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Let me tell you a parable.
“Harry is a hopelessly dumb physics student attending a large university. He fails all his first semester classes; his math skills are at a fifth-grade level; and he has no aptitude for science. One day, all the physics students and professors at his college decide to fool Harry by making him think he is the best physics student at the university. Graders give him perfect scores on all assignments, even though he deserves a failing grade. Eventually Harry graduates and goes on for a PhD, where the ruse continues. The professors at his university send a letter to all the physicists in the world and include them in the spoof. Harry receives his degree, takes a prestigious chair of physics, regularly delivers papers at major science conferences, and is often featured in Time and Newsweek. But he knows nothing about physics. Harry’s life is filled with respect, accomplishment, expertise, and happiness.”[1]
Despite the fact that such a ruse is unrealistic[2], there is a deeper question this parable raises. Would you envy Harry? Does it matter that his life is built on a lie? I wouldn’t want to be him. It seems to me that that kind of life is worthless if it is not true. The apostle Paul thought the same about Christianity. He said,
If Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith…If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins… If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied. (1 Cor 15:14, 17, 19 NIV)
You see, Paul recognized that if the resurrection of Jesus was not a real event in history, then Christianity is false, faith is useless, and Christians should be pitied. At that time, believing a falsehood like the resurrection would only get you impaled and torched in Nero’s personal garden, or hunted down and eaten by animals in the arena. Present day Christian missionaries face similar challenges in hostile parts of the world. They’re often tortured and beheaded for their faith. What a pity, if their life is wasted on a lie.
But what about those not facing persecution, like most Christians in America? If the resurrection of Jesus is false, is their faith still useless? Again, Paul would think so, and I think my parable illustrates why. If the resurrection of Jesus was not a real event in history, then at most, Christianity is a fairy tale that functions like a placebo. There really isn’t anything there, but it makes you feel good. The Christian’s life would be just like Harry’s in our parable. Though it would be filled with comfort and happiness, it would be entirely based on a lie. If Jesus was not raised from the dead, you could call Christianity a “placebo worldview.”[3]
However, if Jesus did rise from the dead, then Christianity is true, and any worldview counter to it would be the placebo. So, who is living the fairy tale- the Christian or the non-Christian? It depends on the truth of Jesus’ resurrection.
But how can you know if he was raised from the dead? Most Christians know by their personal experience of him. There is a famous hymn I have sung many times in church that says, “You ask me how I know he lives, he lives within my heart.” This kind of knowledge of Jesus’ resurrection is completely legitimate, and I share such an experience in my own life. But, I do not think that personal experience is the only way to know that Jesus was raised from the dead. Since the resurrection is a claim about an event in history, it can be investigated using the tools of secular historians. I have made an extensive historical case for the resurrection that you can read here, but in this post, I want to just briefly summarize that case. My contention in my longer essay, and this short blog is that when standard historical methodology is applied to the relevant data we have concerning Jesus and the development of the early church, we are left with a set of minimal facts that are best explained/accounted for by the hypothesis that God raised Jesus from the dead.
Historians do not have time machines to travel to the past and learn exactly what happened. Rather, they have to reconstruct what most likely happened. How do they do that? Two steps: 1) Establish facts and 2) Explain the facts. This is very much like a detective who arrives at a crime scene and begins collecting evidence to establish certain facts like the position of the body, the weapon, friends of the victim, alibis, etc. The detective then begins creating and testing hypotheses to see which best explains the evidence. Can the evidence best be explained by natural death, suicide, homicide, etc. In order to establish facts, historians have a kind of “tool kit” you could say, called the Criteria of Authenticity. To determine the best explanation of the facts, historians have a different “tool kit” called the Criteria for Weighing Hypotheses. The great thing about that first criteria is that it can be applied to any ancient set of documents, no matter how reliable or unreliable they are. The Criteria of Authenticity can pull out the nuggets of truth that may be lost in legendary development over time.
Scholars today have applied the Criteria of Authenticity to the ancient documents (biographies and letters) found within the Bible, and many outside of the Bible. On the reports of Jesus’ resurrection, they have established five facts. These five facts are held by a substantial majority of scholars today regardless of worldview (whether atheist, agnostic, Jewish, etc.) Since there is such wide agreement, we can call these the minimal facts.
