for their entire lives. But as Redman indicates, studies have shown that even these "flashbulb memories" can be unreliable in the details.

An important study which demonstrates this fact is by Charles Weaver III and Kevin Krug, "Consolidation-like Effects in Flashbulb Memories: Evidence from September 11, 2001," American Journal of Psychology 117 (2004): 517-30. They had 400 students at Baylor University fill out questionnaires on their recollection of the events of 9/11 at five different times: 1) within the first 48 hours; 2) after 1 week; 3) after 1 month; 4) after 3 months; 4) and after one year. They concluded:

Flashbulb memories are influenced by the consolidation that takes place during the first week or so after the flashbulb event. . . . Flashbulb memories are subject to the same laws as other episodic memories. Like Winningham et al. (2000), we assume that memories are not fully formed initially but take time to consolidate. During this consolidation processes, memories are especially malleable. Information can be added to the memories . . . . Even more likely, details can be lost. . . . as specific details are forgotten, they might be replaced with schema-consistent details. This would be exacerbated by the frequent telling and retelling of these memories (pp. 525-26).

Another such event was the Challenger disaster of 1986. Robert Burton describes a study that was done relative to how people remembered this event.

Within one day of the space shuttle Challenger explosion, Ulric Niesser, a psychologist studying "flashbulb" memories, asked his class of 106 students to write down exactly how they'd heard about the explosion, where they were, what they'd been doing, and how they felt. Two and half years later they were again interviewed. Twenty-five percent of the students' subsequent accounts were strikingly different than their original journal entries. More than half the people had lesser degrees of error, and less than ten percent had all the details correct (Prior to seeing their journals, most students presumed that their memories were correct).

Most of us reluctantly admit that memory changes over time. . . . So, seeing that your journal entries were different than your recollection a couple of years later shouldn't be surprising. What startled me about the Challenger study were the students' responses when confronted with their conflicting accounts. Many expressed a high level of confidence that their false recollections were correct, despite being confronted with their own handwritten journals. The most unnerving was one student's comment, "That's my handwriting, but that's not what happened" (On Being Certain, pp. 10-11).

These studies show that how one recalls an event, even a momentous event from the past, can change dramatically from the initial appraisal of the experience. In addition, as Redman pointed out, flashbulb memories actually develop over the first week after the event, taking into consideration what is learned from discussion with others . People talk about momentous events with other people who also experienced them. Descriptions from others influence how one remembers the event himself. Sometimes these other details get incorporated into one's own memory of the event and subsequently one believes that he saw the same details too.

I will continue this discussion in the next post.

Do "Ancient Biographies" Always Present Reliable History?

I was listening to the William Craig--Richard Carrier debate today and something jumped out at me. Craig argued that the gospels should be considered as real history because they are in the literary genre called "ancient biographies." I remember Craig Keener and Mike Licona making similar claims at the 2009 Apologetics Conference in New Orleans.

It is true that most scholars believe that the gospels are written in the same literary form as the "ancient biographies." Does the fact that they are written in this genre, however, demand that they be accepted as always presenting reliable history? I maintain that it does not.

Karl Ludwig Schmidt, in The place of the Gospels in the general history of literature (German published 1923; English translation by Byron McCane 2001), writes:

Since the Gospels do represent biography of some sort, however, we need to clarify the essence of ancient biography, In Weber Votaw's opinion [The Gospels and Contemporary Biographies, American Journal of Theology 19 {1915} 45ff.], there were two types: precise, objective, historical biography; and practical pedagogical, popular biography. The latter type, which was largely confiend to antiquity, depicts and glorifies specific heroes. Popular biographies of this sort were especially plentiful during the centuries immediately before and after Christ including Xenophon's Memorabilia, Arrian's Epictetus and Philostratus's Apollonius of Tyana.(p. 3)

Skeptics have often put forth the idea that the story of Jesus was a "copycat" of the story of Apollonius. I do not wish to debate the merits of that argument right now, but simply point out that the Life of Apollonius is in the literary genre of an ancient biography and even Christian apologists would reject its miraculous stories about Apollonius. If they would reject the Life of Apollonius as unhistorical, then why not the Gospels, since they are in the same literary form?

