6: Nineteenth-Century Conservatives versus Liberals on Alternative Theories

6

Nineteenth-Century Conservatives versus Liberals on Alternative Theories

Shortly after the midpoint of the nineteenth century, several major, well-­accomplished, and more conservative professors began publishing responses to the German liberal scholars and their theories regarding the New Testament. Many key responses were aimed at the liberal treatment of the resurrection of Jesus in particular.

The majority of these scholars were British or American, and many held positions at world-renowned universities, such as Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Yale, Princeton, and Harvard. In terms of training and prestige, these respondents were roughly the equivalent from the English-speaking world of the German scholars they were challenging. In short, it was a colossal collision of ideas by accomplished scholars who were contemplating the greatest topics within Christianity.

This chapter will begin by following the same procedure as in the previous discussion. The five major naturalistic theories plus the supernatural objective vision thesis will be reviewed while offering several critiques of each. This time, the critiques will be presented by these conservative scholars. Responses will also be given to a few other prominent and related critical resurrection issues from the perspectives of these same researchers. Afterward, a list of conclusions that emerged from these debates will be addressed.

Like the previous chapter, this one does not purport to be either a systematic or an exhaustive treatment of naturalistic resurrection theories. Refutations will once again be tabled until future chapters in this volume. Rather, the intent just mentioned is to catch a historical glimpse of what a number of prestigious conservative scholars wrote in response to the German liberal resurrection hypotheses and how they critiqued them.

The Swoon or Apparent Death Hypothesis

Actually, the conservative scholars of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries wrote comparatively little regarding the swoon thesis, with one noteworthy exception. The most likely reason for this dearth stems from their personal comments explaining that they shared with German liberals the conviction that David Strauss’s famous critique (along with similar thoughts from other liberal scholars) was not only the best refutation of the apparent death hypothesis, but that it had also accounted almost singlehandedly for the demise of this supposition.

Strauss made it evident that the thesis of Jesus’s apparent death had failed as a mature factual supposition in itself when compared to the known factual data. But as Orr asserts further, Strauss also pointed out that it never answered the question in the first place as to how the disciples were persuaded that Jesus was not just simply alive, but that he had conquered death and the grave altogether. Sparrow-Simpson asserted that earlier forms of the apparent death scenario such as that by Venturini belonged to “the school of rationalistic romance” featuring “no historical restraint” and based on imagination. But Strauss’s refutation was the most complete.

Reflecting on Jesus’s supposed swoon and moving somewhat akin to Strauss’s critique by looking at the scenario from the disciples’ standpoint, University of Aberdeen professor William Milligan raised many questions. One question pertains to the lack of the disciples’ despondency and why they did not venture to help such a severely wounded Jesus. Further, when, where, and how did Jesus actually die? Against these criticisms, Milligan noted that Jesus’s appearances did not evoke pity and sympathy from his followers but rather engendered joy, boldness, and enthusiasm. From these responses alone it can be ascertained that their conviction was that Jesus had indeed been raised from the dead in a triumphant manner rather than, say, merely limping around in his previous body with all of its torturous injuries. As Milligan notes, it was a critic like Strauss who “heaped contempt upon the old theory of a swoon.”

Yale University professor George Park Fisher raised four questions for the swoon hypothesis. He asked how Jesus would have made it throughout the crucifixion process without dying? Then, like Strauss’s question, what physical condition would Jesus be in soon afterward, even if he cheated death on the cross? If not at this time, when did Jesus finally die? Finally, was there ever a time when Jesus and his disciples made plans for him to pretend that he had died on the cross?

More or less minor considerations regarding the swoon theory would include other issues, including the fact that Jesus’s severe pain and other deadly medical issues would cause him personally to realize that he had not been raised from the dead in a new body! As such, his actions would be better viewed by a healthy mind as a charade aimed at the ultimate goal of deception. Like Fisher and Milligan inquire, what were the conditions under which Jesus finally did die? Are we to suppose that not a single one of those who were the closest to him—his family members, the women, disciples, or other followers—ever discovered anything amiss?

Altogether, as will be argued at the end of this chapter, the prevailing critical testimony is that the swoon or apparent death theory attracted very little scholarly attention during the late nineteenth century and probably not much past the first half of the century, as already noted. Too many pieces of data were stacked against it. But in the view of many scholars (and perhaps even the majority), Strauss’s critique alone buried it forever.

Fraud Type 1: Jesus’s Disciples Stole Jesus’s Dead Body and Lied about His Appearances

Before the birth of German liberalism in the works of Schleiermacher, Thomas Sherlock composed a volume that featured a court case centering largely on this first version of the fraud thesis. Arranged as a series of charges and countercharges with many responses, Sherlock’s 1729 work was directed at the English deists, and Thomas Woolston in particular, who as pointed out earlier, had argued this view himself. These early critical discussions occurred precisely during the general time when this view was the most commonly aired, well before Schleiermacher.

Some of Sherlock’s responses were as follows: There is no evidence in support of this mere contention. This thesis would truly be “the hardest plot in the world to be managed,” apparently a reference to how such an elaborate heist could be kept secret and under the disciples’ total control. What would be the disciples’ motive for these actions? Whatever the answer, they seemed to gain little in exchange for their all-encompassing, potentially life-threatening effort. When the disciples stood before the Jewish leaders in the early chapters of Acts, they were commanded to stop preaching Jesus’s message, but they were never accused of stealing Jesus’s dead body. Perhaps most of all, how do we explain the disciples’ life changes, especially their boldness in proclaiming this message?

Many scholars have emphasized predominantly this last point. Milligan thought that the disciples were utterly changed in personal terms, with their lives being affixed on the message of God’s kingdom, even to the point of dying for this message, and that these facts totally refuted this fraud thesis. Moreover, Milligan asserted rather strikingly that there was no reason to discuss this view any further. Westcott, Fisher, and Edersheim are more commentators who, during the time of the German liberals, also emphasized the noteworthy transformation of the disciples as being quite inconsistent with their stealing the body and perpetrating such an obvious deception.

Fisher raised quite succinctly a question for the first fraud thesis: “Why should men make up a story which was to bring them no benefit, but only contempt, persecution, and death?” There is still the question of what happened to Jesus’s body as well. Like Sherlock, Orr also asked, if the Jewish leaders thought that the disciples had stolen Jesus’s body, why were they never blamed for their actions?

Doremus Hayes of the Graduate School of Theology cites some of these same reasons concerning the disciples’ lives of preaching, suffering persecution, and death, at least for many of them. These are not normally considered to be the preferred sorts of activities that we associate with willful lying. Besides, sooner or later, it certainly seems most likely that someone would have allowed the real fraudulent story to slip out, not to mention likewise revealed where Jesus’s body was really buried. Therefore, he concludes, “The charge of fraud fell flat from the very ­beginning. . . . That faith did not rest upon invention or myth but upon the facts of their own experience.”

Sparrow-Simpson points out that some versions of the fraud theory can actually end up launching their own refutations. These theses best establish a single bottom line: not that the disciples’ actions were fraudulent but that “both sides alike agreed upon the fact that the grave was empty.” Twentieth-century critical scholars have emphasized that such admissions by the first-century critics actually point to the concept of enemy attestation, that what one’s opponents concede can be taken either as true or at least as admissible data for the ensuing discussion.

The version of the fraud theory that holds that the disciples were the culprits who removed Jesus’s crucified body received much less attention among the German liberal scholars than did the swoon theory. This thesis faltered at many weak points, but none of these was more obvious than blaming the ones who were quite willing to die for their faith with being the very same ones who knowingly perpetrated all of the evil and unethical acts in the first place, as asserted by some of the earliest conservative scholars such as Sherlock and Milligan.

Fraud Type 2: Non-disciples Stole Jesus’s Dead Body and Other Tomb Theories

The German liberals spent less time discussing the ideas contained in this rather catch-all category plus the previous Fraud Type 1 thesis than with any of the other major natural resurrection scenarios. To be fair, since these liberals rarely even proposed these two stolen body hypotheses themselves, the conservatives who responded to them could hardly be blamed for not spending much time on them either. Nevertheless, comments and critiques here and there can be located in the scholarly literature. For instance, we have already viewed French scholar Albert Réville’s opinion that the Jewish Sanhedrin in Jerusalem arranged for Jesus’s dead body to be stolen, afterward hiding it where it could not be discovered.

Sparrow-Simpson opposed this specific suggestion and proposed a few critiques. Among them, he remarked that the Sanhedrin did not have to go to such an extreme, since they often cooperated with Pilate and could have worked out the situation in some other way than by stealing the corpse with all of the attendant complications. But more telling, if the Sanhedrin had actually taken Jesus’s dead body, then by producing it again or at the very least making public their role in purposely emptying the tomb, they could presumably have dealt a decisive blow to the disciples’ preaching at a very early stage in the process. This would have been a far more forceful alternative than the tame option of simply settling for commanding the disciples not to preach any longer in Jesus’s name.

Then there was Arnold Meyer’s position noted earlier that Joseph of Arimathea only meant for his tomb to be used temporarily in order to fulfill the law with regard to having bodies buried before the Sabbath began at sundown. So he moved the dead body of Jesus later, for any of several potential reasons, which was Joseph’s intention from the beginning, since he did not want Jesus’s body in the same tomb as his own family members or because he was not a disciple of Jesus anyway, contrary to the Gospel reports. We already observed that Strauss made similar moves.

Sparrow-Simpson also addressed this hypothesis, pointing out that there is no evidence at all for such a scenario. To the contrary, even the Gospels present better data than either Meyer or Strauss, for why should no specific data count against some early, definite data? Furthermore, Meyer cannot seem to keep his story straight, for he presents at least three scenarios that appear to conflict with one another: that Joseph moved Jesus’s body, Meyer’s denial that Joseph even had a grave in Jerusalem in the first place, and that Joseph’s grave was not empty after all.

Morison offered a few considerations against this Meyer-type fraud thesis, and additional suggestions may augment the possibilities. On the view that Joseph of Arimathea moved the body, there would have been a very short window of opportunity to do all that needed to be done, since he would have to be finished presumably within a maximum twenty-four hour or so span, basically during the Sabbath. Hence, his actions at a maximum would most likely have taken place between Friday after sundown or Saturday morning and very early Sunday morning. Moreover, if Joseph did not know that the women were coming to finish the burial process, this would also have been another potential snag in that he would not have been forced into an early decision by that knowledge, though the tomb would still have to be empty by the time they arrived.

Continuing, if Joseph was indeed a secret disciple of Jesus, then this probably would have given away his position to the other Jewish leaders, whether or not he did the actual removing himself. But on this scenario, why would Joseph have wanted to move Jesus’s dead body in the first place? Plus, this alternative raises the possibility of tomb worship at the new site, should the word ever have gotten out from those who knew or found out later where Jesus had been reburied. Still worse, explaining why the original tomb was now empty or that Jesus’s reburied body was nearby could have involved huge problems for friends and foes alike.

The details here, whatever they were, could potentially have been worked out even after all these issues. But the worst problem for the German liberals was that changing the location of Jesus’s original tomb would not have explained the more serious issue of all, namely, the disciples’ unflinching belief that they had actually seen the risen Jesus.

Hayes adds that it would have taken several people to perform all the requirements of moving Jesus’s body to another tomb, wherever the new one was located, so at a minimum these persons would have known the particulars. Yet, neither the Jews nor anyone else ever produced Jesus’s body or disclosed any of the moving or secret plot scenarios, though any of them could have revealed truly dicey and unforgettable stories indeed!

The difficulties for Joseph of Arimathea moving Jesus’s body before the women’s Sunday morning trip to the tomb should not be underestimated. For example, if Joseph refused to move the body on the Sabbath, like the law-abiding Jewish leader that he was, this alone would have put everything in a brief Saturday night window—a very fast job. If he did not know that the women were returning so early the next morning, there would have been virtually no reason for him to finish the job so abruptly in the dark.

On the other hand, if either the Jewish leaders or any of the Romans had moved Jesus’s body for any reasons whatsoever, one problem would be their motive for doing so. What sort of gain would have made such a move worth the potential religious or political risk, especially given the many touchy issues involved? This would be especially difficult for Jews with their cleanliness regarding dead bodies. After all, each group appeared to have been finished with the entire situation.

On the other hand, it may have been understandable if either the Jews or the Romans might have thought it wiser to act a little later, after it was obvious that the Christian teaching had begun spreading. Presumably, nothing could be more important than crushing the Christian message during its infancy. It might be surmised that this could have been done up to a month or so later, while the body still could be identified as that of Jesus, especially given the nail and spear wounds. Waiting much longer makes less sense, but even then the story of why the body had been moved would still have been helpful in thwarting the Christian cause, in that even the fact of an empty tomb would have taken on an entirely new meaning contrary to the apostolic preaching. However, on each of these options, what is to be done with the initial female testimony of the original tomb being found empty, along with all of the attendant indications that this was precisely the case?

Kirsopp Lake’s suggestion was that the women possibly could have proceeded to the wrong tomb and when Jesus’s body was not found there, they proclaimed an empty sepulcher. The conservative scholars responded to this scenario. For instance, Orr states: “The theory, it need hardly be pointed out, is itself an invention, without historical support or probability—a travesty of the narratives as we have them. There is no evidence of a mistake of the women, who knew too well where the Lord was laid.” But as pointed out often, even ungrounded details without evidence are often preferred by critical scholars and given precedent over straightforward statements in the Gospels, especially when the alternative option fits better with the direction of their worldviews.

Sparrow-Simpson charged that the liberal critics do not require solid historical reasons in order to reject items in the Gospels that they do not favor. Regarding the empty tomb in general and Lake’s wrong tomb supposition in particular, these critics discarded this teaching simply because it did not fit with their preconceptions. Thus, these liberal scholars rewrote the Gospels at will in order to mold these writings to their own private notions, even from a distance of many centuries later.

Morison raised a few questions of his own pertaining to Lake’s thesis. If it was so dark when the women went to the tomb on that Sunday morning that they even got confused about where it was located, it is also highly unlikely that the young man who met them there, whether he was the gardener or merely a passerby, would even have been there in the first place! Who rakes the ground in the dark? Moreover, that the disciples were not available to correct the situation, as Lake seems to surmise, is quite another tenuous suggestion that Morison rates as being “of a very doubtful and precarious character.”

