Chapter 7: RESIST CONSPIRACY THEORIES
Chapter 7
Principle #7:
RESIST CONSPIRACY THEORIES
“Charlie, your roommate already told us where to find the green plaid shirt you were wearing last night.” Charlie sat with his head down and his hands on his thighs. His body language communicated his continuing resistance to my questioning. This last statement, however, caused the first small reaction I had seen all afternoon. Charlie finally lifted his head and looked me in the eyes. “You and I both know I’m gonna find the victim’s blood on that shirt,” I said. Charlie sat there quietly. I could tell that he believed my lie about his roommate.
Some Popular Conspiracy Theories
Eighteen hours earlier, Charlie and his roommate, Vic, attempted to rob Dennis Watkins as he was walking home from his girlfriend’s house. A simple street robbery turned into a homicide when Dennis decided he was bigger than Charlie and struggled with him for his knife. Charlie stabbed Dennis only once, but the resulting chest wound was fatal. The robbery took place late at night in an alley to the rear of a fast-food restaurant in our town. There were no witnesses, and no one else was on the street at the time of the robbery, but Charlie was unknowingly recorded by a surveillance camera located on a bank across the alley. While the camera was too far away to identify the killer facially, it did record the unusual green plaid shirt worn by one of the two attackers and captured an image of their general height and build. Several hours later (through a series of investigative efforts), we had Charlie and Vic in custody, but we had little evidence to corroborate their involvement. We needed a “cop-out” if we hoped to file the case with the district attorney.
We separated Charlie and Vic as soon as we arrested them; Vic was in a second interview room down the hall. I had not yet interviewed him; I lied to Charlie about the conversation. Vic didn’t tell me where to find the plaid shirt. Charlie just happened to better match the physical build of the primary suspect I saw on the video, so I took a stab at him as the suspect who wore the shirt. I could tell I was right by Charlie’s reaction. He was fidgeting in his chair and turned his gaze to the floor again. I stayed silent and let my statement hang in the air. Charlie finally looked up.
“Vic’s lying about that. He’s the one who gave me that shirt for my birthday, but he wears it more than I do.” Charlie folded his arms again and leaned backward, trying to increase the distance between the two of us.
That was all I needed really—just another small piece of information. I left Charlie for a moment and entered the room with Vic. I pulled a chair up to the table that separated us, introduced myself, and got down to business.
“Vic, I just got done talking to Charlie. Murder is a serious crime, and he told me that you were the one who stabbed this guy. He told me about the green plaid shirt. He said that you gave that shirt to him for his birthday but you wear it more than he does. He told us where to find it. He said we’ll find the victim’s blood on the shirt and he’s willing to testify against you, bud.”
Within fifteen minutes, Vic told us all about the crime and confirmed what we had seen on the video. He provided many details about their prior plan to commit the robbery, and he confirmed his secondary involvement in the attack. He also told us that Charlie was the man who stabbed Dennis, and he provided us with the location of the knife. Vic believed everything I said about Charlie. I had just enough true information to make my lies sound believable; the combination was powerful enough to convince Vic that Charlie had “ratted him out.” Vic was now willing to return the favor.
RULES FOR GOOD CONSPIRACIES
In my experience as a detective, I have investigated many conspiracies and multiple-suspect crimes. While successful conspiracies are the popular subject of many movies and novels, I’ve come to learn that they are (in reality) very difficult to pull off. Successful conspiracies share a number of common characteristics:
Conspiracies
A SMALL NUMBER OF CONSPIRATORS
The smaller the number of conspirators, the more likely the conspiracy will be a success. This is easy to understand; lies are difficult to maintain, and the fewer the number of people who have to continue the lie, the better.
THOROUGH AND IMMEDIATE COMMUNICATION
This is key. When conspirators are unable to determine if their partners in crime have already given up the truth, they are far more likely to say something in an effort to save themselves from punishment. Without adequate and immediate communication, coconspirators simply cannot separate lies from the truth; they are easily deceived by investigators who can pit one conspirator against another.
A SHORT TIME SPAN
Lies are hard enough to tell once; they are even more difficult to repeat consistently over a long period of time. For this reason, the shorter the conspiracy, the better. The ideal conspiracy would involve only two conspirators, and one of the conspirators would kill the other right after the crime. That’s a conspiracy that would be awfully hard to break!
SIGNIFICANT RELATIONAL CONNECTIONS
When all the coconspirators are connected relationally in deep and meaningful ways, it’s much harder to convince one of them to “give up” the other. When all the conspirators are family members, for example, this task is nearly impossible. The greater the relational bond between all the conspirators, the greater the possibility of success.
