The Grand Coherence, Chapter 3: The Resurrection of Jesus Christ
This post is part of the book The Grand Coherence: A Modern Defense of Christianity. For all the links in the book, see this introductory post. To listen to this chapter, click here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nV9aWPB0eJCqQtR3XT_0x2eVWxwEeAji/view.
The New Testament claims that a man, Jesus, rose from the dead. Unlike Jairus’s daughter (Mark 5:35-42) or Lazarus (John 11:1-44), Jesus was resurrected in immortality and would not die again. Instead, He ascended to heaven.
Many eyewitnesses were still living when the apostle Paul (maybe 4-64 AD) wrote to the Corinthians, probably around AD 53, that the risen Jesus “appeared to Cephas [Peter], and then to the Twelve. After that, He appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then He appeared to James, then to all the apostles” (1 Corinthians 15). Paul’s audience could check his claims. They had reason to. It was risky to be a Christian. Already the martyrdoms were beginning that would continue for three hundred years: Christians whipped, nailed to crosses, burned alive, thrown to lions, beheaded. Why face the dangers, unless they believed? Why believe, unless they had evidence, probably a lot more than was ever written down, much less preserved until now?
The apostles themselves clearly believed. They preached boldly. They faced mortal peril, and most of them died for the faith in due course. Except Paul, they were all, according to the Gospels, eyewitnesses of the Resurrected Jesus in the flesh. Why would they lie? What could their motive possibly be? What would they gain by it? It makes no sense.
Or could they have been mad? But then how did they make so many converts? People usually aren’t drawn to madmen as leaders. They don’t transform their lives and identities thanks to the persuasion of madmen. The apostles’ success shows that they were persuasive, compelling, credible personalities, not madmen. And in their own writings, and in the words and deeds attributed to them by Luke in the book of Acts, they seem quite sane.
Could they have been the dupes of a hoax? But again, what could possibly have been the motive for such a hoax? Also, people aren’t so easily fooled by a hoax, especially not when the stakes are high.
Is it possible that they never said and did those things, and the documents that say they did are later forgeries? No, the Gospels can’t be much later inventions because the copies we have of them are too many and too early. The Gospels can’t have been written much later than the lifetimes of those traditionally considered their authors, Matthew the apostle, John the apostle, Mark the disciple of Peter, and Luke the disciple of Paul, and there’s no good reason to doubt the traditional authorship.
The early date of the Gospels limits the options for framing theories about how and why they might have been faked. But it’s not clear who would have had a motive to write fake Gospels, anyway, since few if any were benefiting in a worldly or material sense by being Christians.
Two sets of people might possibly have had a motive to write fake Gospels: the bishops, who had some power in the early Church, and the apostles, who got a certain degree of power and fame. But what would we expect to read in lying Gospels written by bishops or apostles to support their own power and prestige? Bishops would surely want Jesus to have instituted bishops and authorized them to rule the Church. Yet the Gospels say nothing about bishops!
The apostles would have served their own interests best, no doubt, by writing that they had been fearless and discerning followers of Jesus, who in turn trusted and praised them. Instead, the Gospels represent the apostles as dullards and cowards. Thus, Peter provokes Jesus to call him “Satan,” loses faith while walking on water and starts to sink, and, upon beholding Christ’s transfiguration, babbles something or other, whereupon the Gospel of Mark comments that (in one translation) “he didn’t know he was talking about” (Mark 9:6). Above all, after boasting that he would die for Christ, Jesus tells Peter that he will deny Him three times before the cock crows, and even after hearing that and denying it vehemently, he does just that.
And so with them all. Matthew was a tax collector, a greedy traitor to his nation. Paul was a bloody-minded persecutor of the early Christians. James and John vaingloriously asked to sit on Jesus’s right and left hand in the kingdom, and asked to call down fire from heaven on an unbelieving village, and were corrected by Jesus in both cases. Thomas refuses to believe the testimony of all his fellow apostles about the Resurrection. All the apostles are constantly misunderstanding and lacking faith. “Are you still so dull?” Jesus asks them (Mark 7:18). And “O unbelieving and perverse generation, how long must I bear with you?” (Matthew 17:17) And they all fled when Jesus was arrested. One only of them stood by the Cross: John, only he never names himself in his own Gospel.
Is this the picture of themselves the apostles would have presented, if they had written the Gospels, or caused them to be written, for the sake of their own power and prestige? Even if all these things were true, they could have left them out. Only Peter, for example, could have been the source of the story about the three denials and the cock crow. Had he not told it, no one would ever know. Or, having told it to a confidant, he could have suggested that it be omitted as unedifying. Instead, the Gospels seem to go out of their way to highlight the apostles’ faults and failings and follies, to the point where one has to suspect that the apostles’ motive, in telling the story thus, was to discredit themselves as far as they might, to prevent themselves from being too much admired. The unfavorable way in which the Gospels describe the apostles proves the apostles’ sincerity. And the sincerity that is proved when they speak against themselves adds force to their testimony of the Resurrection.