Then rather creatively, Morison asks for further clarification: Why would the male disciples either be in hiding or on their way to Galilee strictly out of fear for their lives, while leaving the women to finish Jesus’s burial alone in Jerusalem? After all, the women were their own kin or fellow disciples! Did they not care a bit for the women’s safety, when they “were in like peril”? Further, did the women then remain in Jerusalem for weeks or even up to a year longer after the burial itself until the disciples returned (as surmised by some critical scholars like Strauss and especially Renan)? Moreover, why would the Jewish leaders not seek out the young man at the tomb until they found him, since his side of the story would be yet another way to disprove the women’s message?

Admittedly, the wrong tomb thesis seems to be quite confused at best, and at many places. It is no wonder that, after considering a related view, Orr again retorts: it would have been so easy—did not anyone else check out the women’s claim to be sure? “It has only to be said of this flight of fancy that, when compared with the narrative of the Gospels, it has no substance or feature of reality to it. It contradicts the tradition at every point. There is no ‘historical kernel,’ for the ground of history is abandoned for imagination.”

Actually, this last conundrum seems to be the case with each of the fraud and tomb scenarios, whether involving the disciples or not. Even these less than coherent options no doubt were still strong factors given the critical rejection of the empty tomb teachings. Thus, some of the critics thought that certain ideas of this nature still remained helpful or even necessary in an attempt to deny the empty tomb. This was especially so in the case of those scholars who preferred one of the vision options (either subjective or objective) or to a lesser degree one of the legend scenarios, for whom the open sepulcher was a potent comeback to these skeptics.

Once again, these critics apparently thought that alternative circumstances sometimes had to be invented to support basically anything besides Jesus’s resurrection or, to a lesser extent, the empty tomb. But at what price? These critical scholars occupied an exceptionally tough position between preferring either a far less than powerful explanatory thesis, perhaps even one that was filled with issues, or embracing the resurrection. However, the latter was clearly not an option for many of them, even though the historical options evidently favored the disciples’ proclamation on these subjects.

The Hallucination or Subjective Vision Theory and Similar Subjective Views

As with the liberal scholars, so the conservatives also spent significant space on the hallucination and other similar subjective positions. Some acknowledged that they did so because it was the most popular natural alternative thesis at the end of the nineteenth century, therefore demanding more attention.

As a brief background for the liberal views at this time and the texts from which their natural positions were frequently drawn, most of the German liberals favored one Gospel over the others. In roughly the first half of the nineteenth century, that favorite was the Gospel of John. Sometimes the priority accorded to John was such that it was considered as largely reliable in historical terms and was treated occasionally as if the contents of this Gospel were simply true. Even the skeptic Renan, among many others like Schleiermacher, held a similar view. One major reason for this conclusion, especially among the rationalistic liberals, was that John recorded fewer miracles than the other Gospels, presumably indicating that it was more interested in historical matters. In this context, Strauss was the first to revoke the Gospel of John’s favored status. Thus it should be noticed that most liberal scholars would not judge all of the Gospels to be equally unreliable, whereas with Strauss the overall skepticism grew more apparent than with the earlier rationalistic liberals.

While the Gospels were commonly criticized, the question could be asked as to what criteria established the liberal’s favorite naturalistic theories, be it swoon, hallucinations, legends, and so on? Was the favored alternative view the best option merely because the critics simply decreed it such? Or was it thought that each was actually defensible on its own grounds, due to being favored by worthwhile arguments? It has already been argued in this volume in detail that the liberals frequently criticized each other’s views. Perhaps they did indeed mistrust one or more of the hypotheses due to their inherent weaknesses. But one key question pertains to whether each view was established factually over the other natural options?

Hallucination or Subjective Visions and the Disciples

James Orr

Also mentioned earlier was that the strongest and most detailed German liberal critique of the subjective vision hypothesis was probably that by Theodor Keim. On the conservative side of the ledger not long after Keim, that honor for the strongest treatment of the subjective vision theory probably goes to Scottish theologian James Orr, who devotes a fairly lengthy chapter to the many issues with visional theories of various types. In fact, Orr’s detailed arguments are probably the premier example of comebacks to Strauss and others during the liberal era. We will reproduce a few of Orr’s criticisms here.

Orr argues over many pages that the historical case to be made for the disciples actually observing appearances of the risen Jesus is quite strong. Agreeing with Schleiermacher, Paulus, and others before him, Orr contends that these events were simply both too real and too persistent. Subjective events have their own laws too, and they are not free to operate just any old way.

Moreover, Orr thought that there were many critiques of the hallucination theses and concluded that these criticisms were often ignored by those who favored them. He defended his arguments from any of the Gospels of Matthew, Luke, or John alone. With the exception of Mark (because there were most likely no appearances recorded in the original text), the situation is that basically any liberal who championed one of these three Gospels would still have to come to grips with these critiques.

Orr was very helpful in pointing out an entire string of items taught in the Gospels that must be avoided or changed by the hallucination theorists, including: (1) The three Gospels that narrated the appearances (Matthew, Luke, and John) placed the initial experiences in or around Jerusalem rather than in Galilee, as do almost all visionary proponents. (2) The disciples experienced bouts of grief, doubt, and despair after Jesus’s death, again as expressed in all three of these Gospels. But because the subjectivist theorists acknowledged that the disciples’ negative states of mind were entirely accurate, they felt compelled to delay the appearances by up to a year to accommodate these negative emotional experiences in order to change these adverse mindsets to positive states of mind so that the visions could begin developing more readily and joyously.

(3) Orr holds that “in no case is there the slightest trace of preparatory excitement” such as scholars like Strauss, Renan, and other critics portrayed as being necessary.(4) Rather than “momentary glimpses,” the Gospels depict several of Jesus’s appearances as “prolonged interviews” between the risen Christ and his followers. (5) That the disciples’ unbelief, doubt, and fear continued even after they saw the risen Jesus is not the best background for hallucinations, where the disciples would have been observing precisely what they wanted to see, hence the lack of these negative emotions. (6) Jesus presented himself corporeally rather than ethereally. Obviously, if Jesus had also been touched, as all three of these Gospels either teach or imply, then the subjective vision thesis is badly mistaken.

As with this and many other German liberal dialogues, contemporary critical scholars could comment on differences in how such a discussion on the Gospel accounts and some other matters might proceed today vis-à-vis the nineteenth century. Due to these contrasts, such a modern response would not be entirely inappropriate either. Yet for the very early twentieth century, Orr’s response was an insightful reply to the natural theses of Strauss and a few other researchers from just a few decades earlier. More crucially, while it is the case that some of the issues discussed above would be considered outdated in the present, other matters here could have been entirely welcome today, depending on the nature of the specific dialogue. On still other subjects, the German liberals could take even more critical stances than what is done today.

Much of the interaction here is in the vein of the classic German liberal dialogue. Since some of the more skeptical German scholars are involved at this juncture at approximately the halfway point of the liberal “century”—among them F. C. Baur, Strauss, Bruno Bauer, along with the French scholar Renan—a couple concluding comments from Orr will be directed to this historic liberal context.

As noted, Orr provided lists of several criticisms of the subjective vision hypothesis, and his arguments against other natural hypotheses should not be ignored either. The force of Orr’s overall critique is that hallucinations require many adjustments to the Gospel records to adopt its own critical parameters. Orr summarizes the matter: “It will be seen, to begin with, that to gain for this visional theory any semblance of plausibility, every fact in the Gospel history has to be changed—time, place, nature of the events, mood of the disciples, and so on—while scenes, conditions, and experiences are invented of which the Gospels know nothing. It is not the facts on record that are explained, but a different (imaginary) set of facts altogether.” This initial assessment by Orr led to his overall criticisms as parsed out in the comments above. Must all of the historical data in the Gospels be changed or ignored if hallucination theses are potentially to obtain? Conversely, if the Gospel data remain, especially in key places, would this be a formidable task or even a multifaceted roadblock that must be answered by those who prefer the hallucination views?

Another more specific critique of Strauss should perhaps be classified as Orr’s strongest historical argument against hallucinations. In fact, this insight by both Strauss and Orr alike may actually rank as being ahead of both their times in accord with more contemporary views. Orr reasoned that Paul’s list of appearances in 1 Corinthians 15 is very impressive “and well attested.” Then Orr quotes Strauss, the major German skeptic and foremost hallucination proponent who actually conceded much crucial information regarding this text. Strauss acknowledges that Paul apparently received his material at this point precisely from Peter, James, and the other original eyewitnesses, as described in Gal 1:18–2:10. Yet, he knew of these data much earlier.

Amazingly, Strauss admits a rather major scenario, almost as if constructing a positive case himself, by maintaining that Paul received the message of the appearances in 1 Cor 15:3–7 three years after his conversion when he traveled to Jerusalem. Strauss affirms that “there is no occasion to doubt that the apostle Paul had heard this from Peter, James, and perhaps from others concerned” as per his own testimony in Gal 1:18–19 and 2:9. Then he specifies that Paul went “to Jerusalem, to get more accurate information about Jesus in general, and in particular about those appearances of him after his death which others also professed to have had.” Further, Strauss thinks that Paul “had heard in many ways of these appearances even at an earlier period, while he was persecuting the confessors of the new Christ.”

So Strauss confirms his position that Paul received the testimony in 1 Cor 15:3–7 just three years after his conversion via his travel to Jerusalem to interview Peter and James (Gal 1:18–20). For Strauss, Paul’s precise purpose in making this trip was to gather reliable information regarding Jesus’s resurrection appearances from the original witnesses themselves. Strauss also thinks that Paul had probably heard often of these appearance reports even before his conversion, precisely during his persecution of Christian believers.

One reason to emphasize Strauss’s approach and the information gained by its use is that it is enormously crucial in making a case precisely against his own hallu­cination thesis as well as in the overall evidence for Jesus’s resurrection appearances that this approach generates. Paul naturally would have been utilizing the study skills that were built into his early training as a Pharisee when he heard these testimonies of these eyewitnesses. In fact, Paul even utilized the same terms for passing on tradition as explained by Josephus, who was himself a Pharisee. This knowledge, combined with Strauss freely admitting that Paul learned from the apostolic witnesses that the appearances occurred to groups of individuals, creates a roadblock to these appearances being hallucinations.

Admitting this group of crucial events, as Strauss clearly does, places him in a bind that necessitates a response. Strauss thinks that Paul still downplayed the experiences of the other apostles due to his belief in the primacy of his own encounter, plus some jealousy on his part. But this suggestion is unverified from the available data while being opposed by several considerations. For instance, Strauss’s stance here is contrary to Paul’s firm and quite positive assertion that all the apostles just mentioned reported the same appearances that he did (1 Cor 15:11).

But beyond Strauss’s clear teachings at this point, the overall introduction of these ideas in this chapter was that conservative scholar James Orr had singled out Strauss’s admissions here as militating against Strauss’s own views that Jesus’s appearances after his death were due to natural hallucinations. Since Orr considered that Strauss’s views were mistaken for these as well as other reasons, he asks whether Jesus may actually have appeared to his followers but in less than a real body. The treatment of this latter option by conservative scholars is entertained later in this chapter.

Other Conservative Commentators

At the close of the German liberal era, prominent New Testament professor C. H. Dodd, of both Oxford and Cambridge Universities, also discussed this last theme of Paul’s two trips to Jerusalem (Gal 1:18–20; 2:1–10) in specific detail. Dodd agreed with Strauss in holding that Paul probably received the traditional material regarding Jesus’s appearances in 1 Corinthians 15 when he visited with Peter and James the brother of Jesus in Jerusalem. These events occurred no more than a maximum of seven years after Jesus’s crucifixion, and they could have happened earlier.

Edersheim adds that Paul’s use of the verb historeō here in 1:18 “implies a careful and searching inquiry on his part.” One more major corollary here is that this text continues in Gal 2:1–10, where, in addition to other subjects as well, Paul indicates that he and Jesus’s apostles were on the same page, agreeing on the nature of the gospel message, which of course included the resurrection event (Rom 1:3–4; 10:9; 1 Cor 15:3–4).

In 1907, Lake noted another argument of equal importance: the material in 1 Cor 15:3–7 not only preserves eyewitness testimony, but it is also dated exceptionally early—in fact all the way back to Jesus’s original disciples in the earliest church, probably at Jerusalem! These ideas are true forerunners of the most crucial, consensus conclusions from late twentieth- to twenty-first-century research!

The force of these last points is easy to miss. If Paul procured his information on the deity, death, and resurrection appearances of Jesus from the most influential of the apostolic eyewitnesses (Peter, James the brother of Jesus, and John), then the reports are indeed difficult to treat offhandedly. In fact, Paul and the other apostles taught the same gospel message (as stated in Gal 2:2, 6, 9, and as Paul confirms in 1 Cor 15:11). As such, this testimony indeed constituted a strong critique of hallucinations or any other naturalistic theory for that matter, since the message dated back to the direct experiences of the earliest eyewitnesses themselves, who saw the risen Jesus collectively.

Even without mentioning many other proposed weaknesses with suppositions that involve hallucinations, Orr sums up much of his case against these subjective notions in just one sentence: “Even on its own ground, however, it must be held that the vision theory breaks down in the most essential points.”

Listing hallucinations as the “only hypothesis which has any plausibility at the present day,” Fisher also presents a multifaceted case against this approach. In no particular order, Fisher lists Schleiermacher’s criticism regarding the disciples that this view “attributes to them a mental imbecility” that would invalidate their testimony. Further, it would question “our moral respect” for Jesus himself. Moreover, Paul distinguishes his appearance of the risen Jesus from his other subsequent revelations from God, indicating that the appearance was a more objective disclosure.

Add to these reasons the disciples’ mental condition after the crucifixion. They were sorrowful and dejected, as almost all critical scholars allow. But how would they recover from this state of mind? No ecstasy or excitement was found in their demeanors. Seeing Jesus “took them by surprise.” Westcott and Lake among many other scholars likewise emphasize the disciples’ exceptionally negative ­psychological outlook.

