How Not to Prove the Resurrection

I recently browsed through an article on the resurrection by a friend of mine here at Cornell (Philosophia Christi, 13.2). Its basic goal was to defend the bodily resurrection of Jesus on commonsense presuppositions, with publicly accessible evidences, and by uncontroversial, standard logic. I’m not enough of a statistician to follow his maneuvers with Bayesian machinery, nor can I claim familiarity with all the theories out there explaining the NT resurrection claims in some materialistic or gnostic key. But I’ve drunk enough of the hermeneutical draught to see that the whole argument for the statistical probability of Jesus’ resurrection crucially stacks the dice. Its minimal claim for which it gathers evidence is that “the bodily resurrection of Jesus did occur” (343), or, per Licona, “shortly after Jesus’ death, the disciples had experiences that led them to believe and to proclaim that Jesus had been resurrected” (qtd on 349). The problem with these minimal claims is that...well, they’re really not that minimal. In fact, though their authors have attempted to abstract the most empirically verifiable datum from its New Testament molding, these statements still depend on a rich network of theological assumptions to give them their basic significance and bearing. It doesn’t take Jon Levenson to tell us that “resurrection” is a very fraught concept: far from being generic, “resurrection” draws on fundamental Hebrew beliefs about God as the creator and giver of life, as an active agent within and Lord over history, as a promise-maker and keeper. “Resurrection” grew from the soil of Israel’s national crisis in exile and prophetic hope for a unified spiritual-political restoration. The belief maintains this seamless spiritual-political orientation in the New Testament. In other words, to say that “Jesus was resurrected” is not a minimal claim – it is a statement that is front-loaded with theological, providential, and eschatological assumptions that hardly count as “publicly verifiable.”

Now that’s not to say we couldn’t pare the claim down and make it more truly minimal and “publicly verifiable.” We could bracket out the concept “resurrection” altogether and investigate something like, whether “Jesus’ followers and friends experienced him physically after they had seen his death.” Even this might not get far enough beyond its New Testament shoring. But actually, the weird thing is, a statement like that has lost most of what makes “resurrection” exciting in the first place. Without all the (thoroughly un-public and untestable) assumptions that render Jesus’ re-appearance the cornerstone of Christian life and hope, we’re left with a strange event: a strange event susceptible to a variety of other theoretical explanations.  Why wasn’t Jesus’ reappearance an act of the Nigerian god Olorun? Why wasn’t it aliens? Why wasn’t it a heretofore unexplained natural event?

This isn’t just playing the devil’s advocate a bit extravagantly. These examples illustrate that when my friend and others make an argument for Jesus’ resurrection by public evidences, what they are doing is making a case for Jesus’ reappearance (or something) – and assuming the coincident correctness of the New Testament beliefs that give it meaning and mooring. The problem is twofold: they think they’ve scientifically confirmed something that actually imports a lot of scientifically opaque assumptions, and they are unaware that the piece that may be (!) scientifically verifiable is theologically underdetermined. To wit: they think they’ve done more than they have. While it may well be that the New Testament’s theological ship needs this theoretically shrunken, empirically attestable reappearance of Jesus to get out of harbor, all the rest of the New Testament’s theological interpretation of this reappearance must be “right,” too, for Christian belief to subsist. I give as my parade example here the (unusual) Israeli historian Pinchas Lapide, who accepted the resurrection of Jesus as a bodily reality and an act of God. But he just thought that the New Testament got the significance of this event wrong – Jesus isn’t Messiah, and certainly doesn’t share in the identity of God. The interpretation the New Testament gives to Jesus’ reappearance is what makes it the “resurrection” we believe in – an interpretation that is, I imagine, scientifically out-of-bounds. Of course, it makes a certain amount of sense to credit the interpretation that lies closest at hand to the event – the understanding of Jesus’ disciples intuitively seems more plausible than Olorun or extraterrestrials. That may be (though we regularly understand events differently than even their eyewitnesses). But my general point is that these two things, the event of Jesus’ reappearance (or whatever) and the New Testament preaching about the promissory resurrection of our Lord – they do not hang together inevitably. So when my scientist friends have done their work, they shouldn’t pat themselves on the back too hard for having “proven the resurrection.”