Jona Lendering, in the introduction to the on-line English translation of Flavius Philostratus: The Life of Apollonius, writes:

In the Life of Apollonius, the Athenian author Philostratus, a sophist who lived from c.170 to c.247, tells the story of Apollonius of Tyana, a charismatic teacher and miracle worker from the first century CE who belonged to the school of Pythagoras. It is an apologetic work, in which Philostratus tries to show that Philostratus was a man with divine powers, but not a magician. He also pays attention to Apollonius' behavior as a sophist.

Arnold Meyer, in Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart 5 (1913, 2151ff), quoted in Schmidt (pp. 21-22) compares the gospels to the Hellenistic miracle literature which was prevalent in the first century of the Christian era. He writes:

oral traditions were collected, along with notes, letters, and documents both genuine and falsified. . . . Miracle stories were strung together, and a biography of the miracle-worker was formed, starting with the first miracle and leading to an amazing conclusion after a remarkable series of events, including healings, persecutions, accusations, and imprisonment. Even the birth of the hero was bathed in miraculous light . . . Clever conversations with friends and foes were then added, including pleas of defense before civil magistrates.

Schmidt has this to say about the 4th Gospel(p. 21):

In the Gospel of John, the miracles of Jesus are narrated, and then the signs are discussed; and in the same way ancient biographies of miracle workers also made changes, additions, and accentuations, selecting them from a virtually inexhaustible supply (Jn. 20:35; 21:25).

I can hear some apologists crying, "The Life of Apollonius does not fit the characteristics of an ancient biography." I disagree and so do the scholars I have quoted but for the sake of argument, lets say its not the typical ancient biography. Okay, how about the writings of Plutarch (46 -127 CE)? All agree that his Parallel Lives represents the literary genre of the ancient biography.

Does Plutarch always present historical facts in his biographies? Listen to Tracy Deline:

Plutarch sometimes "improved on the truth." Plutarch was still not always accurate. Aside from simple memory-related errors, such as interchanging insignificant names, Plutarch seemed to emphasize different versions of a series of events in different Lives so as to accentuate the role (or a specific characteristic) of the various men. C.B.R. Pelling (Plutarch's Life of Antony, p. 36) states that "in such cases, he was improving on the truth, and he knew it (Ancient Biography).

The following is from Biography - Ancient Biography, Medieval And Renaissance Biography, The Seventeenth And Eighteenth Centuries, The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries:

Many of the earliest "histories" were biographical accounts of the lives of important historical figures. Biography often has been associated with the field of history (and at times has been considered a branch of it), but distinctions between them were drawn beginning in ancient times. Whereas the writers of histories always have purported to present the truth accurately, biographers more obviously have praised their subjects or have presented them as exemplars for moral or didactic (educational) purposes. . . . The mixture of fiction with fact in biography means that it has much in common with imaginative literature.

More on Plutarch's writing style (from About.com):

Plutarch's biographies often focus on anecdotes about the subject, while omitting details of his (and it always is 'his') career that we would love to know. Although the biographies are comparatively short (mostly between 20 and 30 pages long), Plutarch cannot resist digressions on anything that catches his interest. See, for example, the digression on the Athenians? treatment of retired beasts of burden in his life of Cato the Elder. Plutarch is also very interested in omens and frequently notes prodigious events, such as monstrous births, that preceded any great battle or the death of his subject.

Hector Avalos (The End of Biblical Studies, p. 120) has this to say about Plutarch:

Consider also the case of Plutarch, the Greek historian, whose biography, title Ceasar, forms another of the most quoted sources for the assassination story. Plutarch has a separate biography, titled Brutus, for one of the alleged conspirators. However, these two biographies don’t always agree on important details. In Caesar (66.4), Plutarch says that a man named Decimus Brutus Albinus delayed Antony’s entrance into the senate-house, where the assassination is said to have taken place. But in Brutus (17.2), Plutarch says it was a man named Trebonius who detained Antony.
According to C.B.R. Pelling, who is a meticulous empiricist, “It is possible that Plutarch has deliberately distorted the narrative in Caesar by transferring the act to D. Brutus: such techniques are not unknown in his work” (Plutarch’s Method of Work in the Roman Lives, Journal of Hellenic Studies 99 {1979}: 79). Pelling presents examples where Plutarch provides contradictory dates for events, as well as cases where Plutarch attributes speeches to Antony and Cassius that were attributed to Casesar in other passages.

