I'm not interested in having a theological discussion at all. I've not engaged with "history" people much, so I am interested in your thoughts.

Simply, I often hear it claimed by Christians -- who cite H.G Wells (I believe a science fiction writer, so I'm not sure why his comments are noteworthy) – something to the effect of, "the resurrection is the most attested to miracle in history". They seem quite convinced that it happened. It seems like a claim worthy of investigation.

So, from a historians perspective, is there enough information or evidence available to make any strong claims about the Resurrection? Clearly, based on the way "reality" works, it's natural to hear of such a claim and say "nope didn't happen", but if there is "evidence" and it speaks for itself, what does it indicate about the Resurrection, or events surrounding it?

Any books that are worthy of a read?

I apologize if this type of thread is not welcome in History, i checked the sticky and it doesn't seem to be in violation.

I would google Gary Habermas' site. He's written on it. IIRC he did his doctorate on the Resurrection. He even has a 9 part skeptic's approach to it on Youtube.

Attested to by whom? Every account of the resurrection is a statement of faith contained within the Gospels, Pauline missionary epistles, or later apocrypha, all of which are clearly religious rather than historical accounts. If we want to get into the historicity of the Gospels, that's a separate matter, but I don't know a single honest historian, Christian or otherwise, who thinks taking the Gospels at face value is a good idea.

How can you make that discernment?

The resurrection is by definition a miracle or supernatural event; it does not fall under the category of straight history. It is also inherently religious in nature and the question should have been posted in RGT were religious history as pertaining to miracles, saintly visions, revelations, resurrections, or Mohammed ascending to heaven on a horse should be discussed.

Also most posters could not be objective in any analysis of an historical religious matter (the resurrection) in which the entire religious belief system hinges on some miraculous event. This applies equally to most current religions, from Hinduism to Christianity to Islam, to whether Buddha attained enlightenment under the bodhi tree.

The OP is about the same as asking what historical evidence is there of the world being created in six days and thinking this is a legitimate post to make in the History Forum.


OP will be moved to RGT.

-Zeno

There are actually historical arguments that can be made in favor of the resurrection. It basically has to do with finding a reason for the origins of Christianity as a deviation from Judaism at the time. Essentially, the argument is of the following form: What could compel a rather large number of Jewish adherents to accept a new theological concept that is somehow grounded in the old theology yet completely different in significant ways?

NT Wright's "The Challenge of Jesus" is an extremely difficult and dense read, but it addresses this issue from an academic historian's perspective. I should note that the book is written to a non-specialist academic Christian audience, but he makes reference in his book to more academic works where you can follow up if you desire.

What's funny is that he spent about an hour on Earth when he came back, then he went back to heaven. A few people wrote about how they claimed to have seen him resurrect.

That's a pretty obviously bad argument. There have been many, many schisms, breakaway sects, new religions, etc., that have arisen from groups of believers of previous religions. We have one nice relatively recent example with the creation of Mormonism, which occurred during a period where we have the benefit of primary historical sources.

And yet i doubt a single Orthodox Christian would accept that the fact that a rather large group of Orthodox Christians accepted the testimony of Joseph Smith and his close associates and deviated into a new hybrid faith is evidence of the truth of Smith's claims.

On the issue raised by the OP, the fundamental problem with any sort of historical claim about the resurrection is the lack of a single contemporaneous account of it. The gospels were written years later, have all sorts of consistency and reliability issues, and weren't written by eyewitnesses (and indeed we actually don't know who wrote them at all).

And the Pauline epistles were even worse-- Saul of Tarsus not only never met Jesus, but derived his teachings, which he attributed to Jesus, from an imaginary, hallucinated "meeting" with Jesus. Not exactly a reliable method of determining what happened to Jesus. And, of course, many of the Biblical epistles contain false attributions of authorship and were written decades after the fact.

You obviously don't know what the argument is, so your analysis of it is fatally flawed.

* There's no claim that Christianity is a unique sect in the sense that it's the only "spinoff" from another religion.