LITTLE OR NO PRESSURE
Few suspects confess to the truth until they recognize the jeopardy of failing to do so. Unless pressured to confess, conspirators will continue lying. Pressure does not have to be physical in nature. When suspects fear incarceration or condemnation from their peers, they often respond in an effort to save face or save their own skin. This is multiplied as the number of coconspirators increases. The greater the pressure on coconspirators, the more likely the conspiracy is to fail.
Charlie and Vic’s conspiracy was difficult to maintain for several reasons. While there were only two conspirators, they were unable to communicate with one another. Once they were separated, they were unable to monitor what the other was saying to the police. We were, therefore, able to deceive each of them without detection. In addition to this, Charlie and Vic were only roommates. The more we talked to them, the more obvious it was they were willing to give each other up to avoid punishment. Neither Charlie nor Vic had ever been to state prison, but both had served time in the county jail system. They’d heard stories from other inmates about the nature of California prisons, and the fear of serving time there was a significant motivation for them to cooperate. Conspiracies are most successful when all of the characteristics I’ve described are present. In this case, several key conditions were missing.
THE CHRISTIAN CONSPIRACY
When I was an atheist, I recognized that the most significant claim of the alleged apostolic eyewitnesses was their claim related to the resurrection. This was the big one; larger than any other alleged miracle ever performed by Jesus and the proof that the apostles seemed to trot out every time they talked about Jesus. I always assumed it was a lie. Maybe it was just my skeptical nature or my prior experience with people on the job. I understand the capacity people have to lie when it serves their purpose. In my view, the apostles were no different. In an effort to promote their cause and strengthen their own position within their religious community, I believed these twelve men concocted, executed, and maintained the most elaborate and influential conspiracy of all time. But as I learned more about the nature of conspiracies and had the opportunity to investigate and break several conspiracy cases, I started to doubt the reasonable nature of the alleged “Christian conspiracy.”
The apostles faced far greater challenges than did Charlie and Vic, two thousand years later. The number of conspirators required to successfully accomplish the Christian conspiracy would have been staggering. The book of Acts tells us that there were as many as 120 eyewitnesses in the upper room following Jesus’s ascension (Acts 1:15). Let’s assume for a minute that this number is a gross exaggeration; let’s work with a much smaller number to illustrate our point. Let’s limit our discussion to the twelve apostles (adding Matthias as Judas’s replacement). This number is already prohibitively large from a conspiratorial perspective, because none of the other characteristics of successful conspiracies existed for the twelve apostles.
The apostles had little or no effective way to communicate with one another in a quick or thorough manner. Following their dispersion from Jerusalem, the twelve disciples were scattered across the Roman Empire and, according to the most ancient accounts, were ultimately interrogated and martyred far from one another. Methods of communication in the first century were painfully slow, and unlike Charlie and Vic, the apostles were separated by far more than a hallway. From Peter in Rome, to James in Jerusalem, to Thomas in Mylapore, the apostles appear to have been ultimately interrogated in locations that prevented them from communicating with one another in a timely manner. They had no idea if any of their coconspirators had already “given up the lie” and saved themselves by simply confessing that Jesus was never resurrected. While skeptics sometimes claim that these recorded locations of martyrdom are unreliable because they are part of a biased Christian account, there isn’t a single non-Christian record that contradicts the claims of martyrdom offered by the local communities and historians.
In addition, the apostles would have been required to protect their conspiratorial lies for an incredibly long time. The apostle John appears to have lived the longest, surviving nearly sixty years after the resurrection. Charlie and Vic couldn’t keep their conspiracy alive for thirty-six hours; the apostles allegedly kept theirs intact for many decades.
To make matters worse, many of them were complete strangers to one another prior to their time together as disciples of Jesus. Some were indeed brothers, but many were added over the course of Jesus’s early ministry and came from diverse backgrounds, communities, and families. While there were certainly pairs of family members in the group of apostolic eyewitnesses, many had no relationship to each other at all. Philip, Bartholomew, Thomas, Simon the Canaanite, and Matthias had no family relationship to any of the other apostles. Whatever the relational connection between these men, the short years they spent together would quickly pale in comparison to the decades they would spend apart from one another prior to the time of their final interrogations. At some point, the bonds of friendship and community would be tested if their individual lives were placed in jeopardy.