Another clear example of an ancient biography is Suetonius' Lives of the Caesars . The website About.com has this to say about Lives of the Caesars

It covers the lives of Julius Caesar and the first 11 emperors, from Augustus to Domitian. . . .It concentrates on the personal lives of its subjects, and their more interesting peccadilloes, which is probably why it has survived. How much is fact and how much is just gossip and rumour is difficult to say.

Suetonius, in the Life of Vespasian (7.13), claims that the Emperor once cured the blind and the lame through the power of of the god Serapis. I wonder is Christian apologists such as Craig or Licona accept this claim as historical fact?

Dale C. Allison in his book Jesus of Nazareth: Millenarian Prophet writes concerning the general reliability of sacred biographies:

Hagiographical traditions and sacred biographies written by the devotees of a founder or religious savior are notoriously unreliable. Tradents gather what they can and concoct what they cannot gather, often reaping what their founder did not sow. The result is that everywhere history coalesces with myth....Once we doubt, as all modern scholars do, that the Jesus tradition gives us invariably accurate information, unvarnished by exaggeration and legend, it is incumbent upon us to find some way of sorting through the diverse traditions to divine what really goes back to Jesus. (p.1-2)

I am sure more examples could be produced but this is sufficient to show that the ancient biography genre does not always record genuine history. For Craig to argue, as he does in the debate with Carrier, that just because the gospels are in the literary form of the ancient biography they must be accepted as presenting real historical facts is flat wrong.

How Long Does it Take a Legend to Develop?

Evangelical apologists, citing Roman historian A. N. Sherwin-White, argue that the gospel of Mark's account of the empty tomb cannot be legendary because the time between the event (circa 30 CE) and its being recorded in Mark's Gospel (circa 60-70 CE)is too short. But is 30-40 years really too short a time for legend to develop? I don't think so. We have an example of such a development in the 20th century.

Richard Carrier, in The Empty Tomb: Jesus Beyond the Grave (eds. Robert M. Price and Jeffrey Jay Lowder, Prometheus, 2005, pp. 174-176), discusses the rise of the Roswell alien spacecraft legend. He writes:

There are still people today who believe that in 1947 an alien craft crashed and was recovered, along with alien bodies, by the United States government, and that this was subsequently covered up and kept secret. Though the "core story" of a saucer crash arose immediately in 1947, the elaborations began to appear as early as 1978, when an eyewitness, Maj. Jesse Marcel, described the recovery of the spacecraft in an interview. He never recanted his story, and since then the legend has grown enormously, with numerous devoted believers. This represents a clear case of a legendary development only thirty years after the fact, with all the subsequent additions to the legend (alien bodies, government threats against witnesses, storage of the craft on a military base in Arizona, physics-defying pieces of debris, and so on) arising less than fifty years after the fact, less than twenty years after the first legendary development. Even though modern literacy, skepticism, and technology have made it possible to expose this legend with copious evidence, thousands still believe it.

Imagine if a promise of eternal life to a miserably oppressed and suffering underclass had been attached to this story, along with promises of a perfectly vicious revenge on their enemies and oppressors. Imagine that an army of the most fanatic of those who believe the story actively promoted this creed, seeing every attempt to stop them as part of the government's conspiracy, confident that their own suffering and death would be rewarded and their torturers and murderers duly punished in the end. Imagine that like many Pentecostals today, these people could "prove" their doctrine's truth by performing miraculous healings and handling of snakes, and adducing scriptures that support them. With only a little luck, could such a religion really fail to triumph?

The analogy here with the empty tomb story is strong. It turns out that the genuine historical core is that a weather balloon carrying top secret nuclear-detonation detectors (actually modified sonar buoys) fell from the sky over Roswell, was recovered by an unknowing crew involving Marcel, and really was subsequently covered up by the Air Force. Yet this historical core was obliterated within a small group of believers and entirely replaced by the legend of an alien spacecraft. If their oral tradition had just happened to be the only one to survive in print, then we would have virtually no way at all to debunk this myth--we would not even know whether it was a myth.

The only reason we know the truth in this case is because our society provides enormous resources to an investigator: huge amounts of government records accessible to anyone, a national mass media system, skeptical organizations dedicated to hunting down and publishing testimony and evidence, plus books, libraries, newspapers, universal literacy, and so on. None of this was available in antiquity. Yet even if it were we could still expect the Roswell story to flourish among many people, just as it has done today. And if such a corruption of historical tradition, the replacement of a genuine historical core with an elaborate legend, can arise in so short a time, and be believed by so many, on little more than hearsay and speculation, becoming transformed by believers into "historical fact," then certainly the same thing could have happened to the empty tomb story.