The rapid spread of the early Church strongly supports the value of eyewitness testimony of Jesus’s resurrection in the eyes of people far better placed than we are to assess it. Paul says that hundreds saw the Risen Jesus, and within the lifespan of the apostles there were many thousands of believers. The news spread, and the witnesses seem to have been convincing. This is especially impressive because the claim must have seemed so strange and improbable. The Jews knew as well as we do that people don’t normally rise from the dead. Their scriptures had a few examples of prophets raising other people from the dead, but not of anyone raising themselves from the dead. The Gospels say that Jesus foretold his own death and resurrection (e.g., Mark 8:31) but it seems nonetheless to have taken the apostles completely by surprise, and that’s understandable, because resurrection is an event so contrary to all experience that it would be natural even for Jesus’s admiring followers to completely discount such a prediction. You might think the news of the Resurrection would be equally disbelieved by all those who heard it. But it wasn’t. Could the witnesses have been so persuasive if they were lying? Could they have made people believe the seemingly impossible if their own basis for belief were shaky or insufficient? Perhaps the converts were impressed, as we can be, by the complete lack by the apostles and other eyewitnesses of the Resurrection of any motive to lie, and were more easily convinced for that reason. That only reinforces the conclusion.
The first epistemic energy of that eyewitness testimony would have lasted long enough to fuel much of the early growth of the Church. Just adding up human lifespans, there might have been people living as late as the end of the 2nd century AD who had known people who knew Jesus in the flesh. As late as the conversion of Constantine, some Christians might have been only four of five steps removed from personal contact with Jesus, and heard the tale, as the saying goes, fourth-hand or fifth-hand, no further removed from the events, in that sense, than many a high schooler hearing rumors about the latest hookup.
For us, the Resurrection is known through written records or perhaps the witness of the Holy Spirit. Word of mouth is too many steps removed to matter. But the early Church had more. They had the written records we have, and perhaps others, but they also had stories passed from mouth to mouth. They were convinced by them, convinced enough to die for them, and whatever stories they knew that we know not, seem to have supported their belief in the Gospels.
The case begins to look overwhelming. The death of Jesus was wrought by professional killers who knew their work. It was done very visibly and officially, in front of many people. Then Jesus rose from the dead and was witnessed alive by many. The witnesses told others, and they believed. They believed in spite of the overwhelming improbability of the claim, so the witnesses must have been persuasive, as it’s hard for a liar or a lunatic to be. The events were recorded in four written accounts not long after they took place. These accounts have the character of eyewitness testimony: the broad consistency with much difference in detail; the inclusion of certain details that are striking yet not obviously significant.
The accounts were produced by simple, uneducated men, in a simple, unliterary style, yet they are so full of wisdom that they have been admired above all other writings by many of the greatest minds of two millennia, and are still admired today by many who have abandoned Christianity. Where did that wisdom come from? The Gospel accounts were circulated among people many of whom would have independent knowledge by word of mouth of the events they tell of. They were accepted by them. The seemingly impossible story gained more and more adherents, of whom thousands believed it so firmly that they faced torture and death rather than deny it. To none, essentially, of all these witnesses can any motive to lie plausibly be attributed. I could go on running up the score even more if I liked, but the truth seems plain beyond evasion: the resurrection of Jesus really occurred. To try to dream up any alternative is to plunge into a realm of absurd fantasy, of vast, ingenious conspiracies with no motive, of people believing lying stories enough to die for them without checking easily available facts, of uneducated charlatans composing the most startling and visionary ethical teachings in history.
On the other hand…
The Resurrection is contrary to the laws of nature. We can observe the laws of nature every day. Every time we drop an object, it falls. Gravity at work. Every time we flip the switch, the light comes on. Electricity at work. It’s very reliable. Every time we rotate our legs and push with our feet in a certain way, we move forward. We don’t worry about whether walking will work. We don’t need to think about it. It always happens, because of the laws of nature. Even if we’re occasionally unable to walk, that’s not because rotating legs and pushing the ground fails to cause forward motion, but because we’re not able to rotate and push. Every now and then, people break their legs. But no one breaks the laws of physics, or at least, that’s what all our experience seems to tell us. We feel very certain about it. The Resurrection is contrary to the laws of nature because human bodies have a rich complexity that emerges through conception and growth. But for those circumstances, the emergence of human life is astronomically improbable, or in effect, impossible. That’s why when a friend dies, we don’t just expect but feel completely certain that we’ll never see him again in this world, walking and talking and smiling like a living man. He’s gone for good. The dead don’t return. Countless billions have gone that way, and never returned, and we know why.
