Arguing the Affirmative: RANDAL THE CHRISTIAN
Arguing the Negative: JOHN THE ATHEIST
Randal’s Opening Statement
What would it take to persuade you that your brother is the long-expected messiah? Quite a lot I suspect. You grew up with the guy. You saw him scrape his knee, get a cold, and accidentally knock Mom’s favorite vase on the floor. Is it any wonder that thinking of your sibling as the messiah strains your credulity far beyond the breaking point?
So it should be little surprise that Jesus too was met with skepticism from his siblings. To begin with, the Gospels give no evidence that the siblings of Jesus supported him during his ministry. If anything, in Matthew 12:46–50 Jesus marginalized family, placing them on the outside while his disciples were on the inside. Even more explicitly, John 7:2–5 avers that the brothers of Jesus openly rejected his teaching:
But when the Jewish Festival of Tabernacles was near, Jesus’ brothers said to him, “Leave Galilee and go to Judea, so that your disciples there may see the works you do. No one who wants to become a public figure acts in secret. Since you are doing these things, show yourself to the world.” For even his own brothers did not believe in him.
This is hugely significant. According to the criterion of embarrassment in assessing ancient historical claims, any testimony that is embarrassing to one’s cause is more likely to be true because it would not have been included otherwise. So it seems highly unlikely that the general incredulity of the brothers of Jesus toward his teaching and ministry would have been included if it had not been true. As a result, the evidence supports the fact that James was not a disciple of Jesus during his brother’s life and ministry.
This makes it all the more incredible that after the death of Jesus, James emerged as the de facto leader of the Jerusalem Christians (see Acts 15:13; 21:18; Gal. 1:19; 2:9, 12). This testimony is confirmed in Jewish historian Josepheus’s work Antiquities where he observes that James was martyred in Jerusalem in AD 62.[80]
But how did this happen? How did an intelligent man (you don’t become a leader of the Jerusalem Christians without being intelligent) become persuaded that his crucified brother was the Messiah? Deuteronomy 21:23 teaches that “anyone hung on a tree is under God’s curse” (NRSV). If anything, James would have viewed the crucifixion as a confirmation of his suspicions. And yet inexplicably, he became a leader of the Christians.
Paul explains why in 1 Corinthians 15 (written ca. AD 50–51), where he recounts a teaching he had received from others: “For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance” (1 Cor. 15:3). This is technical, rabbinic phrasing. One does not innovate or embellish rabbinic teaching but instead passes it on faithfully. What was it that Paul received? He explains: Christ died, was buried, and was raised. And “raised” here is clearly a bodily resurrection, which is made abundantly clear in the rest of the chapter (as well as in the background Jewish worldview of the time). Next, Paul lists in this teaching several names of those who witnessed the risen Jesus and thereby became converts to him, including James, the brother of Jesus.
What is the best explanation for James’s belief that he had seen his brother raised? Obviously legend is not a plausible explanation. There simply is no time for a legend to develop here, and James’s own leadership in the church and martyrdom attests to his belief. One may think that James saw a vision, but remember, he believed his brother died under God’s curse. Visions come within a climate of background expectation. A hypnotist or magician doesn’t call the scowling skeptic in the audience up on stage. He chooses the fawning fan on the edge of her seat, ready to be manipulated. So James was definitely not susceptible to seeing a vision.
So then what? Did James get pulled into an elaborate conspiracy? To what end? So that he could be martyred?
The historian who seeks to reconstruct past events based on available evidence needs something to work with here. If you want to posit a non-miraculous reconstruction of the events you can do so, but it has to work with all the available data and be plausible. For those not closed a priori to the invocation of miraculous causes, the bodily resurrection of Jesus remains the most plausible explanation for the transformation of James. Consider it this way: My brother is a fine chap. But to believe he’s the Messiah? That would take nothing short of a miracle.
John’s Opening Statement
Paul is the only New Testament writer who claimed he saw the risen Jesus, and his letters are the earliest testimony we have of it. But we have serious difficulties in knowing what he saw. On the Damascus Road he never claimed to have actually seen or touched Jesus (see Acts 9; 22; 26; Gal. 1). He specifically said it was a visionary experience (Acts 26:12–19; see 9:17) and that he had many of them (2 Cor. 12:1–7; see 1 Cor. 9:1). Paul even claimed he got his gospel from a private revelation (Gal. 1:11–12; which is contrary to 1 Cor. 15:3). The book of Acts tells us of Paul’s visions in 16:9–10; 18:9; 22:17–18; 23:11; and we see one in Galatians 2:2. Paul repeatedly spoke of revelations that he passed down to the church (1 Cor. 2:13; 7:40; 14:37). He even said he learned about the Lord’s Supper from the Lord himself (1 Cor. 11:23–25), which provided the basis for the stories later told in the Gospels. People in Paul’s early churches were visionaries too, reflected in Acts 2:17: “Young men will see visions.” They were convinced they were receiving divine messages from Jesus and expressed them through the spiritual gifts of divine “wisdom,” “knowledge,” “prophecy,” and “tongues” (2 Cor. 12:7–10). These are private, subjective experiences. Why should anyone who did not have one accept them as reliable testimony? I see no reason why we should. Paul equated his own visionary experience of the risen Jesus with the witnesses in 1 Corinthians 15:3–8, so their testimony cannot be considered any better than Paul’s.