Continuing Fisher’s critique, the resurrection appearances were quite reserved. One might expect that they would grow in numbers, but such was not the case. As Keim taught, the appearances were limited in time and “ceased in a short period.” Also, the disciples were profoundly changed by their experience. This newly discovered enthusiasm must be explained adequately.

After summarizing these eight arguments, Fisher issued a bit of a challenge. Everyone concedes and “nobody questions” that the disciples thought that the risen Jesus had actually appeared to them after his death by crucifixion. Therefore, those who refuse to accept this testimony should propose naturalistic theories that “explain in some satisfactory way the origin, strength, and persistence” of the disciples’ faith!

Milligan also interjected his own list of critiques of the subjective vision thesis: Paul states in 1 Cor 15:8 that Christ appeared to him “last of all.” That (along with Acts 1:3, it might be added) is a direct statement that Jesus’s last appearance ended the series at a very specific time. There was definitely a demarcation in this matter. That was in spite of all of Paul’s subsequent revelations and visions, which he thus had to think of as different phenomena and not as appearances. The expectancy and excitement required by several of the major German liberal theorists is not present; in fact it is quite the contrary. Moreover, if the appearances had been incorporeal, they would be more consistent with light surrounding Jesus, but such is nowhere to be found during the forty days of appearances preceding Paul’s later experience.

Continuing, Milligan points out that Jesus’s appearances ended abruptly without any fresh events even during the early days of persecution. There are good reasons to think that the appearances also occurred in Jerusalem rather than just in Galilee, as opposed to the majority of the vision theorists. The time that Jesus remained with his disciples during some of these appearances is inconsistent with the brief character of hallucinations. If the witnesses were seeing hallucinations as constructs from within their own minds, why did they disbelieve them after they saw them? Moreover, Milligan’s strongest critique was probably that Jesus manifested himself to many people and personalities in many different ways and circumstances.

Hayes mentions several other problems with the hallucination approach. Some of these items are already mentioned above, such as the appearances ceasing and there being no state of ecstasy in the disciples and just despair. Further, subjective visions are brief but some of the appearances lasted quite long, and subjective visions later in the New Testament are distinguished from the resurrection appearances.

Like Orr’s exceptional critique above, Hayes was one of the earliest commentators, either liberal or conservative, to emphasize two other critiques of hallucination scenarios. He pointed out that group appearances where the same details were reported is a very powerful refutation. This is quite a major insight, in that a few early conservative commentators wrongly conceded that such visions were contagious, a concept that was later disproven after the birth of psychology. But this improper view may still have accounted for group appearances being mentioned seldom, perhaps because others had also incorrectly thought that this contagion was the case, hence making group sightings less consequential.

Further, Hayes also asserted that the witnesses to the appearances exhibited quite different dispositions, from Peter, to James, to Thomas and others (and we may certainly add here the women too), yet they all agreed that they had seen Jesus and that he was risen from the dead. Fisher had also pointed out this huge observation even decades before Hayes, stating that Jesus appeared to a wide “number and variety” of people, comprising “all varieties of temperament.” But this was still not a common critique at that time.

Agreeing with Fisher that it was the only worthwhile theory to respond to, Edersheim also produced a list of reasons against the hallucination thesis. He charged that it was impossible to reconcile this notion with what we know from the New Testament, and it fails to explain Paul’s appearance. Further, the motif of the disciples returning immediately to Galilee and the meaninglessness of “third day” references are failed attempts. As per Keim, the appearances ceased, which is not the likely path for hallucinations.

Unlike the German liberal scholars, the conservative scholars exhibited many more insights and made far more crucial critiques of the hallucination thesis in relation to the disciples. By comparison, the liberal response seemed almost half-hearted!

Amazingly, many of these conservative assessments were major and are still considered today to be among the very best criticisms of this hypothesis. These insights would include the concession from Strauss and others that Paul acquired the list of appearances in 1 Cor 15:4–7 from apostolic testimony (Orr) at a very early date (Lake), and that groups of people saw Jesus alive again (Hayes). The term historeō indicates the “searching inquiry” into these events by Paul (Edersheim). The wide variety of times and places (Milligan) and the personalities involved (Hayes) are also crucial factors, as is the other apostles agreeing with Paul regarding the nature of the gospel message (Hayes). Just a few years later, Dodd and others went into far more detail into many of these same features. So with Fisher, the challenge is for those who deny the resurrection appearances to compose a natural hypothesis that will incorporate these and other data. We will return to these points in particular when we construct the best case against hallucinations.

Hallucinations or Subjective Visions and Paul

Brook Foss Westcott was the Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge University and was without much of a doubt one of the most prominent scholars of his or any other era. As strange as it may sound, the German liberals during almost the entire nineteenth century, as the pacesetters of the world of contemporary theological trends, did not possess a critical text of the Greek New Testament! Since this absolutely crucial tool was unavailable to them, they did their studying and theorizing without one, unable to make objective comments regarding the original textual readings! Westcott was part of the famous trio of British scholars who largely made just such a New Testament text available in 1881 along with a critical text of the Apostolic Fathers (1889–1890). Working with F. Hort and J. B. Lightfoot, all three as Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge University, they changed the world of Gospel and New Testament scholarship.

In his volume on Jesus’s resurrection, Westcott objected especially to the notions that the German liberals (such as Strauss, Weizsäcker, and Pfleiderer) frequently assumed regarding Paul’s subjective “vision” on the road to Damascus. Perhaps their chief reason for this conclusion was the idea that since Paul included his appearance (1 Cor 15:8) along with the other appearances in the list (15:3–7), he therefore considered them all to be of the same nature (i.e., closer to spiritual visions of some sort). But Westcott argued that Paul’s point was not metaphysical sameness but that each of the appearances was “equally actual.” For Paul, the appearances were “essentially objective and outward.”

Orr also argued against this prominent German liberal idea that the list of appearances in 1 Corinthians were all spiritual visions. Like Westcott, he also pointed out that Paul’s emphasis was not that the experiences were therefore all visionary in nature, but that his was just as real as theirs.

Fisher addressed a different aspect of the German liberal attempts to explain away Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus in natural terms due to some sort of subjective hallucination or other similar experience. Discussing alternative efforts that were often suggested, such as Paul undergoing a mental crisis due to secret doubts caused by his persecuting the church, or because he encountered a horrible thunderstorm or even suffered a sunstroke, Fisher describes each of these attempts as being “not only without historical warrant, but [it] is directly in the teeth of Paul’s own assertions.”

Another key charge to make in this discussion is that once it is recognized that there are no grounds for claiming that Paul was reacting out of any kind of remorse, guilt, or doubt, as just mentioned, there are also no grounds for the claim that Paul could have hallucinated the risen Jesus. The way he describes himself in his unanimously accepted epistles is the exact opposite of the mindset required to be open to such subjective experiences. As Lake states, “an elaborate psychological process” for Paul must be construed. But showing this would be “extremely cumbrous and improbable” and thus be “a serious objective to the purely subjective hypothesis.” Paul clearly had no desire to see Jesus resurrected!

So these are other areas like those mentioned above where, in order to avoid the New Testament text’s clear conclusions, critical scholars are often willing to invent new circumstances that are not grounded either in the Gospel reports or elsewhere. In this case, Paul’s firsthand statements, especially in Gal 1:13–14 and Phil 3:4–6 (which are acknowledged as genuine by virtually every single critical scholar), clearly outweigh invented possibilities that suggest his state of mind must have been something totally different. This is one of the reasons why historians today generally eschew doing psychological analyses of persons who lived in the past, even more so for those of almost two thousand years ago, especially when these modern analyses contradict the sources that we possess.

Altogether, it is difficult to arrive at any good reasons for thinking that Paul was (or must have been) desirous to see the risen Jesus. All the ideas to the contrary are based on “happenstance” and “what if?” scenarios and oppose the evidence that we possess. Hence, there is simply a decisive lack of any confirmation that pushes us toward the notion that Paul hallucinated. On all accounts, he simply does not seem to be a very strong candidate to have manufactured these subjective visions.

The Objective Vision Theory

As mentioned often already, this is not a naturalistic hypothesis but an alternative view regarding the nature of Jesus’s resurrection appearances. As such, in addition to its historical connections as a sort of opposite to Strauss’s view, we will treat it in this chapter as well. According to this position, Jesus was raised from the dead, taken to heaven, and he and his Father cooperated to send nonphysical visions of himself back to his followers to convince them that he was alive and to call them to ministry.

By far the chief benefit of, or problem for (depending on one’s perspective!), this thesis is that it clearly involves the existence of God, his son Jesus, an afterlife, and the supernatural realm, as German liberal scholar Keim himself admitted. It is even the case that virtually all the major Christian doctrines could still be true on this view except for the bodily nature of Jesus’s resurrected form. In other words, Jesus was raised from the dead and appeared as a glorified spirit-being rather than bodily.

So if the objective vision thesis is true, naturalism is still mistaken at the very center and most crucial part of this worldview, since the natural world would not be all there is to reality. Not only was Jesus raised as a glorified spirit-being after his death, but his Father (God) exists. On the other hand, while orthodox Christianity would be incorrect in its belief that it was Jesus’s body that was raised, it would still be correct that Jesus was raised from the dead. Moreover, it could potentially be correct about almost all other major doctrines. Naturalism clearly loses the most on this thesis. On this, there is widespread agreement.

However, the defeat of naturalism alone is clearly not the goal of Jesus’s resurrection. As Orr also properly reminds us, “The survival of the soul is not resurrection.” So whether the underlying position is close to a view like Plato’s idealistic notion of immortality or to another philosophical position, it clearly represents neither the New Testament teaching nor the predominant Jewish view of the resurrection of the body of Jesus’s day, as we will argue later.

Edersheim mentions that although Keim’s objective thesis has fewer unexplained facts than Strauss’s subjective vision supposition, the empty tomb is an especially major problem for both of them. Plus, how did Jesus’s dead body disappear from the tomb? Other questions for Keim include Jesus showing the disciples his wounds and his followers’ inability to touch Jesus though the traditions speak of this.

Similarly, Orr charges that ongoing, serious problems for the objective vision thesis exist chiefly when the view is compared to the New Testament reports themselves. The largest issues are the lack of bodily resurrection appearances (including Jesus actually being seen by and conversing with his followers) and the denial of the empty tomb, which are very well attested in the texts. But this is not all. Orr also cites A. B. Bruce, who asks, “Why send messages that were certain to produce an opposite impression?” The implication here, of course, is that the Father and his son Jesus were guilty of sending misleading “telegrams,” verging on deceit in that they clearly portrayed Jesus as standing right there in front of his disciples, not to mention the bodiless notion itself. Orr asks that, since “a theory of supernaturalism is not escaped” by the objective vision theory, why trade the Gospel accounts for Keim’s thesis?

It seems that we definitely need to proceed past the fact that the objective vision theory would be a supernatural thesis for several reasons. The most common version by Keim requires at least the notions of the existence of God, Jesus being raised from the dead (even if only as a spirit-being), what appears to be a miracle, and an afterlife for both Jesus and believers. So if this thesis is true, naturalism is false and some major Christian beliefs could still be true. So unlike the natural theories where believers are largely required to do the refuting, the naturalists are on the defensive for this supernatural alternative.

Still, there are serious problems with Keim’s view, to be sure. For example, it fails in minimizing especially the Gospel accounts and descriptions of Jesus’s resurrection appearances, and it denies the historicity of the empty tomb. Further, it adopts a nonbiblical anthropology that affects the future state in which Jesus and his followers exist.

The Legend or Myth Theory

When discussing the nineteenth-century German liberal hypotheses, we saw that a number of the later researchers were convinced that the Christian message had developed and grown due to the likely assimilation of various pagan myths. A variety of these ideas coalesced to form an entire category of potential responses rather than a single thesis. In this sense, differing types of overlapping legendary accretion were thought to have merged. The Jewish or Christian narratives might have grown over time due to any number of factors, even from the simple retelling of fantastic stories and feats, especially as applied to miraculous accounts or claims of divinity.

According to one hypothesis, ancient, mythical “divine men” (Greek: theios anēr) or other semifictitious or fictitious “superheroes” could have been the original inspirations for the biblical accounts. Even the so-called vegetation gods or the tales surrounding them could have served as prototypes that developed into their grandiose “exploits,” including the sense in which these ancient stories were thought to have served as archetypes for biblical persons or teachings.

It was thought that Christian and Jewish comparisons may have been made to historical individuals like Alexander the Great, Apollonius of Tyana, or Sabbatai Zevi. Efforts were made to trace various possible influences of Hellenistic ideas on these Jewish and Christian traditions. Best known for emphasizing some of these trends, the impact of the religionsgeschichtliche Schule was dominant. The apparent similarities and differences were tracked through the pagan accounts into their possible influences on Jewish and Christian teachings with regard to how these emphases could be parsed or teased out of various religious texts of this period, including the New Testament.

As mentioned with the other natural resurrection hypotheses as a whole, it is particularly true here that to provide anything close to a thorough critique of these notions is quite far from our purposes in this chapter. That will be pursued in a later chapter. Our intent at this point is just to delineate some of the various sorts of critiques that were leveled against these positions by the most influential conservative scholars at that time. These researchers made a number of thoughtful comments, as reflected in their writing during the last half of the German liberal reign and slightly afterward.

Lake raises an absolutely crucial complaint. While some of the critical charges are possible, “the difficulty is to decide how far this theory is based on fact, and how far it is merely guess work.” Lake’s chief emphasis, as he explains, is to begin with what conclusions we can ascertain directly from the harder data, such as historical reports. That material would go a long way toward providing some needed explanation apart from any mythological rumors. In short, “it is history, not theology or mythology.” We move best, then, from the known to the unknown data.

To see what this might mean with regard to Jesus’s resurrection, for example, critical scholars basically all agree that Jesus’s disciples were utterly convinced that they had seen the risen Jesus after his death. As well established as this historical fact is, their experiences are the central core that needs to be explained, regardless of what sort of teachings may be scattered through other stories.