1) Jesus’ execution by Roman crucifixion.
2) The disciples’ belief that he had been resurrected and appeared to them at various times and places, to both individuals and groups.
3) Paul’s conversion resulting from his experience of what he believed was the risen Jesus.
4) James’ conversion from skepticism to a leadership position in the early church in Jerusalem resulting from an experience that he considered to be the resurrected Jesus.
5) Jesus’s tomb was discovered empty by a group of women the Sunday morning after his crucifixion.
As minimal facts, these are not legends. They are the facts that must be explained. So what hypotheses have historians of the past and present proposed? There have been many alternative hypotheses put forward. But when assessed using the Criteria for Weighing Hypotheses none of them are even close compared to the resurrection hypothesis. Let’s look at some of those hypotheses now and assess each one briefly.[4]
1. God Raised Jesus from the Dead- This hypothesis can explain why there would be an empty tomb, since Jesus’s corpse would be transformed and made alive again. This hypothesis can explain why there would be appearances to both individuals and groups since Jesus had a body and could be seen and heard, touched and eaten with. The only problem you may have with this hypothesis is if you don’t believe in miracles. But if that is your only reason for rejecting it, then you have let your bias decide what happened before you have ever looked at the evidence. Additionally, I would ask why you would say a miracle is impossible or improbable when we have such great evidence for God from natural theology[5] as well as evidence for a supernatural dimension to reality[6]?
2. Someone Stole the Body- This hypothesis struggles to explain who exactly would have had the motivation and the means to steal the body other than the disciples (see #8 Conspiracy Theory). A single individual could not move the 440lb stone. So, some group had to do it. The Roman and Jewish authorities wanted Jesus dead. Jesus’ family wouldn’t steal it because they probably weren’t wealthy enough to have a family tomb, and even if they were, putting Jesus’ remains in it would dishonor all the other ancestral remains. Grave robbers risked serious punishment under Roman law, and are not likely to take the body itself, only the valuables in a tomb. There is no evidence for necromancers stealing bodies in this time and place. And, even if all of these difficulties are solved, at best this theory can only explain the empty tomb, not the appearances.
3. The Women Went to the Wrong Tomb- This hypothesis imagines that the women accidentally went to a different tomb that morning, and upon finding it unoccupied since it was not in use yet, concluded that Jesus had risen from the dead. There are three big problems though: a) the Jewish Authorities would have happily reported the mistake as soon as the disciples began proclaiming resurrection. b) It doesn’t fit well with the fact that across the gospels, no one except John is said to have believed on the basis of the empty tomb alone. c) At best this would explain the empty tomb, not the appearances.
4. Roman or Jewish Authorities Took the Body- This hypothesis imagines that Roman and Jewish authorities moved Jesus’ body to the common graveyard for criminals, and the women and disciples found an empty tomb and concluded resurrection. This hypothesis is very weak because the Jewish leaders wanted to crush the movement Jesus started. That is why they had him crucified. They would surely have put a stop to the resurrection rumor by pointing to his actual burial site. This theory is also weak because the gospels are clear that no one believed in the resurrection on the basis of the empty tomb alone except John. This theory cannot account for the appearances.
5. The Appearances were Hallucinations- This hypothesis is very weak because it does not account for the empty tomb. It also cannot account well for the individual appearances to Paul or James since they were not in the mindset to hallucinate Jesus. It also cannot account for the group appearances to the twelve, all the apostles, and the five hundred. Prominent psychologists who have authored textbooks on hallucinations tell us that they happen in a single individuals minds and not in groups.
6. The Appearances were Apparitions- An apparition is the sensing of the presence of a dead individual. They are rare, but when they occur it is usually to those who are grieving the loss of a loved one. This hypothesis is weak in many of the same ways as hallucinations. It does not account for the empty tomb. People who experience apparitions do not conclude that their dead love one has been resurrected or is alive again. Also, the apparition would be the only one in history for which we have any evidence that could be seen, heard, touched, and eaten with. It would be extraordinarily rare if not impossible for an apparition to have all of those features at the same time. It would be even more extraordinary for the apparition to have those features each time it appears to different individuals and groups.
