19: Conclusion
19
Conclusion
Reviewing the initial two overall arguments here, volume 1 argued the details of the mostly historical evidence in favor of Jesus’s resurrection appearances. Volume 2 sought to address and answer the naturalistic and other alternative responses that dispute these resurrection facts and interpretations. In a nutshell, it was the position here that none of these objections come very close to dismantling the best evidences.
The general response that tends to reject miracles or supernatural events because they are deemed to be outdated, unscientific, or unevidenced does not refute the arguments made in these two volumes. While this sort of response is widely held, it fails to deal with the crux of the empirical matters developed in more than one area here.
(1) In the first two volumes, it has not been argued that the resurrection was a miracle, only that Jesus’s appearances after his death were historical events that were believed to be resurrection appearances; that is, after his death, Jesus was actually seen again (without arguing for God’s action). (2) In the initial appendix to volume 1, it was argued that near-death experiences (NDEs) provide more than enough evidence to indicate the nonmiraculous likelihood of some form of an afterlife.(3) Further, if there is an afterlife, this at least opens the door to an integral component of the resurrection argument. In other words, if there is an afterlife of some sort, then Jesus’s resurrection becomes even more likely as a specific case that involves and took place in this realm. (4) As per the direction of volume 2, it should be even clearer to understand why naturalistic and other alternative theses do not work and are improbable. (5) Finally, the resurrection evidence presented in volume 1 can now speak for itself.
These considerations are far from questions concerning why more observers do not accept various arguments and change their views either one way or the other when they hear the data. Sometimes this does occur. Of course, this question could be asked the opposite way as well! Most of those who hold different positions read or hear the material, and neither side will be convinced. It is widely known that worldviews usually dominate evaluations of the data, but this is a separate issue, which once again is to be taken up in volume 4.
This brings us to the end of volume 2, so we will leave these matters here with a couple more works still on the way. But for now, this broad summary should remind us where we left several of the chief issues.
Notes
In spite of the length of this volume, it is not being claimed that the treatment here was exhaustive. Various other alternate approaches have been attempted by critical scholars. For example, postmodern historical approaches among others were also presented and evaluated in volume 1. Michael R. Licona, in his text The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Academic, 2010), treated a specific postmodern scholar who has applied some of these postmodern ideas to Jesus’s resurrection plus various other religious considerations. Licona argued that postmodernists might insert their views into the systems of others in the name of openness and acceptance, though often doing so somewhat forcefully. According to Licona, Pieter Craffert is a representative scholar who failed in almost every step of Licona’s very detailed evaluation by importing outside views into his New Testament studies, while all the time attempting to be postmodern, magnanimous, and accepting of all beliefs and cultures. Yet, at virtually every step, Craffert obstructed the beliefs of others and attempted to inform them that they are not viewing their own data from the proper perspectives. For example, Craffert employed a postmodern historiography against the “overwhelming majority of historians identifying themselves as realists” (566). Further, ad hoc components such as psychohistory produced some of these results (581-582). Craffert holds that multiple views and realities are true (564), but in the end, he is an example of pushing his naturalistic worldview onto others who do not hold these positions (566-67, 574). In the process, he “proposes interpretations that clearly run contrary to the main sense of the texts” in question (580), thereby doing violence to these other positions (581). The bottom line is that Craffert “failed to fulfill every one of the most important criteria” of Licona’s comparative study (582).
Please note that what follows is definitely not to be taken as a detailed or step-by-step demarcation of the argument in these first two volumes. Rather, we are just accenting a few of the most important comments.
This is far from a quaint avoidance of the miracles issue. The historicity of Jesus’s resurrection appearances is exactly what was being pursued in these two volumes at this point. A case for the cause of the resurrection is to be treated in volume 4 of this work, though it has not been attempted yet. That this historical case alone may be a possible move even from an atheist view, Bart D. Ehrman even argues that historians can study the question of “whether the disciples really had visions of Jesus after his death.” But historians cannot adjudicate whether God was the one who actually raised Jesus from the dead. Thus, historians may even say “that Jesus was crucified, and buried, and then he was seen alive, bodily, afterward.” But again, the key is that the historian could do so as long as the discussion was done “without appealing to divine causality” by saying that God was the one who performed the event of raising Jesus. This is the potentially miraculous portion of this question, and for Ehrman, this conclusion cannot be argued by historians from within their own discipline. Ehrman, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee (New York: HarperCollins, 2014), 148–49. In this matter, as far as it goes here, these are the questions that also have been addressed in these initial two volumes since the miraculous possibilities were not argued. As Ehrman states, whether Jesus was crucified, buried, and then seen afterward walking around and talking are historical issues apart from the cause.
Allison agrees on this point as well in Dale C. Allison Jr., The Resurrection of Jesus: Apologetics, Polemics, History (London: T&T Clark, 2021), 235, 350.
Again, the term resurrection in these volumes refers to that belief in the earliest church, as explained in this minimal fact as it was described in volume 1.