Westcott claims, “There was no popular belief at the time which could have inspired [the apostles] with a faith in an imaginary Resurrection. There was none among the Greeks whose mythology might appear at first sight to offer scope for its spontaneous growth.” The key idea here is that “to the Greeks the Resurrection, whether as the type or as the spring of a new life, was a strange idea.” Then Westcott adds, as pertaining to the Christian gospel, “Nor was it otherwise with the Jews.”

Hayes comments similarly regarding the empty tomb. He declares, “It cannot be accounted for by any suggestion in Jewish prophecy or in Oriental myths.” Then more like Lake, he adds regarding the early belief in Jesus’s resurrection, “That faith did not rest upon invention or myth but upon the facts of their own experience.”

Finally, very few trained scholars followed Bruno Bauer or Peter Jensen in rejecting Jesus’s very existence, yet this position should still be mentioned here, since it made extensive use of various concepts of myth and legend. As the better established of the two, Bauer’s ideas were influential even though his entire position was not embraced. However, references to the view that Jesus never lived are relatively rare among the researchers of the German liberal period.

In the preceding two chapters, it was pointed out that Schweitzer dismissed Bauer’s work as consisting of poor research, such as arbitrarily dating the Gospels and even Paul’s critically accepted epistles into the second century, seemingly to give more credence to his own views. Schweitzer was exceptionally critical of Bauer’s thesis and flatly blamed this German theologian for his arbitrariness, ungrounded arguments, and self-refuting ideas. As a result, Schweitzer reports that Bauer’s conclusions were simply ignored by his peers, concluding among other things that “he had long been regarded by theologians as an extinct force; nay, more, had been forgotten. . . . For his contemporaries he was a mere eccentric.”

Hayes also critiques Bruno Bauer and several other mostly later popularizers who denied Jesus’s existence. Citing Schweitzer’s harsh words regarding these writers being out of their fields and using their imagination rather than strong research, Hayes states, “There seems to be general consensus of opinion today that these ultra-destructive critics have failed, and utterly failed, to establish their negative positions concerning this most important fact in the history of the race.” He ends the matter with the words, “Practically all the authorities are agreed that there was a man Jesus and that he died and that he was buried.”

But it was also mentioned in an earlier chapter that Marburg University professor Peter Jensen likewise postulated that Jesus had never lived, though from a different angle. Jensen traced his notions to a collage of ideas and stories adopted from the Old Testament, which he termed a Jewish Gilgamesh myth. The Gospel writers recycled these mythical accounts in order to totally fabricate the details of Jesus’s life. For instance, Old Testament resurrections and similar ideas found their way into the Gospel writings.

But Orr argues, “Jensen is an extremist, and his book may be regarded as the reductio ad absurdum of a theory which, before him, had been getting cut more and more away from the ground of historical fact.” Orr suggests treating historically the recognized, accredited evidence for Jesus’s death, burial, and resurrection instead of simply showing “no concern with the facts” and trying to deny everything perceived to be in one’s way. Orr continues, “You do not get rid of facts by simply proposing to give an artificial mythological explanation of them.”

Orr continues critiquing Jensen: “Where is the faintest trace of evidence of such a pre-Christian Jewish sketch of the Messiah embracing Virgin-born, Resurrection, and Ascension? It is nothing but an inferential conjecture from the Gospel narratives.” Then, sounding quite similar to Lake’s point above, Orr states, “The Resurrection of Jesus was no nature-myth, but an event which happened three days after His Crucifixion, in an historical time, and in the case of an historical Personage. Parallels to such an event utterly fail.”

Regarding that mythological explanation, Orr makes two additional critiques. First is Jensen’s baselessness. Jensen’s starting point here is a wide-ranging theory concerning “the general astral Babylonian hypothesis” and “the assumed universal diffusion of this astral theory throughout the East.” Orr notes that the remainder of the thesis is arranged such that it stands or falls on the success of this initial, far-reaching astral thesis. However, in a general Near Eastern ethos, almost any idea can be located somewhere!

The second critique is Jensen’s arbitrariness. Supposed similarities between Babylonian, Jewish, and Christian ideas are reproduced as if there were one-to-one correspondences between them. However, the original, underlying liberal thesis had never been corroborated in the first place, and no apparent connections existed between these ideas. So Orr adds: “Where facts fail, imagination is invoked to fill the gaps.” Then again, “this ingenious construction—[is] wholly in the air, as if there was no such thing as history in the matter.”

For example, Jensen and others who support the legendary thesis draw comparisons between the Gilgamesh tales and the Christian message, especially with regard to Jesus’s resurrection. But there is no resurrection or anything like it in the Gilgamesh tale! In fact, the story ends with an almost opposite moral: human beings can never obtain immortality, for that is simply not in their power or nature. As per Orr’s comments, the stretch needed to even compare these two accounts is mind-boggling!

Jensen’s response is that the earliest version of Gilgamesh probably did include a translation to heaven and that this would be like a resurrection. This is, no doubt, what Orr means by his statements regarding Jensen’s utilization of the imagination to fill the gaps in factual comparisons and his thesis being constructed in air apart from history. We will simply add two brief comments: we cannot and must not assume what is missing in the text! Further, translation to heaven (or apotheosis) is definitely not an inference for the idea of a resurrection! But we will return to this subject in later chapters.

The conservative scholars from the second half of the German liberal period leveled at least two principal charges against the proponents of the legendary or mythical hypotheses. Most significantly, these legend theses predominantly sidestep or bypass the chief issue: even if there were such data consisting of ideas that have apparently grown more complex as time went on, or ancient, pre-Christian stories that typify crucial Christian messages in whole or in part, these overlook how the disciples’ experiences are to be understood. The reason for the priority of the latter is clear: since critical scholars are quite unanimous that the historical evidence indicates that the disciples really thought they had seen the risen Jesus, then that is the center of what must be explained. Other stories may be relevant in some sense, but they do not account for the crux of these experiential convictions.

Further, the conservative scholars denied that parallel accounts of this nature existed before Jesus’s time anyway, as the comments indicate above. If so, then there were no stories containing crucial elements like the gospel message to copy. So these legendary or mythical ideas fail on both ends of the suppositions.

Orr adds a few more general thoughts: the evidenced link or point of connection between the pagan and the Jewish or Christian ideas is sadly lacking. In other words, how do we demonstrate that the latter were derived from the former? Moreover, the extent to which these ideas are even found in earlier religious or other contexts to begin with is a serious issue too, such as with Persian or Zoroastrian sources on the subject of bodily resurrection. Further, many have questioned the degree to which these ideas are even found in the Old Testament, especially at an early date.

We must not glide past this important point. As vital as explaining the confirmed historical data is, as we have seen, the causal connection linking two or more claimed similarities is just as critical. It is no stretch of the imagination to line up similar events, teachings, or holy books in order to make comparisons, while all the time thinking that such moves are sufficient to somehow “prove” a connection between them. Similarities are just that—similar! They may even be coherent to some extent.

But similarities simply do not translate to causal relations. Life is absolutely full of any number of ideas, events, or even ball games that seem to be related closely in some select sense, but which have absolutely no causal connection in any way whatsoever. Regarding the causal assertions made by the German liberals that a certain pagan idea inspired a similar-sounding biblical idea, the burden is on them to show the causal connections between the one and the other. They must show how we know that the one led directly to the other and make that all-important causal link. Without it, the comparisons at their very best still remain unproven similarities.

Not only are causal connections between pagan ideas and Jewish or Christian ideas lacking, but Orr concludes that we cannot even produce a single example of resurrection belief regarding a historical person like Jesus. Further, “The Christian Resurrection is thus a fact without historical analogy.” If statements such as these obtain, it would seem that the Christian message may just be inching closer to some notion of uniqueness. But we do not wish to move too quickly here—that is a topic for ongoing discussion.

By the end of the German liberal reign, many criticisms had been aimed at the various legend or mythical theses. But very little was known or published at that time regarding such necessary information as the time frames of the mythical stories, which aspects were present in the earliest accounts, the question of the earliest sources for the historical persons being compared to Jesus and the resurrection accounts in particular, and so on. If the mythical stories dated before Christianity or were composed sufficiently close to the lives of the real persons they recount, there obviously would be more of a point to be made. But as this era ended, these huge topics remained largely unsearched and unsolved. As such, the crucial components for these discussions were simply missing and unknown. So debates could only, by their very nature, beat the air. How could causal links be established without clear information on the sources thought to be precedents for the gospel message?

Still, this was not the chief point being made by the conservative scholars anyway. Their oft-repeated message was that regardless of when the pagan stories were dated, since virtually all scholars, whether liberal or conservative, agreed that Jesus’s disciples were utterly convinced that they had seen the risen Jesus and that these events were central to their message, it is these experiences that must be explained adequately. So we are talking first and foremost about these experiences rather than the state of the non-Christian materials, about which not enough was known anyway.

Was Paul the Founder of the Christian Church?

A cognate issue that sometimes functions as an extension of the last subject above should be mentioned here quickly. For our present purposes, did Paul originate the gospel message involving the early high Christology along with the teachings of Jesus’s death and resurrection appearances? Or was this early Christian gospel core in existence before Paul’s teaching and preaching?

It will be argued in much detail later in this volume that legendary and mythical theses of various species concerning either fictitious or living persons that seek to disprove the gospel message have not only been thoroughly refuted in each of their major claims, but they have even been basically abandoned by the critical scholars themselves. Similar refutations also apply to arguments that would suggest Paul’s implementation of mythical ideas, which are likewise rejected by the vast majority of scholars.

Although the basic idea is not a naturalistic theory as normally understood, it was argued periodically in German liberalism and particularly by the religionsgeschichtliche Schule that Paul was perhaps the mastermind behind Christianity or even its true founder, while Jesus was more simply a Jewish prophet and teacher loyal to the teachings of Judaism. Direct and indirect comments alike were aimed at how some of the Christian teachings of the first century were due either to Paul’s ideas or to the larger influx of Hellenistic Christianity that he helped to introduce. For Bousset, for example, the primitive Jewish concept of the “Son of Man” was contrasted with the Hellenistic community’s concept of “Lord.”

Some of these distinctions were only beginning toward the close of German liberalism. As with the other subjects in this chapter, the conservative scholars pushed back firmly against these ideas as well, even though the most developed aspects from both sides did not truly emerge until decades later in the mid-twentieth century.

At the very end of the German liberal era, Princeton Theological Seminary professor J. Gresham Machen published his own detailed discourses on the topic, discussing separate aspects of this thesis. Machen began by arguing specifically against Bousset that the early church’s strong emphasis on the full deity of Jesus Christ began unequivocally with the original disciples in Jerusalem rather than with Paul and Hellenistic thought. After all, it was Paul who traveled to Jerusalem on at least two occasions to meet with his predecessors to make sure that they were all of one mind on this teaching, ascertaining that they stood in agreement (Gal 1:18–20; 2:1–10). Paul traveled to them in order to gain the answer. After a further discussion of the matter, Machen concluded, “Thus the Pauline Epistles contain not the slightest trace of any conflict with regard to the person of Christ. . . . Paul appears to have been in harmony with all Palestinian Christians.” Other nineteenth- and early twentieth-century conservative researchers also defended Jesus’s deity as an early teaching that clearly predated Paul’s efforts and said that these early claims and messages were verified by Jesus’s resurrection from the dead.

During the heyday of the religionsgeschichtliche Schule, various German critical scholars began to research and study the hymns, prayers, liturgical texts, and other similar traditions chiefly found in Paul’s Epistles as well as in other New Testament works. As the research progressed, it was concluded that these generally brief, formally oral texts reflected pre-Pauline beliefs and teachings in the very early church, a view that is commonplace in recent scholarly research, including among critical researchers. For the purposes of this chapter, many of these creedal or traditional passages not only predate Paul’s writings, but they almost always address early statements about Jesus and frequently teach high Christology. Clearly, these teachings were present in the earliest church before Paul’s Epistles. This argument alone consists of a major indication that Paul did not invent the early church’s high Christology.

Shortly after the German liberal theological reign ended, C. H. Dodd wrote an influential volume on these early creedal traditions and the Acts sermon summaries, comparing the Pauline confessions to other New Testament texts. Reflecting on the similarities in light of Paul’s first trip to Jerusalem to confer with Peter and James the brother of Jesus, Dodd penned a now-famous quip to describe these leaders’ influential fifteen days together: “We may presume they did not spend all the time talking about the weather.” Dodd argued, “Thus Paul’s preaching represents a special stream of Christian tradition which was derived from the main stream at a point very near to its source.”

Moreover, the death of Jesus was not invented by Paul, as would hardly be charged by any specialist scholars. Bousset does not dispute this, attesting that even the notion of Jesus’s sacrificial death was recognized and accepted in both the primitive Palestinian community as well as by gentile Christians. Further, Bousset also thought that Jesus’s earliest disciples in the “first Christian community” apparently had spiritual visions of some sort and believed that in spite of his death, Jesus was perceived as being alive and exalted in glory. Otto Pfleiderer was another very influential member of the religionsgeschichtliche Schule, who, though he rejected the resurrection, still attested that the “most direct source” of these occurrences was “the historical fact of the death of Jesus, and the following visions seen by His disciples.” Hence, dating back to Jesus’s disciples, their belief in Jesus’s resurrection and his appearances were not due to Paul’s invention.

So the earliest gospel teaching of the deity, death, and resurrection appearances of Jesus was birthed in Jerusalem with Jesus’s apostles. The status of the ultimate facticity of their church-founding message makes all the difference. Once Jesus was raised from the dead, the gospel center was thereby established. There are, of course, far more of Paul’s overall teachings. Yet Paul met and conversed with the major apostles who held these gospel doctrines before he did (Gal 1:18–20). After his conversion, he agreed with this proclamation and was commended by the apostolic leaders (Gal 2:6, 9), explaining later that they were all teaching the same central gospel message that he was regarding Jesus’s resurrection appearances (1 Cor 15:11). On this core theme, then, as Dodd asserted, it should be concluded that “anyone who should maintain that the primitive Christian Gospel was fundamentally different from that which we have found in Paul must bear the burden of proof.” There was agreement in these essentials.