* The claims of the religious sect itself must be taken into consideration (ie, Mormons don't claim that Joseph Smith was resurrected).

* The historical knowledge of the middle east during that time is much more thorough that you're willing to admit.

* I doubt you would recognize a historical anthropological argument if you saw one. The study of history is a search for the reasons things happen the way that they do. Why did something happen at some point in history instead of another? What was the catalyst? What are sufficient circumstances for it to happen? These are the questions of the historian. Your comments sound very much like they come from someone who doesn't know what he's talking about.

it gets as much historical as the magic of Grigori Rasputin... meaning.. not...

This really is a matter of faith as if one begins to read the scriptures in light of historical criteria many problems arise. Whether the reading is cursory or one of in depth research, discrepancies are readily seen amongst the cannonical gospels and the resurrection story is no different. Just as one ought not to treat Genesis chapter 1 as a science manual, one should not treat gospel literature in the New Testament as historical documents.

Aaron, i just demonstrated to you what the catalyst is. False beliefs sometimes catch on like wildfire. It happened with Mormonism, it happened with scientology, and it happened with Christianity. Humans are socially influenced creatures and if a bunch of people in your community start runnng around saying false things like that someone found golden plates in the wood or that some charlatan preacher was raised from the dead, sometimes the belief catches hold.

And there's no reason why a resurrection claim is different than a golden plates claim. In both cases, we have no contemporaneous accounts of eyewitnesses except for tainted sources produced by the church itself years later. As far as we know, all that happened is that suddenly some people started saying in both cases that the con artist's claims were true.

As for your other arguments:

1. No Aaron, we do not have any contemporaneous accounts of Middle East history AS IT RELATES to Christianity. We don't even have any contemporaneous accounts that Jesus was a living person. It was all written later. And it's very sketchy. Yet you choose to fantasize that you know the intentions of a bunch of hypothetical early Christian apostles who didn't write a thing down and who were not even contemporaneously quoted about anything? Are you that stupid, or does the immature desire to live forever just override all of your critical skills.

And finally, the precise relationship between Christianity and Judaism is not that important here. The important thing is that we've seen bullcrap spread quickly many times. But if you do think the precise details of the schism are important, it's worth noting that from what we do know about early Christianity, it was apparently a form of relatively common Jewish redeemer prophecy. Saul of Tarsus, who never met Jesus, changed it into a new and different religion.

In other words, "early Christians" were not much different from other Jewish sects that existed at the time. They just believed in different specific false beliefs.

Again, you obviously have no clue what a historical argument looks like because you're not making one. "It just happens!" is not an historical argument. (Nor is it a cultural or anthropological one.)

Except for the most obvious fact that they are not the same claim. But you won't let such details deter you from bombasticism, now would you?

What's really funny is that you don't even know what the argument is. How do I know? Because the argument hasn't even been presented! If you look closely (or not that closely, actually), there NO ARGUMENT being presented here.

What you are doing is taking the a priori position that no argument can possibly succeed, so no matter what the argument is, your position is sufficiently strong to negate it. Congratulations! (For what, I have no idea, but you sound like need an affirmation of some sort.)

So does someone have a good link I can read or watch in, say, under a half an hour that summarizes the historicity in ideally a relatively non partisan way?

I do think the historical question of the origins of Christianity are interesting even though I just take it on face value that all the metaphysical claims are false. I also think that lawdude has a point (if imperfectly framed as a historical question) that throughout history we have many examples of religions forming and splitting and miracles attested to (take sathya sai baba although I probably butchered the spelling) as a modern example. As such, we shouldn't find the question of Christianity's start to be an overly compelling question. I would like to know the answer and we should study it, but we should not suspect based on these other precedents that the answer should be all that unique and certainly should not accept as some form of default a supernatural explanation if a historical one can't be offered.

I doubt that there is a resource that summarizes the arguments for and against historicity in a reasonable way. I've looked in the past, and haven't found any. A lot of it is pretty bad (both for and against the resurrection).