I think the Roswell legend is an excellent analogy. There was 31 years between the time of the event (1947) and the first legendary embellishment (1978). Since 1978, the legend has grown to enormous proportions. If Mark was written circa 60 CE, that would be about 30 years from the time of the death of Jesus (circa 30 CE). So if the Roswell story can be embellished in less than 30 years in modern times, why couldn't the story of Jesus be embellished in ancient times? It would have been much easier for the story to take on legendary elements in ancient times. Again to cite Carrier,

How would a myth be exploded in antiquity? They had no newspapers, telephones, photographs, or access to public documents to consult to check a story. There were no reporters, coroners, forensic scientists, or even detectives. If someone was not a witness, all people had was a man's word, and they would most likely base their judgment not on anything we would call evidence, but on the display of sincerity by the storyteller, by his ability to persuade, and impress them with a show, by the potential rewards his story had to offer, and by its "sounding right" to them. (Ibid., p. 172).

To one who is not already committed to believing (faith)in the divine inspiration of the Bible, it seems to be obvious that the Gospel account has the characteristics of a legend.

The Memory of Eyewitnesses

In yesterday's post, I discussed Jan Vansina's research regarding the reliability of eyewitness testimony. Today, I turn to Elizabeth Loftus' discussion of the subject. She is a world renowned expert on the matter of false memories. She is often called upon to testify at trials where eyewitness testimony is being used. She is the author of the leading book on the subject, Eyewitness Testimony (Harvard University Press, 1996).

In Scientific American (September 1997, vol. 277, #3, pp. 70-75), Loftus explains how memories can become corrupted:

Research is beginning to give us an understanding of how false memories of complete, emotional and self-participatory experiences are created in adults. First, there are social demands on individuals to remember; for instance, researchers exert some pressure on participants in a study to come up with memories. Second, memory construction by imagining events can be explicitly encouraged when people are having trouble remembering. And, finally, individuals can be encouraged not to think about whether their constructions are real or not. Creation of false memories is most likely to occur when these external factors are present, whether in an experimental setting, in a therapeutic setting or during everyday activities.

False memories are constructed by combining actual memories with the content of suggestions received from others. During the process, individuals may forget the source of the information. This is a classic example of source confusion, in which the content and the source become dissociated.

In a CBS newsreport on the subject, Charles Osgood says:

According to this theory, memories are not stored like snapshots, but are instead like sketches that are altered and added to every time they are called up. Loftus has shown subjects who are given false information about an event or scene tend to incorporate it into their memories, and "recall" the false information as a part of their original memory even two weeks later. In other experiments, subjects asked to imagine scenarios can then become convinced that the imagined scenario is a real memory.

In the November 2003 issue of American Psychologist, Loftus says:

But could one create an entire memory for an event that never happened? My first attempt to do this used a procedure whereby participants were given short narrative descriptions of childhood events and encouraged to try to remember those events. While participants believed that all of the descriptions were true and had been provided by family members, one was actually a pseudoevent that had not occurred. In this study, approximately 25% of participants were led to believe, wholly or partially, that at age 5 or 6 they had been lost in a shopping mall for an extended time, were highly upset, and were ultimately rescued by an elderly person and reunited with their family (Loftus & Pickrell, 1995). Many added embellishing details to their accounts(Make-Believe Memories, p. 869)

At the end of the above article, Loftus concludes: People’s memories are not only the sum of all that they have done, but there is more to them: The memories are also the sum of what they have thought, what they have been told, what they believe. Who we are may be shaped by our memories, but our memories are shaped by who we are and what we have been led to believe.(p. 869).

How does Loftus' research relate to the supposed eyewitness testimony found in the New Testament? Many apologists, such as Josh McDowell, have argued that either the disciples were lying or the events really happened. These apologists maintain that since no one would die for something they know to be false, then the events, including the resurrection of Jesus, must have actually taken place.

Loftus has shown that its not that simple. People can believe things happened that didn't really happen. These memories can be just as real and as strong for the individuals as events that did occur. Memory is a complex phenomena that is only now beginning to be understood.

