Dear Alumni,
It is strange, is it not, that
perfectly rational, even brilliant people should believe the
most untenable of fables but disbelieve the most believable of
historical events? No, it is beyond strange: it is downright
tragic, because to deny this one historical fact—the
resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ—means to die in pitiful
despair (1 Cor 15:17–19).
Yet people through the ages have replaced the resurrection of
Christ with some fabulous theories of their own. They must do
something, because Christ’s resurrection cannot be ignored by
anyone who goes under the name of Christian. An enraged bull in
a pasture you speed past on the highway is merely of possible
interest, but he necessarily becomes an item of urgent attention
when he shows up in your living room! The resurrection of Jesus
Christ is squarely in the living room of Christianity.
It seems that virtually all possible theories to turn aside from
believing in Christ’s resurrection have been advanced at one
time or another. But they always fade away in light of the
overwhelming evidence and truth of the resurrection of Jesus
Christ from the dead. His resurrection today is as real and
demanding for the unbeliever as that snorting bull parked in the
living room.
Hoax Theories
The very first alternative theory proposed said that the
disciples stole Jesus’ body and were lying about his
resurrection. Indeed this was spread by those who crucified the
Lord (see Matt. 28:11–15). In subsequent centuries the
rudimentary hoax theory was modified to say that either Judas or
Simon Magus substituted himself on the cross for Jesus who
subsequently went into hiding. More recent times have witnessed
several versions of the hoax theory. In 1778, a deist professor
of Oriental languages in Germany, H. M. Reimarus, advanced the
old line that the deceitful disciples stole Jesus’ body. In 1828
another German professor named H. E. G. Paulus defended his
“swoon theory” which says that Jesus merely fainted on the cross
and came out of his grave a few days later to live out his days
in hiding. A newer and more complicated hoax theory was advanced
with much media publicity in 1965 by Hugh Schonfield (The
Passover Plot) who said that Jesus provoked his own
crucifixion which he survived—with the help of some drugged
vinegar from conspirators Judas and Joseph of Arimathea—in order
to dupe his gullible disciples into believing that he was raised
to eternal life.
The original hoax theory fails on the simple point that all it
would have taken to explode the Christian story of Jesus’
resurrection was to exhume his body. Peter himself remarks that
all his contemporaries knew that David “is both dead and buried,
and his tomb is with us to this day,” yet “This Jesus God has
raised up, of which we are all witnesses” (Acts 2:29, 32). It is
impossible to believe that an early Christian testimony like
this could stand if Jesus’ body were still in his tomb for the
authorities to produce in order to expose a hoax. It is equally
impossible to believe that the demoralized, confused group of
disciples would have dreamed of stealing Jesus’ body from under
the noses of armed guards in order to perpetrate some grand
fraud about his resurrection. What would be the point? They
gained nothing by their belief in Jesus’ resurrection except
great risk to their lives and families—indeed, many paid the
extreme price for their faith.
Hugh Schonfield’s fanciful reconstruction has been called a thin
“tissue of imagination,” and the same could be said of all the
other hoax theories. Are we to believe that all of the earliest
Christians were a credulous lot of dupes to be taken by some
incredibly stupid scheme? How could anyone have provoked his own
crucifixion with the intention of surviving and pulling off some
exceptionally complicated ruse? And are we to believe that Jesus
and his apostles, who consistently taught and modeled the
highest of ethical standards, were rank liars and frauds (e.g.,
Rev 21:8; 22:15)? Frankly, these theories are much more
preposterous than the Bible’s clear testimony that Jesus was
indeed raised from the dead.
Phantom Theories
A
second theory reaching into the earliest days of Christianity
was particularly attractive in a pagan Greek world in which many
denigrated bodily existence and exalted the soul. Hence, some
independent teachers arose on the outskirts of Christianity who
taught that Jesus did not rise from the dead in the body,
because he never had a body to begin with—he merely appeared to
come “in flesh.” This teaching is called “docetism” after the
Greek word for “to appear,” and was opposed very early on by the
Apostle John (1 John 4:1–3; 2 John 7) and the early church
father, Ignatius of Antioch (especially in his Trallian and
Smyrnean epistles). This “docetic” teaching was propagated later
among various Christian fringe groups, especially by the
pseudo-philosophical works of those known as “Gnostics” and
Manichaeans.
Interestingly, there is a short Gnostic treatise on the
resurrection found among the famous collection from Nag Hammadi
in Egypt, which asserts that Christ’s body was indeed raised
from the dead. The author makes a very perceptive point when he
says that it is more suitable to believe that the world is
illusory than that the resurrection is. Some religions, of
course, teach that the world is an illusion, but this notion has
no support whatsoever in the biblical world view. In the end,
this ancient Gnostic teacher’s statement is a most perceptive
critique of the docetic dream that Christ was a phantom all
along. “Behold My hands and My feet, that it is I Myself. Handle
Me and see, for a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you
see I have” (Luke 24:39).
Vision Theories
Finally, some alternative theories state that Jesus truly died
and his body stayed in the tomb. How then do they explain the
testimony of the earliest disciples that they had seen the risen
Christ? Various explanations have been advanced by twentieth
century scholars like Rudolf Bultmann, Johannes Weiss, Michael
Perry, and most recently, by Gerd Luedemann. The disciples
honestly believed that Jesus arose from the dead, but, we are
told, they were only experiencing a mental picture of him. For
some, this vision was a subjective dream induced by the
disciples’ own crushing disappointment at Jesus’ crucifixion.
For others, the vision of the risen Christ had an objective core
as a paranormal telepathic experience. For Luedemann, for
instance, religion is a “pschyodynamic” grappling with the
unconscious, so that what the disciples experienced was induced
by a kind of religious ecstasy. He writes that, after all,
ancient people were incapable of distinguishing between illusory
experiences like this and the experience of external, physical
events.
Both modern hoax theories and
these modern “vision” theories arise from an anti-supernaturalist
starting point that Jesus could not have risen from the dead.
The theorists claim that they are pursuing the issue through
“scientific” historical inquiry, yet they exclude the only
plausible conclusion from the start. Despite their claims, this
is not unbiased historiography at work. And if the ancients were
unable to distinguish a vision from real life, why do we read in
the Gospels that Thomas and others did not believe in Jesus’
resurrection until they could verify that he was physically
raised, by touching him and seeing the evidence of crucifixion,
and seeing him eat (John 20:24–29; Mark 16:14; Luke 24:41–43;
cf. Matt 28:17) ? Perry, Luedemann, and others would have us
place our faith in the highly dubious area of parapsychology
(telepathy, clairvoyance, psychokinesis, etc.) and the study of
the “unconscious” on which various psychological theories have
widely divergent views. Orthodox Christianity has chosen instead
to believe the testimony of men who insisted that they
touched and saw these things with their own eyes and
hands (e.g., 1 John 1:1–3; 2 Pet 1:16–21; Heb 2:1–4). It seems
much more difficult to believe that over 500 people (1 Cor 15:6)
experienced the same hallucination induced by some sort of
religious frenzy sustained for almost six weeks.
The alternatives proposed throughout history to the Bible’s
presentation of a loving and omnipotent God who raised his
incarnate Son from the dead for our redemption are hardly
persuasive. In the end of the day it comes down to whose
testimony we can believe. “For we did not follow cunningly
devised fables . . . but were eyewitnesses” (2 Pet 1:16).
S. M. Baugh
Professor of New Testament
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