Most of the arguments against the resurrection start from the presumption that it didn't happen, and then try to find an alternative reasoning for the theological shift that happened. Most of those arguments come down to the "myth/legend" viewpoint, in which the fundamental claim is that the writings have been exaggerated over time (either as a rumor or intentional misrepresentation).

Historians will recognize that this is a flawed approach since it presumes the answer the primary question. The question is "Did the resurrection happen?" and if you presume the answer, then there's no point in looking at any information. (The way that the "myth/legend" argument works, the question that is being answered is "Since the resurrection did not happen, how might we explain the theological shift to Christianity?")

The types of arguments you will find in on the pro-resurrection are closer to the types of arguments historians would make. For example, if the disciples had stolen the body, is it reasonable for them to have preached boldly that Jesus was resurrected, to the point of death? This argument has merit, but it's not some iron-clad reasoning that "proves" the resurrection (in something like a scientific sense). The common counter-argument given is that people die for things all the time that may or may not be true (although this argument is logically flawed because it does not include the presumption of the first-hand knowledge of the farce). But that's an indication about how historical arguments progress.

The approach of a historian would come down to something that sounds more like the following: Given the shift in theology, is it more or less likely true that Jesus was resurrected? This puts the question of the resurrection as the idea being pursued, rather than pursuing a reason for a predetermined answer.

(Edit: This would require one to study the pre-theology and post-theology and determine what specific ideas had been changed and the extent to which they've been changed, and then make an argument about how reasonable it is for those changes to have happened in that particular cultural context. It's an extremely intricate argument, which is another reason why you won't find a very short summary that would be compelling in one way or another.)

Aaron, instead of using labels (IOW, what is a "historical" argument and what isn't), let's discuss the actual argument, which is "the fact that all those people adopted the truth claim that Jesus rose from the dead evidences that Jesus indeed rose from the dead". That's the claim.

And it's wrong.

1. We don't know anything about the people who spread the claim that Jesus rose from the dead, nor the people who accepted it. What were their motivations? Their intentions? Their political positions? Was there coercion? We know nothing, because there are no contemporaneous accounts. Everything was written later by different people who had agendas.

2. We do know that false beliefs can spread like wildfire. We have many contemporary examples of this. Your obkjection is that i don't know the precise mechanism for this. That is true. I don't. But the fact that it happens in modern recorded history is pretty good evidence that it also happened in the past.

3. You assert that resurrections are different than golden plates, but why? What's so special about a resurrection claim that would make it exempt from 2?

Indeed, one of the big problems with Christianity is that Jesus wasn't the only one raised from the dead. Read the book of Acts. Supposedly, Simon Peter and Saul raised people from the dead too. Now, are all those claims believable? Do you think that Simon Peter and Saul resurrected people? And if you don't, how is that not an example of exactly the same phenomenon, false beliefs regarding resurrections nonetheless spreading?

That's not the "actual argument." Nor is it "the claim."

This is what you said:

Essentially, the argument is of the following form: What could compel a rather large number of Jewish adherents to accept a new theological concept that is somehow grounded in the old theology yet completely different in significant ways?

I answered you. What could compel it is that people pick up false religious beliefs that derive from earlier theology and these beliefs spread like wildfire all the time. Mormonism is an example of this-- a rather larger number of Christian adherents accepted a new theological concept that is somehow grounded in the old theology yet completely different in significant ways.

You responded, in effect, "raising the dead is different from golden plates". But you didn't explain WHY raising the dead is different from golden plates.

I also answered you in another way. That you are assuming that the early Christians picked up Pauline / Nicene Creed Christianity. And while we know very little about early Christians, it also appears that this is not the case at all. That, in fact, early Christians were one of many Jewish sects that adopted some sort of Messianic theology involving a redeemer at that time. All those other Jewish redeemer sects died out, while Christianity didn't. Which means that there were several groups of Jews that did the same thing the Christians did, but whose redeemers you would contend were not in fact true redeemers.

You did not respond to that except to claim (falsely) that we know a lot about the relevant Middle Eastern history.