Naturalistic Theses at the Demise of German Liberalism

As in so many fields of study, conservatives are expected to criticize liberals and vice versa. One of the items that makes the material in this chapter so intriguing is that the majority of these conservatives held equally prestigious positions at major universities, making this a clash between colossal competitors.

Another fascinating item presaging interest in this battle is that it concerned the issue of naturalistic challenges to the resurrection of Jesus, which is generally taken as the most crucial, central, and important event in Christianity. Further, the German liberals themselves also offered many criticisms of each other’s hypotheses as well, sometimes even agreeing on the same sorts of critiques as those made by the conservative scholars, as depicted in the previous chapter. This comparison of opposing scholars on the similarities and dissimilarities between those who critiqued the various German liberal views would make an incredible study in itself.

Why were these naturalistic options composed in the first place? Edersheim insightfully comments for many researchers that the chief reason is that the resurrection would presumably be a miracle, and some worldviews simply cannot allow supernatural events.

So as we have seen several times already in this chapter, critics even preferred poor options over ones that offended their own worldview sensibilities. Such an example is the common effort to thoroughly rewrite Paul’s state of mind as to what happened when he was converted on the way to Damascus, in spite of it being Paul’s unanimously accepted epistles that were being freely adjusted without the necessary data to support these moves, while other liberals objected to these moves themselves. This caused Sparrow-Simpson, among others, to note that while the presence of worldviews is quite influential and personal, this still does not allow a scholar to theorize just about anything except precisely what the facts indicate, as in the case of Paul’s conversion.

One of the fascinating results of this research was discovering that several testi­monies from both the German liberal scholars as well as their contemporary conservative colleagues agreed that particular naturalistic theories had been decimated by their own challenges, causing some of them to be abandoned and no longer held by any scholars at the close of this theological epoch. Some of the scholarly language treated particular hypotheses like museum exhibits!

For example, after having remarked earlier that the swoon thesis “is now hopelessly discredited,” Orr asserted confidently, “No one now holds that Jesus did not die!” Morison reported of the apparent death hypothesis a couple decades later that “it is really little more than an historical curiosity.” Hayes stated strongly from the same time that, “it is not surprising, therefore, that the swoon theory has been rejected by all recent writers.” Sparrow-Simpson overstated the situation, but the thought expressed here is clear enough: “Probably no living person could be induced to credit it.”

It is likely that most of these scholars would attest that the very weakest of the alternative theses were the fraud hypotheses. Of the view we called Fraud Type 1, Orr explains, “The disciples, indeed, are now usually exonerated from participation in a deliberate fraud.” Then he adds, “The old theory of fraud on the part of the disciples has now no respectable advocates, and may be put out of account.” Hayes states strongly that “practically all authorities are willing to agree that conscious and continuous deception with such men as the apostles is an impossibility.” Fisher declares, “That some of the disciples stole his body, nobody will for a moment credit.” Milligan disregards the matter even quicker than the others: “It is not necessary to discuss the theory. It has been abandoned by every inquirer to whom a moment’s attention is due.”

Concerning what we called Fraud Type 2, few of these options were even defended by the German liberals anyway. After mentioning Pilate, Joseph of Arimathea, or the Sanhedrin as possibly removing Jesus’s body, Orr made an astute comment, citing the critics Renan and Loisy as agreeing with him on his sentiment: “Others, more wisely, leave the matter in the vagueness of ignorance.” After all, if a critic takes one of these directions, it makes much more sense to cite some unnamed, unknown person as the perpetrator, thereby not leaving a trail that is so liable to be confronted by the inevitable barrage of critical responses that descend whenever some specific person or group is named! But even with an unnamed culprit, difficult questions are still forthcoming. This is simply another indication of the strength of the traditional evidence.

Besides the contrary testimony, another reason for the unpopularity of the Fraud Type 2 charges is that, even if true, they explain far too little of what the liberals need. Among other things, they fail to respond adequately to—let alone solve—the questions regarding the appearance claims. Without these puzzle pieces, they are far away from workable solutions anyway.

Indicting both the swoon and fraud theories, Edersheim pronounces toward the end of the nineteenth century that “we may here put aside two hypotheses, now universally discarded even in Germany,” and follows by naming these two views. Then he asserts several times later, a little too strongly and confidently perhaps, that all versions of fraud as well as the vision alternatives are just “impossible.”

But not terribly far away from Edersheim’s comment, Orr considered that the following resurrection alternative theses had already been refuted thoroughly: swoon, fraud by the disciples, subjective visions or hallucinations, and objective visions. Summarizing the issues more generally but similarly, Hayes also reported, “All of these theories are practically discredited now.”

Thus, whichever scholarly train of views we follow, whether we are citing the German liberals themselves or their conservative scholarly counterparts, there was some initial agreement that, by the end of the nineteenth century or a little later, most of the once-prominent naturalistic theories had run their course and were now passé. At a minimum, most scholars appear to have thought that this extended at least to the swoon or apparent death theses, plus the varieties of the two fraud views. Even as a general conclusion, this is a valuable result of how scholarly interaction should take place by honing the various theses.

A Few Cognate Issues in the German Liberalism Debate

As these scholarly exchanges continued during the First Quest for the historical Jesus, several questions of a similar nature emerged from the discussions. A few of these matters are worth commenting on and summarizing, given the overall conversation, including providing some hints of some potential directions through the territory that developed during the ensuing decades.

Joseph’s Burial and the Women’s Visit to the Tomb

With few serious doubters, Jesus was believed by the majority of German liberal scholars to have died by crucifixion. Where does that leave the state of the Gospel accounts pertaining to Jesus’s body being buried in Joseph of Arimathea’s tomb, as well as the accounts of the women coming to Joseph’s tomb on the morning of that first weekday to finish the burial process?

As will be observed below, at least for the German liberal scholars who favored one of the major visionary hypotheses, Jesus’s appearances were generally held to have taken place at least initially in Galilee. For these and similar positions, this affected their views of the testimony regarding the Jerusalem tomb and what could be done with it. After telling his readers, “No one now holds that Jesus did not die!” Orr explains that most critical scholars of that time did allow that Joseph of Arimathea buried Jesus’s body in his own tomb. However, Orr offered the caveat that this acceptance usually came “with qualifications and explanations which deprive the act of the character it has in the Gospels.”

One example of such a view that is not quite a straightforward affirmation of the Gospel data is Schleiermacher’s, who thinks that while Joseph made sure that Jesus’s body was placed in the tomb, there is still room for the possibility that others were sent by Joseph (to move the body?) before the arrival of the women on Sunday morning. But not all scholars took this Joseph option at all. Orr even notes that some of those among the liberals, such as Strauss and Réville, even favored the position that Jesus’s body was simply tossed in the garbage heap! This may come as a surprise to some modern readers who may think of this as a phenomenon that has arisen just during the past few decades.

Further, Orr thinks that most German liberal scholars even accepted the women’s trip(s) to the tomb. He cites the negative votes of Weizsäcker, Keim, and Pfleiderer along with the positive affirmations of Renan, Réville, H. J. Holtzmann,O. Holtzmann, and Lake, concluding that “indeed most—accept the fact as historical.” Schleiermacher is another of those who could have been added to the positive side. Lake is an intriguing case here. While writing about the same time as Orr, he has the women going to the wrong tomb, one in which Jesus was never buried. Yet, he explains these things amid caveats and with what appears to be hesitant ideas.

The Empty Tomb

Generally speaking, the subject of the empty tomb did not command as much historical attention or thoughtfulness during the First Quest for the historical Jesus as it presently does in the Third Quest. But that does not eliminate some significant distinctions that were presented during the earlier movement. Several out­spoken and influential German liberals such as Strauss, Keim, and A. Meyer are well known for their opposition to the empty tomb, holding that it was a nonhistorical report. Lake, with his wrong tomb hypothesis, should be included among the deniers too, as just cited. It must be recognized that many if not most of those who denied the empty tomb did so because they were committed to visionary views of one sort or another.

On the other hand, Renan and O. Holtzmann are among those skeptical scholars who perhaps surprisingly accepted the historicity of the empty tomb. In fact, even Keim, speaking from the “unhistorical” side of the question and continuing to hold that position, still acknowledged that “a hundred voices” were raised in protest against the naysayers. Rather incredibly, Keim himself noted that these positive votes were cast both by the liberals as well as by the conservatives among their ranks. Then he provided a list of over a dozen scholars who argued affirmatively for the empty tomb, such as Schleiermacher, Hase, Weizsäcker, Godet, and Riggenbach. Writing several decades later, Adolf von Harnack added his considerable testimony to the discussion, at least concerning the likelihood of Paul’s knowledge of the empty tomb.

Having noted some of the positive support for the empty tomb, it clearly remains the New Testament teaching that the disciples’ resurrection faith was not derived from this empty tomb data. Rather, it was Jesus’s appearances that prompted their faith and proclamation. Scholars definitely recognize this aspect as well. As Harnack explains, “What [Paul] and the disciples regarded as all-important was not the state in which the grave was found, but Christ’s appearances.”

The Location of Jesus’s Appearances

One prominent issue during this time was the location of the appearances or visions, with two chief preferences being found in the literature: Galilee, and Jerusalem plus Galilee. In particular, the German liberals who championed either the subjective or objective vision theses were the chief proponents of the Galilean-only preference. The main reason for this was the predominant view at that time that the disciples would be incapable of working through all of their negative emotions in light of the unexpected crucifixion of Jesus and the dashing of their fondest hopes both for themselves and Israel. The disciples’ resulting depression, despair, and unrest would take some time to work through before they were able to respond by rejoicing in the news that Jesus had been raised. As Orr summarizes the matter, “The third day also is set aside as affording too little time for the recovery of the disciples from despair.”

Accordingly, it was concluded that the disciples must necessarily be given some “space” to recover. On the Galilee view, the disciples’ rest time was encouraged by Strauss’s quite straightforward mention of the need for “some time for the mental state of the disciples to become exalted in the degree necessary, before this . . . highly wrought enthusiasm could believe.” Being more specific regarding the length of time that may have been required, Renan allowed for up to one year for the apostles to rest, rejuvenate, and heal. Keim and others roughly followed a similar scenario, in spite of postulating actual appearances of Jesus, though of the objective visionary sort. So the reason for the Galilee location appears to be more than clear: in order to postulate either subjective or objective visions, it was thought that the time and location of these events must simply be changed from the details identified in the Gospel reports to accommodate these scholars’ hypotheses.

The chief pushback came from scholars who thought that Jesus appeared to his disciples and others in Jerusalem first and then later in Galilee. This is reported by Matthew and John, while Luke only has appearances in Jerusalem. But it must be noted carefully at this point that it is definitely not being argued here in a straightforward, one-to-one manner that all of the following material can be worked out simply by studying and attempting to harmonize these texts. If that were the case, there would be less need for much else besides parallel Gospel accounts or harmonies. Other options, such as Mark’s addition of his “and Peter” comment, are possible nuances. There are certainly some potential questions among these passages.

It is only being pointed out for now that since reading through each of the earliest narratives does not automatically work out all the possibilities or decide between paths that differ from the ones chosen by this or that scholar, as just listed above, questions cannot simply be ignored. For starters, at least according to three of the Gospel reports, the disciples were still in Jerusalem on that first Easter Sunday morning. The angel at Jesus’s burial tomb instructed the women to go tell the disciples that Jesus had been triumphantly raised from the dead and that Jesus would go ahead of them to Galilee as well as meet them there (Matt 28:7). Even in Mark 16:1–8 it certainly seems that when the women were instructed to go tell the apostles, they did not have to run to Galilee on a multiday trip! The women delivered their message to the disciples (Luke 24:5–9; Matt 28:8, 11; John 20:18), who left sometime later for Galilee (Matt 28:16).

In the meantime, the texts relate that at least Peter and John ran to the burial tomb in order to check out the women’s message (John 20:3–9; cf. Luke 24:12, 24). During that same Sunday, Luke and John (plus Matthew) indicate that Jesus appeared a few times in and around the city of Jerusalem. He appeared to one or more of the women who came to the tomb (Matt 28:9; John 20:14–18), and then to two of his followers just outside the city (Luke 24:13–31). Later he appeared to Peter (Luke 24:34), and then to all eleven of his disciples in Jerusalem (Luke 24:33–49; cf. John 20:19–22).

According to John alone, the disciples were still in the city of Jerusalem one week later when Jesus appeared to them again (20:26–29). So all four Gospels want readers to know that the women and probably the male disciples had not yet left Jerusalem before Jesus’s resurrection from the dead. Luke also relates that the ascension occurred later, just outside of Jerusalem (Luke 24:50–53; Acts 1:6–11).

It is also the case that two of the four Gospels do indeed teach clearly that Jesus appeared to the disciples in Galilee, while Mark reports this prediction by both Jesus himself (14:28) as well as by the young man (or angel) at the tomb (16:7). Since it can hardly be thought that such predictions would be mentioned if Mark intended to convey the idea that Jesus had been mistaken about a Galilee appearance, Mark’s Gospel reports can safely be added to the Galilee list. Matthew actually reports such a Galilee appearance (28:16–20), as does the last chapter of John (21:1–23), whether or not it is taken to be an appendix or an addition. So Galilee clearly has its place in the majority of the Gospel appearance narratives.

At least a couple of other considerations also clearly favor the Jerusalem plus Galilee scenario for the appearances. Even if the majority of the disciples had fled for Galilee soon after Jesus’s arrest in Gethsemane, they would very possibly (if not likely) still have failed to arrive there until Sunday night or possibly even later, especially if they were traveling carefully to avoid arrest, or if they had rested at all on the Sabbath. This would actually have amounted to four or more days later by Jewish reckoning. If so, this would not have constituted Jesus being raised and appearing on the third day after his death (as with the early creedal material in 1 Cor 15:3–4 and frequently elsewhere). But the trip to Galilee could easily have fit into the longer period of Jesus’s appearances after Jerusalem.

Further, it makes little sense for the men to go running away to Galilee anytime during the entire weekend while leaving the women behind—their friends, colleagues, and perhaps even their family members! Since the commonly stated reason for the disciples fleeing was out of fright, how could they possibly justify exposing these women to similar troubles? Moreover, in John 20:19, that fear drove the men inside behind locked doors in the city rather than out on the road to Galilee.