7. The Resurrection was a Hoax by Jesus’ Twin- This hypothesis is weak because it makes all kinds of un-evidenced assumptions. You must assume that a) Jesus was separated from his twin at birth, b) the twin just happened to come to Jerusalem at the time of Jesus’ death, c) the twin was stupid enough to want to impersonate someone who had just been executed and if caught would be likewise, d) had to be unethical to want to steal Jesus’ body and lie to hoax the resurrection, and e) so familiar with Jesus’ speech and mannerisms despite their having never met that he could fool Jesus’ closest friends. This is a desperate ad hoc attempt to escape the conclusion that Jesus was raised from the dead.
8. The Disciples Stole Jesus’ Body and Invented the Resurrection- This hypothesis is weak because the disciples would never have made up a story that women were the first witnesses to the empty tomb since in that culture, a woman’s testimony was not accepted in a court of law. It also cannot account for the conversion of Paul or James. They were a persecutor and skeptic respectively, so they would not have been in on the lie. Lastly, it doesn’t fit well with the disciples’ willingness to suffer intense persecution, imprisonment, and even death for their faith in the resurrection. Their willingness to suffer shows that they sincerely believed it.
9. Jesus Only Passed Out- If you’ve ever seen the Passion of the Christ movie you have a pretty good idea of what Jesus went through. Based on the best medical and historical evidence we have, a team of three medical doctors showed this hypothesis to be debunked and published their findings in the Journal of American Medical Science in 1986. Scourging alone was enough to kill some, but the Romans were trained executioners and would have made sure Jesus was dead. However, even if Jesus had survived, this hypothesis is still farfetched. Why? Because Jesus in his weakened, battered, bloody state with no food or water for two days, would have had to roll away a stone weighing 440lbs. with nail pierced hands, beat up the guards, hobble on nail pierced feet a significant distance until reaching the disciples, then inform them that he was the resurrected Prince of Life who had conquered death, and some day each of them would receive a glorious resurrected body just like him. They wouldn’t have worshipped him…they would have called a doctor.
Each of the alternative hypotheses to the resurrection suffered insurmountable problems. Combining hypotheses won’t help either because it just increases the improbability since the individual problems still go unsolved. For example, suppose we combined hypothesis 2 and 5, saying that someone stole the body of Jesus and the appearances were hallucinations. Well, it still suffers the same problem of who would have stolen the body, and why, as well as the problems that it wouldn’t account for Paul or James or group appearances. If there was a 50% chance that someone stole the body (though I think it is far less), and a 10% chance that all the appearances were hallucinations (though I think it is far less), combining these would just make matters worse, giving you a 5% chance that your hypothesis is correct.[7]
As I already mentioned, I have made a far more robust case for the historicity of the resurrection elsewhere, but hopefully this summary gives you a pretty good idea. The resurrection is the best hypothesis for anyone who is open minded to the possibility of its truth. If you let your bias rule it out before ever looking at the evidence, then I consider that intellectually dishonest. Having shown its historicity, we can now answer our original question of who had the placebo worldview? Is it the Christian or the non-Christian believing a fairy tale like Harry in our parable? I honestly think the evidence shows it’s the non-Christian. We ought to follow the truth wherever it leads, and the evidence for the resurrection is decisive. It leads to Jesus.
Endnotes
[1] Moreland & Muelhoff. The God Conversation. (IVP). 2nd Ed. 2017. Pg. 97.
[2] Ruses like this, but to a lesser extent have been done. Look into the stories of Florence Foster Jenkins and John Du Pont. Good films depicting the ruses have been made. See “Foxcatcher” (2014), and “Florence Foster Jenkins” (2016).
[3] Moreland & Muelhoff, The God Conversation. Pg. 98.
[4] I developed the chart based on Peter Kreft & Ronald Tacelli’s Handbook for Christian Apologetics pg. 182.
[5] https://www.reasonablefaith.org/ See the videos on the cosmological argument, fine-tuning argument, moral argument, and ontological argument.
[6] https://youtu.be/WRYIr2aBkLk
[7] I’m using this example more as an illustration, rather than an an accurate statistical analysis. For that, we would have to use the probability calculus of Bayes Theorem, and historians do not use it because some of the variables are too difficult if not impossible to assign a value. Even if it could be used, I think resurrection still comes out on top as demonstrated by Richard Swinburne in his book The Resurrection of God Incarnate (Oxford University Press) 2003.