And finally, I answered you in a third way. Which was to note that since the Pauline / Nicene Creed Christianity that you believe in was invented by later con artists and was not the Christianity of early Christians, the premise of your argument (that the early Christians adopted a new theological concept) is false. In fact, they were basically just practicing Jews who thought their redeemer had come.

You did not respond to that at all.

You have to do better than that, Aaron.

Why did the War of 1812 happen? Because World War 2 happened! This is what your argument sounds like. There's no actual substance to what you're saying other than "it happens in history."

It was in a response, but it's worth noting that I'm making a commentary on your argument, not supporting the initial statement. But since you bring the perspective that the fact of the matter has already been decided (that it is a "false religious belief"), there's literally nothing that I can say to you that you would accept. This is precisely what I have described in my previous posts.

Please point to where that assumption was put into play.

This argument is so convoluted that I don't even know where to begin. Yes, it's true (and nobody would deny this) that there were many people who claimed to be the messiah. It's also true that many of those movements died out. But this raises the question of why Christianity would have succeeded in some way where the others failed. Your "argument" doesn't address anything in particular because (again) you don't know what a historical argument sounds like, so you have no chance at even beginning to construct one.

Notice that the form of your previous arguments and this one are basically identical in form: Some stuff happens. It simply doesn't qualify as being an argument.

Sorry, but we know a lot about the relevant Middle Eastern History. Maybe you think that it is necessary to have a 20th century information-age level of data to have "a lot" of relevant knowledge, but that's simply an error of your judgment (or your own ignorance).

Again, you are asserting something that I've clearly not used in any way in my presentation.

I know you like to argue for the sake of arguing, and I do not have the time that I did in the past to continuously indulge your delusional sense of what argument is actually being made. Two out of the three "points" that you made were premised on something that is noticeably absent in what I've presented. So I will not continue in this line unless you actually take the time to learn more about the arguments that are made (a reference has been provided).

1. The War of 1812 is a bad analogy. Better analogy: a person discovers a mass of tar on fire, which he has never seen before, and says "God must have done this". His friend points out that he has seen wood burn and the tar likely combusts due to the same process, and therefore God is not needed to explain it.

2. You still haven't shown why claiming that the dead were raised is different than claiming that golden plates were given to a person by an angel.

Whether i think your religious beliefs are false has nothing to do with your answer to that question.

3. The point about the various Jewish sects, and the point about Pauline Christianity, is simple. What we know about early Christians suggests THEY didn't change their theology at all. They were just like a number of their contemporaries. What we now know as Christian theology was generated later. So the premise of your argument-- that all these people accepted a new theology-- is false.

4. Aaron, when i say we don't know much about history, i mean not that we know nothing at all but that the types of claims YOU need to be true for Christianity to be true are far too specific to be borne out by the historical record. You can certainly make more general claims about the era, but you are, for instance, inferring that the people who went around claiming Jesus was resurrected must have both been honest and credible. History can't justify THAT sort of claim, because it involves reading the minds of people who lived 2000 years ago.

Wait wha...? I mean, maybe, if your hypothetical historian assigns a non-zero prior probability to DEAD PEOPLE COMING BACK TO LIFE, this might be her point of departure.

But a great many historians don't share that prior, you know.

I said that they aren't the same claim. Why this is difficult for you is baffling.

I'm interested in seeing an exposition of what "think "what we now know as Christian theology" is and why you believe what you do about "early Christians" and what specifically you mean by that.

What I will say is that it's hard for early Christianity to be a "sect" if the belief system was identical to everyone around them. Even if I grant that "what we now know as Christianity" developed later, it STILL requires a historical reconstruction as to why it developed whenever it did. The presentations that you give seem to imply that you think these things just pop up out of nowhere.

I am? Please show me where I did that.

Sorry, but this makes you sound ignorant and stupid.

That's fine. But if this is the case, then it's obvious that they aren't studying the historicity of the resurrection of Christ.

Well, some people would consider it pointless to apply historical methods to obvious myths, but whatever. Just as with scientists and philosophers, I'm sure you know better than anyone the essential soul of the historian's task.