Consider instead the gold plates Joseph Smith claimed the angel Moroni led him to discover, which he supposedly translated, producing the Book of Mormon. Smith carefully chose eleven men besides himself who became twelve “eyewitnesses” to these plates. Their testimony is that they had “beheld and saw the plates and the engravings thereon” and that they “know of a surety that the said Smith has got the plates of which we have spoken.” Now let’s say this is all we know. Is it enough to believe? Before deciding we surely would want to personally ask them some questions and investigate their claims, just as we would want to personally talk to Paul’s list of “witnesses.” That’s not unreasonable, just as we would doubt Balaam’s tale until he made his ass talk in front of us (see Num. 22). In the case of the witnesses to Smith’s gold plates, we know they were family, close friends, and/or his financial backers. We also know they didn’t actually physically see these plates but rather saw them in visions and that some of them recanted later.[81]
When it comes to Paul’s witnesses, most of the questions we need to know go unanswered. We do not know much about them except that it’s likely they were probably all visionaries just like Paul. Besides, second-, third-, and fourth-hand testimony is simply not good enough. Perhaps they were duped. Did they all tell the same story? Did any of them recant? Without independent evidence to believe them, we must be skeptical.
We do not have anything written directly by Jesus himself or any of his original twelve disciples, nor do we have anything written by the Jewish leaders about Paul’s claims, nor anything by the Romans. We have no records they were converted either. The Jews of Jesus’s day believed in Yahweh and that he did miracles, and they knew their Old Testament prophecies. Yet overwhelming numbers of them did not believe Jesus was raised from the dead by Yahweh. So Christianity didn’t take root in the Jewish homeland but had to reach out to the Greco-Roman world for converts. Why should we believe if the Jews who were there didn’t?
Furthermore, we have no independent reports that:
Could these events really have happened without Philo, Josephus, rabbinic or Roman literature mentioning them? These silences are telling.
There is every reason to doubt Jesus rose from the dead.[82]
Randal’s Rebuttal
John suggests that Paul was an unreliable witness because he was prone to visions. Not only is this begging the question since it assumes that Paul’s experiences had no divine cause, but it also doesn’t explain the Damascus Road experience. It is one thing to have a vision; it is another thing to be knocked to the ground and set on a completely different life course.
Regardless, my argument relies on James, the leader whom Paul met for two weeks along with Peter (Gal. 1:18–19). It is very likely that Paul received the teaching summarized in 1 Corinthians 15:3–8 during this time. If John’s argument is going to work, he can’t simply raise a few doubts about Paul. He also has to explain the beliefs of Peter, the other early Christians, and of course James—not to mention the empty tomb. Unfortunately for John, naturalistic accounts of all the data end up looking even more miraculous than the miracle they’re straining to avoid.
John’s Rebuttal
Just ask yourself what it would take for Joseph Smith’s father and two brothers to believe him about the gold plates. They were visionaries, just like James was according to Paul, since he equated his visionary experience with the witnesses listed in 1 Corinthians 15:3–8. In a superstitious world like that, anything can be believed. It doesn’t matter if James was a doubter before his vision, for a vision could easily change his mind in that world. And if Paul believed James’s vision converted him, then he surely would have said so.
I have doubts James was a doubter. The only place we’re told he doubted is an editorial comment in John 7:5: “For even his own brothers did not believe in him” (see vv. 2–5). How do we know the editor properly interpreted their words when the scholarly consensus is that the Gospel of John is a late and unreliable one? Eliminate it and there is nothing elsewhere indicating he doubted.
Nonetheless, if James was a nonbeliever prior to seeing the risen Jesus, then Jesus can convert people without abrogating their free will. If he can do this once with James, why doesn’t he do this with others?
Randal’s Closing Statement
John’s Mormon analogy breaks down because a golden plate isn’t a resurrected person. While he is anxious to raise doubt about the credibility of witnesses, John cannot offer a satisfactory natural hypothesis to explain all the data, including the convictions of early Christians like James in the empty tomb and post-resurrection appearances.
John’s Closing Statement
It’s not begging the question to doubt Joseph Smith’s witnesses if all we know is that they saw the gold plates in visions. Paul said he had a vision on the Damascus road. It’s related in Acts realistically as he saw it, since visionaries believe these things really happened.