For these reasons, then, a Jerusalem-followed-by-Galilee scenario for the appear­ances easily makes the most sense. The clear teaching of the Gospels, especially when multiply attested at this point, the lack of travel time to Galilee before the third day, and the disciples leaving the women behind in Jerusalem during what they thought was a very dangerous time are powerful considerations favoring both locations for the appearances. Perhaps for reasons such as these, this question has generally received much less attention after the German liberal era, and certainly without the deliberative force of the earlier liberal discussions. This could well have been due to the lessened emphasis on both major versions of the visionary hypotheses as well, which were the chief engines motivating the “Galilee first” agenda, plus the decided lack of more dogmatic evidence.

The “Galilee thesis” certainly seems to reject a stronger thesis in order to fit preferred critical presuppositions. Thus, it needs to be emphasized regarding the immediate move of the disciples to Galilee that this option was widely pursued by the liberal critics even though it was opposed to the best data and reasoning. This indicates yet another move that rather arbitrarily favored their notions over what the texts taught. This time, the motives that were even admittedly identified by the German liberals were to allow their visionary alternative hypotheses instead of bodily resurrection appearances and to undermine the women’s message regarding the empty tomb (which would have created even worse problems for them, given the notion of visions).

Paul’s Appearances of the Same Sort as the Others?

An exceptionally common assertion found among the German liberal scholars is that, since Paul added his name at the end of the early traditional lists of resurrection appearances in 1 Cor 15:3–7, he was thereby asserting that his appearance on the road to Damascus was of the same or similar species of those to the other apostles. As Lake states, there is no “reason to suppose that [Paul’s] experience was essentially different from that of the other disciples.” Similarly, Johannes Weiss extrapolated from Paul’s vision to all of the others as also being visionary. F. C. Baur was another scholar who apparently tended to tie what he thought was the subjective vision of Paul to the other visions. Orr explains the German liberal idea like this: “From St. Paul’s ‘vision’ of Jesus on the way to Damascus, it is argued that the earlier appearances which he enumerates must have been visionary also.”

Another consideration must be borne in mind here before this view is evaluated. As just noted, there are overriding reasons for the frequent liberal tandem positions on the appearances of Jesus taking place in Galilee, largely in order to get past the apostles’ grief and despair, plus the late report of the empty tomb. These are additional examples that most likely indicate some rather self-serving motives on the part of the German liberals who made this move. Like the earlier example, the chief reason here seems to be the popularity of both the subjective and objective vision theses. Therefore, if the comparison could be successfully established between Paul’s appearance vis-à-vis the others as well as the late proclamation of the empty tomb, this dual support for the liberal thesis would help it along considerably, pointing in the direction of visionary events of some sort rather than bodily appearances for all the recipients. This was the preferred interpretation even if the visions were taken in the objective visionary sense, as both Lake and Weiss did.

However, there are several indications that this was not at all the point that Paul was attempting to establish in 1 Cor 15:3–8, though we will again only be able to mention these responses here very succinctly. First, Paul argued at the outset that he was not a participant during the initial time frame with the other apostles. Rather, the Lord’s appearance to him was “as to one untimely born” (15:8 ESV). Since Paul at least acknowledged that he was out of the appearance time sequence proper, this temporal difference of two to three years could well indicate that he knew of other variations between the appearances as well.

Further, the Greek term ōphthē (from the verb horaō) used in this text indicates that the recipients “were appeared to,” with Christ clearly being the initiator of the experience. Therefore, the emphasis is placed on the initiative of the one doing the appearing as opposed to internal, self-generated experiences of the recipients. The kind of sight spoken of here can refer to either bodily or spiritual sight. However, the Greek terms refer most often to normal, physical sight. For instance, in the Gospel of John (20:18, 25, 29), this same term is utilized to speak of Jesus’s very physical resurrection appearances, including his being touched by Mary Magdalene. Thus, there is no exclusive, textual, or other dogmatic use to appeal to this term in order to indicate some inner, subjective form of perception.

While discussing the German liberal tendencies here, Orr raises another worthwhile consideration. He thinks that to hold the liberal contention of the sameness of the appearances “is to miss the very point of the Apostle’s enumeration. St. Paul’s object in his use of ‘appeared’ is not to suggest that the earlier appearances were visionary, but conversely to imply that the appearance vouchsafed to himself on the road to Damascus was as real as those granted to the others.” Westcott provides a similar argument. Comments by Wilhelm Michaelis and N. T. Wright are reminiscent of one another.

Moreover, a crucial point mentioned precisely in this text is that Paul was careful to proclaim his apostleship on a number of occasions (1 Cor 15:8–11; see also 9:1), and he asserted that he was granted this honor straight from Jesus Christ personally, when Jesus chose and called Paul, rather than by the recognition of men (Gal 1:11–17; 2:6–9). This call to Paul to join the ranks of apostleship, by itself, could certainly have been the sole reason why Paul added his appearance to those of the other ­apostles, even if he were aware of differences such as the timing aspect that he had just mentioned. Paul’s intention here was at least that he had received the apostolic seal from the risen Christ, so that he and the others were all on the same ground, rather than there being no differences in the mode or manner of their experiences. After all, Paul had already acknowledged at least one variance between the appearances.

The last and probably the most important argument here would be rather anachronistic in our present context because it was not a very powerful or popular scholarly position during the First Quest for the historical Jesus. It will only be mentioned here that if the strongest case that could be made from the New Testament turned out to be that the resurrection appearances of Jesus were believed to be bodily in nature, even most especially if this applied to Paul’s case as well, then this would have tremendous implications for this discussion. Since the predominant view of first-century Jewish interpreters was that of bodily resurrection, it could assist mightily in reaching a conclusion on the matter of bodily post-resurrection appearances too. Then if bodily resurrection appearances were shown to be the established and strongest textual position here, this most likely would be the sense of the appearance narrative mentioned in 1 Cor 15:3–8, having a tremendous bearing on Paul’s meaning throughout.

But this last point is not totally in vain even in the late nineteenth century. We have already seen in the previous chapter that Keim’s critique of the subjective vision theories of Strauss and others involved the point that Paul had clearly differentiated between resurrection appearances and later visions. What were thought to be the chief characteristics involved in this contrast? Could it be that the original resurrection appearances were considered to be more realistic in some sense than the latter ones? Further, the Luke-Acts corpus records both the very physical appearances to Jesus’s disciples (Luke 24; Acts 1:1–11) as well as Paul’s conversion story on three separate occasions (Acts 9:1–9; 22:1–11; 26:12–18) without recognizing any inherent problems or inconsistencies in doing so. So perhaps the work of Keim and a few others foreshadowed some of the beginnings of what, in the hands of later New Testament researchers, became criticisms of both subjective and objective vision theses in favor of bodily appearances.

Strangely enough, it was Keim once again who even disagreed with the common argument among his fellow German liberals here as to why Paul had added his appearance to the list in the 1 Corinthians 15 creedal statement in the first place. Just as we mentioned the relevant point above, Keim asserted that it was the time span between Paul’s appearance and those of the other apostles (which Paul himself acknowledges in 1 Cor 15:8) that made the difference. As Keim states: “Having made such a sharp and clean division, it is to be taken as proved that there lay between the first five or six appearances and the later oft-repeated visions such a great and broad gulf of time, and indeed of character, as rendered it impossible to reckon the latter appearances with the former.” As a result, Keim termed his position the “imparity” of Paul’s vision with the other appearances. To drive a final point home, Keim was willing to concede that “even the corporeal appearance may be granted” to those who thought they needed the classical position to be true!

The Disciples’ Belief That Jesus Had Been Raised from the Dead

The note on which to end this discussion of the German liberal treatment of Jesus’s resurrection is the unanimous agreement of virtually all scholars—German liberals and conservatives alike—that whatever else may be the case, Jesus’s disciples actually and fully believed that they had seen Jesus alive after his death. James Orr states the matter well: “It is granted on all sides that the Christian Church was founded on, or in connexion [sic] with, an energetic preaching of the Lord’s resurrection from the dead. The fact may be questioned: the belief will be admitted.”

The German liberal scholars were hardly less convinced of this than were their conservative counterparts. Even Strauss declares, “It is still certain from the epistles of Paul and the Acts that the Apostles themselves had the conviction that they had seen the risen Jesus.” As Lake asserts, “There is convincing evidence that the disciples believed that the Lord had appeared to St Peter and to others. . . . It is quite plain that the disciples were all firmly convinced that the Lord had appeared to them, and no one more firmly than St Paul.” Lake then indicates later, “critical methods point just as clearly to the existence of a conviction among the disciples that the Lord had appeared to them.”

Other liberal scholars freely admitted the disciples’ belief in Jesus’s resurrection and his appearances. To the positive comments above, many others could be appended, such as the thoughts of prominent German liberals like Schleiermacher, Baur, Renan, Troeltsch, Harnack, and Pfleiderer. The conservatives, of course, were even more convinced of this truth. Fisher states the matter rather clearly: “The immovable faith of the apostles that Jesus ‘showed himself alive to them’ is a fact that nobody questions. Without that faith Christianity would have died at its birth.” Fisher is joined here by influential conservative scholars such as Westcott, Milligan, and Orr.

That the early disciples were utterly convinced that they had witnessed appearances of the risen Jesus has always been (and still remains) at the center of the New Testament message, as well as a key component that is held in common by virtually all commentators, whatever their various theological commitments. Further, along with Jesus’s death by crucifixion, which is held just as strongly by scholars, the disciple’s beliefs regarding Jesus’s afterlife appearances to them formed the crucial blocks on which to build the best case for historicity, at least according to those who have argued in favor of the gospel message. The acceptance of the disciples’ belief in the resurrection and Jesus’s appearances has continued through German liberalism and on through the Third Quest for the historical Jesus. As Allison states, going a bit further, “I am under the impression that, since David Friedrich Strauss, most skeptical scholars have also had no qualms about attributing visions to the first resurrection witnesses.” In fact, “a significant number of critical scholars” have always recognized that this was the case.

Conclusion

Albert Schweitzer concluded his epochal volume The Quest of the Historical Jesus on a rather downcast note. In the opening paragraph of his last chapter he states, “There is nothing more negative than the result of the critical study of the Life of Jesus.” Then he followed with this additional thought: “The historical foundation of Christianity as built up by rationalistic, by liberal, and by modern theology no longer exists; but that does not mean that Christianity has lost its historic foundation.”

Schweitzer criticized the entire nineteenth-century Quest as an imploding movement that devoured itself. Perhaps we could say that the German liberal apple never fell far enough from the tree. To Schweitzer’s mind, the majority of commentators rejected the notion of the eschatological Jesus, leading to much of the confusion and wrongheadedness of their approaches. Actually, the liberal mindset consumed and demolished its own edifices, while all the time missing the main points in the discussion. Another major problem is that those in the movement were more interested in the historical questions than those matters of spirituality, ethics, love, piety, and the spirit of Jesus.

A little more in line with Schweitzer’s first criticism, his major work revealed some of this personal bickering and infighting between the German liberals—some of it being quite vicious at times. But the bottom line for our purposes is that the weaknesses of the various naturalistic hypotheses pertaining to the resurrection were all exposed fairly efficiently. This was true of the liberal themselves, as they leveled some of the best-known critiques against the others here. Then just a little later, the mostly British and American conservative scholars from major universities finished off the lingering leftovers of the feast, often with more detailed and searching criticisms. At the end of the First Quest for the historical Jesus, then, not much remained of the liberal alternative attacks on the resurrection; little of the criticism was left standing. As will be seen, though, some of these views even appear to have gone into hiding, only to reappear later.

A systematic treatment might have drawn together some of the loose ends of these critiques made piecemeal since they were drawn from many different perspectives, sources, and worldviews as well as being written in three different languages. Some of this will be attempted later in this study.

Notes

Many other scholarly, conservative works from this time period were written in whole or in part on the resurrection but are cited in this chapter only sparsely or not at all. For some examples of such texts, see Cambridge scholar H. C. G. Moule, The Resurrection of Christ: Expository Studies of St. John 20 and 21 (Minneapolis: Klock and Klock, 1898); Université de Neuchâtel (Switzerland) professor Frédéric Louis Godet, Lectures in Defense of the Christian Faith, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1883), featuring chapter 1 on the resurrection and chapter 2 on the visionary thesis; William Milligan, The Ascension and Heavenly Priesthood of Our Lord (London: Macmillan, 1892); Princeton Seminary’s J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1923), see chapter 5. From a few years after the close of the liberal period, other noteworthy scholars could be added here, such as Wilbur M. Smith, The Supernaturalness of Christ: Can We Still Believe It? (Boston: Wilde, 1940), with chapter 4 on Jesus’s miracles and chapter 6 on Jesus’s resurrection; Smith, Therefore Stand: A Plea for a Vigorous Apologetic in the Present Crisis of Evangelical Christianity (Boston: Wilde, 1945), with chapter 8 on Jesus’s resurrection; John McNaugher, Jesus Christ: The Same Yesterday, Today, and Forever (New York: Revell, 1947), with chapter 4 on Jesus’s miracles, chapter 6 on Jesus’s resurrection, and chapter 7 on the ascension.

Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu was published in two volumes from 1835–1836. Even in the first few of numerous editions there were many references that hinted at the mature critique of the swoon or apparent death thesis that would emerge in Strauss’s later editions almost three decades later. See David Friedrich Strauss, The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined, ed. Peter C. Hodgson, trans. George Eliot (Mifflintown, PA: Sigler, 1972). Strauss mentioned many of these hinted critiques on 678–79, 734, 737–39, 751. However, the most famous version of Strauss’s criticism of the swoon hypothesis was not contained in his 1836 text, as is often thought and repeated, but in his 1864 volume, Das Leben Jesu für das deutsche Volk bearbeitet (The Life of Jesus for the German People, Revised ). The English translation is entitled A New Life of Jesus, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (London: Williams & Norgate, 1879), with Strauss’s renowned comment appearing in 1:412 as the concluding paragraph to the discussion of this topic on 1:408–12.