Is Eyewitness Testimony Reliable?

Most Christian apologists, (for example, see Eyewitness Testimony for Jesus' Resurrection Appearances by Gary Habermas), believe that the case for Christianity is strong because of alleged eyewitness testimony to the life, death, and especially the resurrection of Jesus Christ. (I say alleged eyewitness testimony because, apart from Paul's five words in 1 Cor. 15:8, it is not an established fact that we even have true eyewitness testimony of the resurrection. What we have are second and third hand accounts from those who claim they spoke with eyewitnesses or we have anonymous writings from those who claim to have been eyewitnesses.)

Even if we assume, however, that there is genuine eyewitness testimony of the events in the life of Jesus recorded in Scripture, then there is still the question of the reliability of eyewitness testimony.

Below is a quote from Oral Tradition as History by Jan Vansina (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985). Vansina is widely recognized as one of the leading authorities on the subject of the oral transmission of history.

Here is what he says about eyewitness testimony:

In the best of circumstances, even the best of witnesses never give a movie-like account of what happened, as all accounts of accidents show. Eyewitness accounts are always a personal experience as well and involve not only perception, but also emotions. Witnesses often are also not idle standers-by, but participants in the events. Furthermore, an understanding of what happened cannot occur through mere data of perception. Perceptions must be organized in a coherent whole and the logic of the situation supplies missing pieces of observation. The classical cases of car accidents or purse snatching document this to satiety. A witness reporting a car accident typically first heard a smash, then saw it, then deduced how it happened—how both cars were traveling before the accident after which he or she built up a coherent account of the incident. Usually he did not see the two cars before the accident drew attention to them. Most witnesses cannot resolve themselves to build up a story starting with a noise and the result of the accident first. If a witness was traveling in one of the stricken cars, much of what took place happened at a speed greater than his own reaction time allowed him to perceive. Such persons often only remember one or two images of the accident. Yet when called upon to tell what happened, they must become coherent and build up a tale in which the logic of the situation makes up most of the account. (pp.4-5)

Eyewitness accounts are only partly reliable. Certainly it is true that complex or unexpected events are perhaps rarer than simple, expected events. Yet even here the account remains imperfect. The expectation of the event itself distorts its observation. People tend to report what they expect to see or hear more than what they actually see or hear. To sum up: mediation of perception by memory and emotional state shapes an account. Memory typically selects certain features from the successive perceptions and interprets them according to expectation, previous knowledge, or the logic of “what must have happened,” and fills the gaps in perception. (p. 5)

Note several things from Vansina's statements.

1. Eyewitness accounts are always a personal experience and involve not only perception, but also emotions. Witnesses often are also not idle standers-by, but participants in the events.

If there is genuine eyewitness testimony in the Scriptures, it is from individuals who are not objective by-standers but individuals who have a "stake in the claim." This automatically makes their testimony somewhat suspect.

2. Furthermore, an understanding of what happened cannot occur through mere data of perception. Perceptions must be organized in a coherent whole and the logic of the situation supplies missing pieces of observation.

If there is genuine eyewitness testimony in Scripture, it is from individuals who had to "make sense" of what they saw. They interpreted what they saw in accordance with their world view, which in the first century, was one in which the supernatural realm (angels, demons, God, etc.) regularly invaded the natural realm. So, their testimony is "colored" by their world view, a world-view which is largely rejected today.

3. The expectation of the event itself distorts its observation. People tend to report what they expect to see or hear more than what they actually see or hear.

In other words, all personal testimony is subjective. People interpret the events in light of their emotional connection to the person(s) involved and in light of what they see as compatible with their overall set of beliefs about a person or an event.

As Vansina says: To sum up: mediation of perception by memory and emotional state shapes an account. Memory typically selects certain features from the successive perceptions and interprets them according to expectation, previous knowledge, or the logic of “what must have happened,” and fills the gaps in perception.

So, the claim to eyewitness testimony in Scripture, even if true (and that is far from certain), does not guarantee the authenticity of the events therein described.

Recently, a thorough defense of the eyewitness testimony reported in the Bible has been written by Richard Bauckham, Professor of New Testament at St. Andrews University in Scotland. It is entitled: Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels As Eyewitness Testimony. This work is probably the best possible defense of the claim of eyewitness testimony in the New Testament. I will interact with this book in upcoming posts.