Logic, Life, and the Resurrection: The Old Evangelical Apologists

When I was a young evangelical, the resurrection of Jesus was both a vitally important and easy topic to address. It was important because I believed that the message of the church stood or fell on the reversal of death in space-time reality. The first section of John Updike's poem, "Seven Stanzas at Easter", captures the perspective as well or better than any prose description. 

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall. 

 It was also easy because I had been armed with arguments carefully cultivated by old-school apologists engaged in the culture wars of the 80s and 90s. These arguments often attempted to show that not only might the resurrection have happened a straightforward, literal-physical sense, but that it was just about as certain as you could get in matters of history. Not all of them were as crass. I was attracted to the slightly more sophisticated versions that I could find. C. Stephen Evans and Peter Kreeft, a philosopher at Boston College, became a trusted guides for me among the skeptics and liberals (a.k.a. wolves in sheep clothing). Kreeft, in particular, argued that there were only five logical possibilities regarding the resurrection of Jesus:

1. The Swoon theory--Jesus never actually died.
2. The Hallucination theory--the grief-stricken disciples imaginations got the best of them.
3. The Conspiracy theory--the disciples stole the body.
4. The Myth theory--the recorded testimony is not meant to be taken literally.
5. The Christian explanation--which you should accept because none of the others hold up.

Pieces of Kreeft's entire argument can be found scattered about the history of the church. In fact, that is part of the beauty of his achievement as a synthesizer. For example, Pascal wonders in the Pensees, "If Jesus did not rise, who made the disciples act as they did?" C.S. Lewis devotes some time to the appearances and the hallucination theory in Miracles Chapter 16. I will not recapitulate the entire argument offered by Kreeft, which even in condensed form runs over ten pages, but the rebuttal essentially goes like this:

1. The Romans were too good at crucifixion for resuscitation to be possible.
2. Many people claimed to see Jesus, so why didn't someone just produce the body and stop it?
3. The disciples died gruesome deaths. Surely someone would have let the cat out of the bag.
4. Either the  gospel accounts are historical or mythical.
5. Paul (like Updike above) believed it was the linchpin of Christianity (1 Cor. 15)

Probably the only statement above that seems likely to be true without qualification is the statement about Jesus' death being real. The other statements rest upon a couple of debatable presuppositions. Dominic Crossan, for instance, asks the haunting question that I believe enters the heart of statements 2 and 3.To paraphrase, what if those who cared didn't know, and those who knew didn't care? Sometimes the conservative apologist's picture of the period after the resurrection imagines the Roman and  Jewish leadership standing in the place of the modern skeptic, waiting for an opportunity to crush the fledgling sect by digging up a body and saying, "Aha!" Or, similarly, the disciples going door-to-door bothering everyone with Easter tracts. Judaism was splintered into a variety of sects. Who cared about one more, especially when their Messiah was dead? The other presupposition is that history and myth are logically incompatible forms of discourse. This is almost certainly a modern invention. Ancient texts routinely mix what we would call history with legendary and metaphorical elements. I can hear the conservative detractor say, "But the disciples claimed to be eye-witnesses" True enough; they did. Overall the gospel accounts, and the writings of Paul on the subject, sound like much like eye-witness accounts in comparison to other stories in the Bible. But it simply begs the question that, even if they were, they would write on the subject in the manner of the Enlightenment centuries later with its attempted, authentic, unbiased reporting of "the way it was". This itself further assumes that historiography of that kind is both achievable and desirable.

About the time that Kreeft was typing out his argument, conservative Christianity starting questioning the foundationalist presuppositions of its program through the incorporation of Kierkegaardian (Evans eventually went on to write several books on the Dane) and postmodern humility. The old evangelical apologists were fading away, but the questions still remained.

* Picture: Jacob de Wit shows truth keeping her eye on a historian (1754)