Successful conspiracies are unpressured conspiracies. The apostles, on the other hand, were aggressively persecuted as they were scattered from Italy to India. According to the records and accounts of the local communities, each of them suffered unimaginable physical duress and died a martyr’s death. Ancient writers recorded that Peter was crucified upside down in Rome, James was killed with the sword in Jerusalem, and Thomas was murdered by a mob in Mylapore. Each story of martyrdom is more gruesome than the prior as we examine the list of apostolic deaths. This pressure was far greater than the fear of state prison faced by Charlie and Vic, yet none of the Twelve recanted their claims related to the resurrection. Not one.
The Martyrdom Traditions of the Apostles
I can’t imagine a less favorable set of circumstances for a successful conspiracy than those that the twelve apostles faced. Multiply the problem by ten to account for the 120 disciples in the upper room (Acts 1:15), or by forty to account for the five hundred eyewitnesses described by Paul (1 Cor. 15:6), and the odds seem even more prohibitive. None of these eyewitnesses ever recanted, none was ever trotted out by the enemies of Christianity in an effort to expose the Christian “lie.”
Don’t get me wrong, successful conspiracies occur every day. But they typically involve a small number of incredibly close-knit participants who are in constant contact with one another for a very short period of time without any outside pressure. That wasn’t the case for the disciples. These men and women either were involved in the greatest conspiracy of all time or were simply eyewitnesses who were telling the truth. The more I learned about conspiracies, the more the latter seemed to be the most reasonable conclusion.
MARTYRDOM ISN’T ALWAYS A PROOF
Before I move on from this discussion of conspiracies, I want to address an issue that is sometimes raised related to the relationship between martyrdom and truth. History is filled with examples of men and women who were committed to their religious views and were willing to die a martyr’s death for what they believed. The hijackers who flew the planes into the Twin Towers, for example, considered themselves to be religious martyrs. Does this martyrdom testify to the truth of their beliefs in a manner similar to the martyrdom of the twelve apostles? No, there is an important distinction that needs to be made here. You and I might die for what we believe today, trusting in the testimony of those who were witnesses thousands of years ago. We were not there to see Jesus for ourselves, but we may believe that we have good reason to accept their testimony. Our martyrdom would therefore be a demonstration of this trust, rather than a confirmation of the truth.
The original eyewitnesses, however, were in a very different position. They knew firsthand if their claims were true or not. They didn’t trust someone else for their testimony; they were making a firsthand assertion. The martyrdom of these original eyewitnesses is in a completely different category from the martyrdom of those who might follow them. If their claims were a lie, they would know it personally, unlike those who were martyred in the centuries that followed. While it’s reasonable to believe that you and I might die for what we mistakenly thought was true, it’s unreasonable to believe that these men died for what they definitely knew to be untrue.
A TOOL FOR THE CALLOUT BAG, A TIP FOR THE CHECKLIST
A healthy skepticism toward conspiracy theories is an important tool to include in our callout bag. We need to hesitate before we wholeheartedly embrace conspiratorial claims related to the apostles. Movies like The God Who Wasn’t There27 and Zeitgeist, the Movie28 have popularized the notion that Christianity is simply a retelling of prior mythologies. In essence, these movies argue that a group of conspirators assembled the fictional story of Jesus from a number of preexisting mythologies (borrowing a little here and a little there) and perpetuated the elaborate lie until they died. While some of my skeptical friends may still reject the claims of Christianity, I hope I can at least help them recognize that successful, large-scale conspiracies are rare and that the notion of a “Christian conspiracy” is simply unreasonable.
As Christians, we need to recognize that our culture is fascinated by conspiracy theories. Many of our friends and family members are quick to jump to elaborate conspiratorial possibilities even when there are simpler explanations on the table. Given what I now know about the difficult nature of successful conspiracies, I can help the skeptics in my world as they assess the claims of the apostles. You can too. We all need to take the time to understand the elements of successful conspiracies so we can communicate them to others. But in order to be consistent in our beliefs and explanations, we’re also going to need to resist the temptation to see a conspiracy around every corner of current events. If it is unreasonable for the resurrection to be the product of a conspiracy, it is just as unreasonable that other events requiring a large number of conspirators and the perfect set of conditions would be the result of a conspiracy. Let’s be careful not to unreasonably embrace conspiracy theories related to secular issues, while simultaneously trying to make a case against the alleged conspiracy of the apostles. If we are consistent in our understanding and rejection of unreasonable conspiratorial explanations, we’ll successfully communicate the truth of the resurrection to a skeptical world.
CASE NOTES
27. The God Who Wasn’t There, directed by Brian Flemming (Hollywood: Beyond Belief Media, 2005).
28. Zeitgeist, the Movie, directed by Peter Joseph (GMP LLC, 2007).