In addition to the German liberal theologians who agreed readily, as enumerated in the previous chapter, the conservatives also credited Strauss (often by name) and referred to his now-famous paragraph originally published in 1864, concluding in general that his critique of the apparent death thesis was the very best of the refutations. For details, see James Orr, The Resurrection of Jesus (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1908; repr., Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1968), 11n2, 43; W. J. Sparrow-Simpson, The Resurrection and the Christian Faith (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1968), 44, 160; Doremus A. Hayes, The Resurrection Fact (Nashville: Cokesbury, 1932), 285; Frank Morison, Who Moved the Stone? (London: Faber & Faber, 1930), 64, 96; cf. George P. Fisher, The Grounds of Theistic and Christian Belief, rev. ed. (New York: Scribner’s, 1883), 193; cf. also Alfred Edersheim, The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah, 2 vols. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1883), 2:629; Smith, Supernaturalness of Christ, 208; Smith, Therefore Stand, 382; McNaugher, Jesus Christ, 148. This agreement across both the liberal and conservative sides of the critical aisle (as well as today, as will be indicated in subsequent chapters) on behalf of Strauss’s critique is simply amazing.

Orr, Resurrection of Jesus, 43.

Sparrow-Simpson, Resurrection and the Christian Faith, 43–44.

William Milligan, The Resurrection of Our Lord (London: Macmillan, 1881), 75. The quotation above concerning Strauss is from the 1899 fourth edition, 77. The swoon theory is discussed there on 76–80. Milligan also wrote what he termed “a sequel to those [lectures] on the Resurrection of our Lord published by the same writer a few years ago.” See Milligan, Ascension and Heavenly Priesthood, vii. This second volume was fairly lengthy (367 pages) for this particular subject. Chiefly a theological assessment, Milligan did not direct many of his comments in this text to alternative or critical theses but concentrated on a few other issues, such as how a tangible body could ascend to or even exist in heaven, whether heaven was located “up” in the clouds, and so on.

Fisher, Theistic and Christian Belief, 193.

Milligan, Resurrection of Our Lord, 76.

Milligan, 78.

Thomas Sherlock, The Trial of the Witnesses of the Resurrection of Jesus (London: Pemberton, 1733), with these ideas appearing on 9, 18–19, 38, respectively.

Milligan, Resurrection of Our Lord, 79–80.

Brooke Foss Westcott, The Gospel of the Resurrection: Thoughts on Its Relation to Reason and History, 4th ed. (London: Macmillan, 1879), 4, 121; Fisher, Theistic and Christian Belief, 197–98; Edersheim, Jesus the Messiah, 2:625.

Fisher, Theistic and Christian Belief, 193.

Orr, Resurrection of Jesus, 213.

Hayes, Resurrection Fact, 276–82.

Sparrow-Simpson, Resurrection and the Christian Faith, 41.

Albert Réville, Jésus de Nazareth: Études critiques sur les antécédents de l’histoire évangélique et la vie de Jésus, 2 vols. (Paris: Fischbacher, 1897), 2:250–52, 347, for the Sanhedrin, their beliefs, and actions.

Sparrow-Simpson, Our Lord’s Resurrection, 2nd ed. (London: Longmans, Green, 1909), see particularly 100–101.

Arnold Meyer, Die Auferstehung Christi: Die Berichte über Auferstehung, Himmelfahrt und Pfingsten (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck,1905), 118.

Sparrow-Simpson, Our Lord’s Resurrection, 42.

Morison, Who Moved the Stone?, 89–94.

Hayes, Resurrection Fact, esp. 279–81.

Morison, Who Moved the Stone?, 94–96. A “wait and see” hint could have been taken here that may have been reminiscent of the advice given in Acts 5:38–39.

In our discussion of Jesus’s death in volume 1, information is provided on an approximate timetable for recognizing a crucified and now-dead body at this geographical location and time of the year.

Kirsopp Lake, The Historical Evidence of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ (London: Williams & Norgate, 2012), 237–38, 248–53.

Orr, Resurrection of Jesus, 131.

Sparrow-Simpson, Resurrection and the Christian Faith, 44–45.

See the discussion on this point below.

Morison, Who Moved the Stone?, 237–38, 248–53.

Orr, Resurrection of Jesus, 131–32, quotation on 132.

Ernest Renan, Vie de Jésus (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1864), 423–24, especially Renan’s pronouncement that the Fourth Gospel keeps or maintains its superiority over the other Gospels: “le quatrième Évangile garde sa supériorité” (423). But Renan is also clear that he values this Gospel’s narratives rather than its discourses.

Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Life of Jesus, ed. Jack C. Verheyden, trans. S. Maclean Gilmour (Mifflintown, PA: Sigler, 1997), 223, 417–18, 435, 441, 447–50, 454. In several places Schleiermacher refers to John’s Gospel as the work of eyewitnesses, such as, “I know no rule to set up except this: The Gospel of John is an account by an eyewitness” (433).

Schweitzer, Quest of the Historical Jesus, chiefly 85.

This is widely acknowledged. Besides the German liberals who agreed in the previous chapter, a few of the conservative examples also should be mentioned here. These would include scholars such as Orr (Resurrection of Jesus, 219), Fisher (Theistic and Christian Belief, 198), and Edersheim (Jesus the Messiah, 2:628n2). ­Sparrow-Simpson even asserted rather surprisingly that Keim did a better job of setting forth the case for the subjective vision position—which he did not hold—and that Keim even “expresses it more learnedly and forcibly than Strauss” (Resurrection and the Christian Faith, 112–13)!

Orr, Resurrection of Jesus, 205–31.

Notice that the emphasis here is on the initial appearances. Virtually no one denies that these experiences also took place in Galilee.

This is especially located in Renan, Les apôtres, histoire des origines du christianisme (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1880), 2:45–46. Other helpful comments in this direction are found in Renan, Vie de Jésus, 355–56; David Friedrich Strauss, The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined, trans. George Eliot, ed. Peter C. Hodgson (Mifflintown, PA: Sigler, 1997), 739–40.

For these and other comments, see Orr, Resurrection of Jesus, 222–25; the quotations utilized in points 3 and 4 above were each taken from 223.

Such as how many of Paul’s epistles were considered genuine. F. C. Baur, perhaps the most accomplished Pauline critical scholar among the German liberals, allowed only four authentic epistles: Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, and Galatians. He was followed by other liberals in this conviction. See Ferdinand Christian Baur, Paul the Apostle of Jesus Christ: His Life and Works, His Epistles and Teachings; A Contribution to a Critical History of Primitive Christianity, trans. A. Menzies, 2 vols. (London: Williams & Norgate, 1873, 1875; repr., Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2003), 1:256–58. The subject of this chapter on the very wide acceptance of naturalistic theories as supported by the German liberals would be another such difference.

Orr, Resurrection of Jesus, 222–23.

Orr, 26–27. It must not be overlooked that the Gal 2:1–10 text to which Strauss refers includes the apostle John as also being present as one of the “others” whom Strauss explicitly mentions by name elsewhere—see below.

Strauss’s major acknowledgment here is found in his volume mentioned earlier, A New Life of Jesus, 2nd ed., 1:400. Fisher makes a similar point concerning the data in Theistic and Christian Belief, 192–93.

Strauss includes John along with Peter and James as the Jerusalem “pillars” (see Gal 2:9) in his earlier, less detailed treatment of Paul’s meeting them in Jerusalem. See Life of Jesus, 147.

This is another critical example of what was termed in volume 1 of this study the pre-Pauline 1 creedal statements that predated Paul’s own transformation. This would increase even further the historical weight of the early traditions contained chiefly in the New Testament Epistles.

On the passing of tradition as practiced by the Pharisees, see Josephus, Ant. 13.297; Ag. Ap. 1.49–50; Life 361. Translation, including different demarcations of the references, from The Works of Josephus, trans. William Whiston (Philadelphia: McKay, 1820; repr., Grand Rapids: Kregel, 1963), see Ant. 13.10.6; Ag. Ap. 1.9; Life 65, cf. 75–76. On Paul employing these same skills, using precisely the same language, see also Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2017), 36–37, 264–71.

For the importance of group appearances of the risen Jesus, see especially both volume 1 of this study on the evidence for these events plus the treatment of hallucinations and similar approaches in this volume.

Strauss, New Life of Jesus, 1:401–2.

Additional factors also militate against Paul’s resistance to fully appreciating the valuable testimony regarding the other apostles’ appearance testimonies. For example, why would Paul take the difficult and dangerous journey to Jerusalem in the first place (Gal 1:18–20) and then return again after fourteen years (2:1–10) in order to interview (Greek: historēsai; 1:18) these apostles regarding their own testimony if he hardly cared about it or was taking it less seriously than his own? Moreover, why was Paul pleased to include his own testimony along with that of the other apostles (1 Cor 15:14–15), downgrading himself in the process (15:9)? Strauss strangely chides Paul for taking three years to make his initial trip to Jerusalem, holding that he was quite satisfied with the veracity of his own appearance of Jesus (New Life of Jesus, 1:402)! That’s an exceptionally odd stance when in other examples from ancient history, this is an exceptionally brief time —perhaps even without parallel. See Paul Barnett, The Birth of Christianity: The First Twenty Years (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), 210, cf. 12. After all, it must be remembered that Paul had other things on his mind at this time, such as being in danger himself. Strauss’s complaints sound like he is judging ancient times by more modern parameters. But then again, Strauss clearly did not believe in Jesus’s resurrection, so it appears that since he had admitted this crucial data that Paul records in Galatians 1–2, this may well have been his best way to mitigate it somewhat.

Orr, Resurrection of Jesus, 26–27. Orr treats later the notions of both the hallucination hypotheses (205–26) as well as real but less than bodily appearances (226–31).

See C. H. Dodd’s volume The Apostolic Preaching and Its Developments (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1936; repr., Grand Rapids: Baker, 1980), particularly his conclusions on 16–20, 26.

Edersheim, Jesus the Messiah, 2:625. As just mentioned above, that Paul chose a term that implies checking out testimony firsthand is certainly a strong comment as well as a notion of central importance. We will return to this topic in our presentation of the evidence for Jesus’s resurrection.

Lake, Resurrection of Jesus Christ, 223.

Lake, esp. 37–43, 192–96, also 254, cf. 223.

By Dodd’s time, some thirty years after Orr and Lake wrote, this conclusion was just starting to be mentioned more frequently; see Dodd, Apostolic Preaching, 15–16, 21, 31. Hence we see the insightful research of Orr, Lake, and just a few others from a couple of decades earlier.

Orr, Resurrection of Jesus, 223–24.

Fisher, Theistic and Christian Belief, 194.

Fisher, 196–97.

Westcott, Gospel of the Resurrection, 120–21; Lake, Resurrection of Jesus Christ, 190, 193, 218. As Lake states forcefully, “None of the other disciples were present, for they had scattered after the arrest of Jesus (St Peter a little later than the rest), and had either already returned home, or were in hiding in Jerusalem until they could find an opportunity of escape” (237–38).

Fisher, Theistic and Christian Belief, 197–98. We have already mentioned other scholars who agree on their transformation, namely Westcott, Gospel of the Resurrection, 4, 121; Milligan, Resurrection of Our Lord, 79–80; Edersheim, Jesus the Messiah, 2:625; Lake, Resurrection of Jesus Christ, 2:193, 226.

Fisher, Theistic and Christian Belief, 199.

Milligan, Resurrection of Our Lord, 87–114.

Hayes, Resurrection Fact, 287–90.

Hayes, 289. Morison (Who Moved the Stone?, 114) is another who mentions this component, offering a strong version of this critique, declaring that if some of the appearances are not collective, then they are “of no use to us.”

Unfortunately, this even includes Orr (Resurrection of Jesus, 219) and Sparrow-Simpson (Resurrection and the Christian Faith, 113).

Hayes, Resurrection Fact, 289–90.

Fisher, Theistic and Christian Belief, 196–97.

Edersheim, Jesus the Messiah, 2:626–28.

Stephen Neill and Tom Wright, The Interpretation of the New Testament, 1861–1986, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 35, 120–23. Speaking quite pointedly and addressing primarily the conclusions of prominent German scholar H. J. Holtzmann, Neill and Wright assert, “Scientific work on the Gospels was hardly possible in 1863” (120).

On Pfleiderer in particular at this point, see the analysis by Sparrow-Simpson, Resurrection and the Christian Faith, 161–65.

Brooke Foss Westcott, The Gospel of the Resurrection: Thoughts on Its Relation to Reason and History, 4th ed. (London: Macmillan, 1879), 110–12.

Orr, Resurrection of Jesus, 38–39. Fisher comments very closely at this juncture as well (Theistic and Christian Belief, 195).

Fisher, 194–95. Hayes adds along this same line that anyone who would blame Paul with having had a fit of epilepsy “can be accepted only by those who are capable of a boundless credulity, to say the least” (Resurrection Fact, 291).

Lake, Resurrection of Jesus Christ, 267; also, Milligan, Resurrection of Our Lord, 91; Hayes, Resurrection Fact, 291.

Theodor Keim, The History of Jesus of Nazara: Considered in Its Connection with the National Life of Israel, and Related in Detail, trans. Arthur Ransom, 6 vols. (London: Williams & Norgate, 1883), esp. 6:361–65; Keim, Die Geschichte Jesu von Nazara, in ihrer Verhaltung mit dem Gesamtleben seines Volkes frei untersucht und ausführlich erzählt, 3 vols. (Zurich: Orell and Füssli, 1867–1872), 3:602–4.

On these points of discussion, among others, see Orr, Resurrection of Jesus, 229; Milligan, Resurrection of Our Lord, 81–82; see even Lake, who holds this view in Resurrection of Jesus Christ, 267, 272.

Edersheim, Jesus the Messiah, 2:627–28.

Here Orr quotes from A. B. Bruce, Apologetics; or, Christianity Defensively Stated (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1892), 393.

Orr, Resurrection of Jesus, 229–30, with the quotation on 230.

Lake, Resurrection of Jesus Christ, 262–66, cf. 198–99. The two quotations are from 262 and 264, respectively.