Haven’t our whole lives been a vast accumulation of evidence for the reliability of the laws of nature? The knowledge of it has become so routine that it sinks out of consciousness altogether. We could only with difficulty reconstruct and describe the muscle movements by which we do tasks as simple as walking or picking up a cup, much less complex movements like saying a sentence. But we do these things every day, and they work as we expect, and every time they do, they provide a little bit more evidence for the great generalization of the laws of nature. We do not have infinite experience, so perhaps we don’t have a right to strictly infinite confidence. We sometimes do get surprised. But our confidence in the efficacy of the natural laws is justifiably very, very high. And so if we hear a tale that a man rose from the dead, we must consider that story, prima facie, very, very improbable.
It’s a conundrum. The resurrection of Jesus presents us with a dilemma between two extremely improbable claims, one of which must be true. The resurrection of Jesus is, prima facie, extremely improbable. But the testimony of the apostles, the conversion of multitudes, the courage of the martyrs, the simple eyewitness style yet tremendous wisdom of the Gospels, all claiming Jesus rose from the dead-- let’s sum it all up as the rise of the early Church-- also seems extremely improbable if Jesus didn’t, in fact, rise from the dead. How can we settle it?
Can Bayes’ Law help?
Well, yes, sort of. Bayes’ Law can settle exactly how probable the resurrection of Jesus is, in light of the rise of the early Church, if we can quantify the ex ante probability of the resurrection, and of the rise of the early Church, with and without the resurrection. Of course, that’s not easy to do. We can say of both the resurrection, and the rise of the early Church without the resurrection, that they’re “extremely improbable,” meaning the probability is low, but how low? One in a million? One in a billion? One in a sextillion sextillion sextillion? We can’t wrap our heads around such numbers. In normal speech, “one in a million” and “one in a billion” are practically synonyms, meaning “impossible,” and “one in a sextillion sextillion sextillion” sounds like a joke. Yet depending on how such arcane numbers get picked, the likelihood of the resurrection of Jesus can swing from nearly certain to negligible.
To see why, first define A as Jesus rising from the dead. P(A) is the probability of A. Next, define B as the rise of the early Church, and P(B|A) and P(B|-A) as the probability that the rise of the early Church would occur if Jesus did, and didn’t, rise from the dead, respectively. P(B|A) should be relatively high, since it’s not surprising that if hundreds of people witnessed a miraculous resurrection, they would spread the word, and have a big impact. P(B|-A) should be extremely low, for all the reasons explained above.
So let’s try some specific numbers and see what result we get:
P(A) = 1 in 1 million
P(B|A) = ½
P(B|-A) = 1 in 1 billion
Plugging these numbers into Bayes’ formula yields a likelihood of 99.8% that the Resurrection occurred. But maybe we think the ex ante probability of a man rising from the dead is less than 1 in 1 million. So let’s try different numbers:
P(A) = 1 in 100 trillion
P(B|A) = ½
P(B|-A) = 1 in 10 billion
With these numbers, the likelihood of the Resurrection of Jesus falls to 0.005%!
The mathematical exercise here may seem artificial and fantastic, yet its lesson is valid and important. The common sense expectation would be that neither (a) the resurrection of Jesus, nor (b) a vast, disinterested, and dangerous conspiracy to invent the resurrection of Jesus for no reason, would ever occur. Both events should be dismissed as prohibitively improbable. But since the rise of the early Church did happen, we have to choose between (a) and (b). So which is more improbable? If the resurrection is a bit more improbable than the conspiracy, a Bayesian rationalist would conclude that Jesus wasn’t resurrected. If the resurrection was a bit less improbable than the conspiracy, a Bayesian rationalist would conclude that He was. But how can we tell? What basis have we to judge such a question? And if we judge without being able to account for how-- and we have to do that sort of thing every day, so we can’t really oppose it absolutely on principle-- will we all come to the same conclusion? Evidently not, since people are in diametric disagreement about whether the resurrection occurred.
Jesus foretold as much. “I have come,” He told His disciples, “to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law” (Matthew 10:35). Many, many families know the truth of this prophecy first-hand. Christianity often drives a wedge between parents and children, between siblings, between spouses, with one believing, the other denying, even as they have little difficulty agreeing on most other things. And now we have a glimpse of why. Christianity forces people to choose between two impossible alternatives, and it is hard to balance on the knife edge of indecision. People fall one way or the other, and end up polarized.
But what determines the outcome in each individual case? What determines into which certainty people fall? Bayes’ Law has an answer: it depends on priors. That is, how people decide after consulting the evidence depends on subtle differences in worldview prior to the evidence, differences that make various possibilities seem to them plausible and likely, or implausible, or even impossible. But where do worldviews come from? That is the topic of the next chapter.