Westcott, Gospel of the Resurrection, 115–19. The three quotations are from 115–16, 117–18, and 118, respectively.

Hayes, Resurrection Fact, 37.

Hayes, 282.

Schweitzer, Quest of the Historical Jesus, 138, 157–59.

Hayes, Resurrection Fact, 35–38, with all of the quotations here from 36.

Peter Jensen, Das Gilgamesch-Epos in der Weltliteratur (Strasburg: Trübner, 1906), especially 1026–28.

Orr, Resurrection of Jesus, 241–47. The three quotations in this paragraph are taken from 244, 245, and 245–46, respectively.

Orr, 249.

Orr, 247–253. The quotations are from 247, 250, and 252, respectively.

Jensen, Das Gilgamesch-Epos, 923–24; Orr, Resurrection of Jesus, 251.

Orr, Resurrection of Jesus, 256–58.

Orr, 224.

Another example in this vein, though more indirectly, is James G. Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1890).

This is a huge subject, with many of its considerations extending well beyond our subject of the death and resurrection of Jesus. It has been pursued in full treatises of its own. Nonetheless, a few particular aspects will still be addressed here where applicable. For a full treatment, see the excellent study by David Wenham, Paul: Follower of Jesus or Founder of Christianity? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995).

A major example from the most influential voice of this school of thought is that of Wilhelm Bousset, Kyrios Christos: A History of the Belief in Christ from the Beginnings of Christianity to Irenaeus, trans. John E. Steely (Nashville: Abingdon, 1970), with these ideas being contrasted on 151–52. A longer discussion of these contrasts appears on 200–210.

See chap. 5 in Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, esp. 80–85 on this last theme. See also chap. 2 in this volume by Machen.

J. Gresham Machen, The Origin of Paul’s Religion (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1925), 130–37, with the quotation on 135. See also chap. 8 in Machen.

Examples would include scholars like another very well-known Princeton Theological Seminary professor who predated Machen, Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, 3 vols. (New York: Scribner’s, 1873), see vol. 1, chap. 7; Fisher, Theistic and Christian Belief, chap. 7; Orr, Resurrection of Jesus, 269–71, 277–80.

Among the most detailed and influential scholars here were Alfred Seeberg, Der Katechismus der Urchristenheit (Leipzig: Deichertschen, 1903); Eduard Norden, Die antike Kunstprosa vom VI: Jahrhundert vor Christus bis in die Zeit der Renaissance, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Teubner, 1898); Norden, Agnos Theos: Untersuchungen zur Formengeschichte religiöser Rede (Leipzig: Teubner, 1913); Johannes Weiss, “Beiträge zum paulinischer Rhetorik,” in Theologische Studien: Festschrift für Bernhard Weiss, ed. C. R. Gregory (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1897); Eduard von der Goltz, Das Gebet in der ältesten Christenheit (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1901); Ernst Lohmeyer, Die Briefe an die Philipper, an die Kolosser, und an Philemon, 2 vols. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1928, 1930). For a lengthy list of critical works published on this subject after these early volumes, from 1921 onward, see Richard N. Longenecker, New Wine into Fresh Wineskins: Contextualizing the Early Christian Confessions (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1999), 9–10.

Some of these major Pauline examples include Rom 1:3–4; 4:24–25; 10:9; 1 Cor 8:6; 11:23–26; 15:3–7; Phil 2:6–11. Other nominees by scholars often mentioned include Rom 8:34; 1 Thess 1:9–10, among many other candidates.

See Dodd, Apostolic Preaching, 16–20, 26. Both of the quotations were taken from 16.

Bousset, Kyrios Christos, 305.

Bousset, chiefly 49–51.

Otto Pfleiderer, The Early Christian Conception of Christ: Its Significance and Value in the History of Religion (London: Williams & Norgate, 1905), 157–58, also 78, 102.

See Dodd, Apostolic Preaching, 16–20, 26. The quotation was taken from 16.

Edersheim, Jesus the Messiah, 2:626.

Sparrow-Simpson, Resurrection and the Christian Faith, 168–69.

Orr, Resurrection of Jesus, quoted on 42, 92, respectively.

Morison, Who Moved the Stone?, 96.

Hayes, Resurrection Fact, 285. Also in agreement with this conclusion is Fisher, Theistic and Christian Belief, 193.

Sparrow-Simpson, Resurrection and the Christian Faith, 43.

Orr, Resurrection of Jesus, 212.

Orr, 128.

Hayes, Resurrection Fact, 278.

Fisher, Theistic and Christian Belief, 193. While it is true that most of the scholars above are addressing what we have termed the “Fraud Type 1” views, this was not always the case. Besides, slight modifications of Fraud Type 1 critiques could also be at least imagined for the other positions. It is actually even surprising to have so many more or less applicable negative comments here, given the negligible number of German liberal scholars who supposed these ideas. The German rationalist Reimarus did prefer Fraud Type 1, but it may be recalled that his work predated Schleiermacher’s by a few decades, and he was not considered to be a member of the German liberals who we are addressing in this chapter.

Milligan, Resurrection of Our Lord, 81.

Orr, Resurrection of Jesus, 212–13. In his volume Les évangiles synoptiques, 2 vols. (Ceffonds: Loisy, 1907), Alfred Loisy remarks that it is “useless” to dialogue about the different ideas on who may have removed Jesus’s body from the tomb (2:720).

Edersheim, Jesus the Messiah, 2:626 and 629, respectively.

Orr, Resurrection of Jesus, 12.

Hayes, Resurrection Fact, 294.

Orr, Resurrection of Jesus, 92, 94, respectively.

Schleiermacher, Life of Jesus, 442.

Orr, Resurrection of Jesus, 93–94.

Orr, 112–13.

Schleiermacher, Life of Jesus, 439–45.

Lake, Resurrection of Jesus Christ, 248–53, cf. 237–38.

For instance, Strauss, Life of Jesus, 704–5; Keim, History of Jesus of Nazara, 6:297–98.

Keim, 6:296–301, esp. 297n2; Sparrow-Simpson names a half dozen advocates (Resurrection and the Christian Faith, 46–47), while Orr provides a slightly shorter list (Resurrection of Jesus, 113). Schleiermacher’s view can be found in Life of Jesus, 441–42.

Adolf von Harnack, What Is Christianity?, trans. Thomas Bailey Saunders, 3rd. ed. (London: Williams & Norgate, 1912), 164–65.

Harnack, 164–65; see also Sparrow-Simpson, Resurrection and the Christian Faith, 47–48; Sparrow-Simpson, Our Lord’s Resurrection, 105.

Orr, Resurrection of Jesus, 222. Orr lists such liberal scholars as “Strauss, Weizsäcker, Keim, Pfleiderer, A. Meyer, Professor Lake” as the leading proponents who held that “the disciples, immediately after the Crucifixion, fled to Galilee, there, and not at Jerusalem, receiving the visions which convinced them that the Lord had risen” (114). Later, Orr adds Harnack, O. Holtzmann, and Loisy to the supporters of the Galilee scenario (215, 222).

Strauss, Life of Jesus, 743.

Renan, Les apôtres, 2:45–46.

It must be pointed out that even in the Gospel of Mark, which most scholars think purposely did not narrate any of Jesus’s resurrection appearances while still favoring these events taking place at least in Galilee, it cannot be taught positively that there were no indications whatsoever of Jerusalem appearances. Some contemporary scholars in particular (as we will note below) hold that the message of the young man or angel at the tomb to “go, tell his disciples and Peter” (Mark 16:7, emphasis added) is actually a further indication if not a prediction of the appearance to Peter, as in the dual early traditions in 1 Cor 15:5 and Luke 24:34. Both Luke and John locate at least Peter and a few others in the city on Sunday morning (and John 20:19–20 places other disciples along with Peter and John there as well). Luke specifically places the appearance to Peter in Jerusalem (24:34). By the time Mark wrote, the appearance to Peter would be well known and could have preceded any appearance(s) in Galilee. The Gospel of Mark after 16:8 is still frequently listed, though as a later, secondary source.

On the famous comment by Mark, who presumably ended his Gospel with the words that the women did not speak to anyone upon leaving the vicinity of the tomb (16:8), Allison begins his worthwhile discussion of scholarly rejoinders with the quip, “This claim wobbles.” See Dale C. Allison Jr., The Resurrection of Jesus: Apologetics, Polemics, History (London: T&T Clark, 2021), 125–27.

Rather extraordinarily and in spite of all these Gospel comments, Keim thinks that it is better to conclude that the women at the tomb were not charged to stay in Jerusalem to tell the disciples, but to go on a several-day journey to Galilee to tell them (traveling by themselves?), since that is where the men were. See Keim, History of Jesus of Nazara, 6:297. Even for Keim, presuppositions and prior decisions seem to get in the way more than need be the case.

Notice that Orr above cites the German liberals as holding that the disciples’ flight from Jerusalem to Galilee occurred “immediately after the crucifixion” (Resurrection of Jesus, 114). This would delay further their trip and ensure that they would not have arrived in Galilee by Sunday.

Lake, Resurrection of Jesus Christ, 265–66.

Johannes Weiss, Earliest Christianity: A History of the Period AD 30–150, trans. F. C. Grant, 2 vols. (New York: Harper & Row, 1959), 1:27.

This is according to Milligan, Resurrection of Our Lord, 83–88.

Orr, Resurrection of Jesus, 220, also 38.

Gary R. Habermas, Philosophy of History, Miracles, and the Resurrection of Jesus, 3rd ed. (Sagamore Beach, MA: Academx, 2012) provides a list of reasons on 35.

Beyond “untimely born,” Paul’s term here (ektrōmati ) is sometimes translated either as “miscarriage” or even as “abortion.”

For a number of major thoughts here, especially on the specific definitions of the key words along with their textual usages, the following are very helpful: Allison, Resurrection of Jesus, 39, 46–93, 184, 198, 209–10; Michael R. Licona, The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Academic, 2010), 330–33; N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, vol. 3 of Christian Origins and the Question of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003), 317–29; Marion L. Soards, 1 Corinthians, New International Biblical Commentary: New Testament (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1999), 317–24; Craig S. Keener, The Historical Jesus of the Gospels (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), 342–44; Murray J. Harris, Raised Immortal: Resurrection and Immortality in the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993), 44–49.

Orr, Resurrection of Jesus, 39.

Westcott, Gospel of the Resurrection, 111.

Wright, Resurrection of the Son of God, 477, 606–7, 609; Wilhelm Michaelis, “horaō,” in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, ed. Gerhard Kittel and Gerhard Friedrich, trans. and ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley, 10 vols. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1967), 5:359. Though it is difficult to make out his exact meaning in terms of his context, Michaelis comments that Paul in 1 Cor 15:8 “regards this appearance as similar in kind. In all the appearances the presence of the risen Lord is a presence in transfigured corporeality.”

It is argued later in this study that this view is probably in fact the majority position today in the twenty-first century, even for the apostle Paul. But this discussion later in this study will have to wait.

Keim, History of Jesus of Nazara, 6:353, including n. 1.

Keim, 6:362.

Orr, Resurrection of Jesus, 33, afterward citing Strauss, Wellhausen, Gardner, Henson, Burkitt, and Lake (33–34, 115).

Strauss, Life of Jesus, 739 (emphasis added), see also 727–28, 795.

Lake, Resurrection of Jesus Christ, 265.

Lake, 275, just as Lake expresses it elsewhere too (191, 193, 227, 266–67).

Schleiermacher, Life of Jesus, 461; Baur, Paul, 1:67–69; Renan, Vie de Jésus, 422; Ernst Troeltsch, The Christian Faith, ed. Gertrud von le Fort, trans. Garrett E. Paul (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991), 88, 96; Harnack, What Is Christianity?, 163–67; Otto Pfleiderer, Early Christian Conception of Christ, 157–58.

Fisher, Theistic and Christian Belief, 199.

Westcott, Gospel of the Resurrection, 113, 135; Milligan, Resurrection of Our Lord, 39–45; Milligan, Ascension and Heavenly Priesthood, 4, 8; Edersheim, Jesus the Messiah, 2:625; Orr, Resurrection of Jesus, 34–36, 115, 147, 231; Hayes, Resurrection Fact, 294 (citing esp. Lake); cf. Sparrow-Simpson, Resurrection and the Christian Faith, 161.

Dale C. Allison Jr., “Explaining the Resurrection: Conflicting Convictions,” Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 3 (2005): 125.

Schweitzer, Quest of the Historical Jesus, 398.

Schweitzer, 399.

Schweitzer, 331, 398–401. Many years later, Schweitzer recalled again his bitterness in realizing these conclusions; see Schweitzer, Out of My Life and Thought: An Autobiography, trans. C. T. Campion (New York: Holt, 1949), 47–48, 50, 58. Asking whether he considered himself to be a pessimist or an optimist, he chose the former but declared that he was still willing to hope (240).

Schweitzer, Quest of the Historical Jesus, 399–403; Schweitzer, Out of My Life, esp. 50–51, 56, 59.

As with the note made at the outset of our three chapters on nineteenth-century German liberalism and those scholars’ efforts to establish what has come to be called the First Quest for the historical Jesus, neither of the words in the moniker “German liberals” is meant derogatively. It is being used the way it often is in the literature, speaking of a specific movement. This is in spite of the fact that certain French scholars like Renan, Réville, Salvador (along with how Schweitzer himself is often categorized), plus even an occasional British scholar such as Kirsopp Lake, were often numbered roughly as members of the movement. Still, German scholars made up the predominant number of members in this group.

Strangely enough, in a passage regarding the end of Jesus’s life, Schweitzer discusses Jesus’s own view of his atoning death, mentioning afterward that “the disciples find the grave empty, and in their enthusiastic expectation of the glory in which their Master is soon to appear, have visions of Him as risen from the grave, they are certain that He is with God in heaven, soon to appear as Messiah and bring in the Kingdom” (Out of My Life, 40–41). Especially since the portion about the disciples seeing visions of Jesus as risen and their relating these to Jesus being in heaven with God sounds possibly reminiscent of some of Keim’s notions, it is unfortunate that this comes at the end of a chapter and is left unexplained by Schweitzer.

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