Cold Case Christianity: Yes, the disciples lied about the resurrection of Jesus

This is my reply to an article by J. Warner Wallace entitled

The Truth About Easter: Did The Disciples Lie About the Resurrection?

Posted: 31 Mar 2018 07:30 AM PDT

Homicide detectives are perhaps the least trusting people in the country.

That's because they know perfectly well that the only correct explanations for data are purely naturalistic.  If a criminal suspect's alibi is that he was in two different places at the same time, you don't ask the jury to consider the possibility of the supernatural, you tell the jury that because miracles don't happen, the suspect is obviously guilty.

My own experience investigating murders has taught me to consider everyone a liar – until, at least, I have good reason to believe otherwise. I know that sounds pessimistic, but I learned a long time ago that mysteries don’t get solved if you believe everything you’re told. Maybe that’s why I rejected the claims of Christianity for so many years. I was an atheist until the age of thirty-five and like many other non-believers, I thought the claims related to the Resurrection of Jesus were most likely lies on the part of the alleged eyewitnesses.

You had the right attitude.  Can you imagine how horrific the downfall of America's justice system would be if the Courts started allowing defense attorneys to argue to the jury that they are allowed to seriously consider miracles as a way of explaining the Defendant's actions? 

Then I examined these claims using the tools of a detective.

In my years working robberies and homicides, I had the opportunity to investigate (and break) several conspiracy efforts. As a result, I now know what it takes to accomplish a conspiracy.

Actually, you don't know shit about what it would take to succeed in a first-century conspiracy to lie about Jesus.  They don't teach genre-identification at Homicide School.

Successful conspiracies typically involve the following five conditions:

A small number of conspirators – The smaller the number of conspirators, the more likely the conspiracy will be a success.

Generously forgetting the serious problems there are with apostolic authorship of two of the gospels, the resurrection accounts in the NT which come down to us today in first-hand form are Matthew, John and Paul.  That's all.  Since nobody has a clue on what basis Paul could allege that 500 people saw Jesus alive all at once, that's 500 people who were never on your list in the first place.  A small number of conspirators indeed remain.

Lies are difficult to maintain,

Tell that the Benny Hinn, whose live on-stage healings in front of thousands of people testify how easily religious fervor can suspend a person's critical faculties and cause them to automatically interpret anything they see as supporting the religion they've previously chosen to follow.

and the fewer the number of people who have to continue the lie, the better.

We have abundant evidence to support the contention that false religions can start up and become very popular when in fact the cult-leader's claims are total bullshit.  Look at Mormonism.  It's obviously a false form of Christianity, but it still managed to get millions to agree to the bullshit testimonies of the 3 men and 8 men. We know they never saw any gold plates, yet millions of people swear that such testimony was honest.

Mormonism teaches us that a person's desire for the religion to be true, can make them unspeakably forgiving toward the religion's evidentiary shortcomings.  For some reason, most people care more about how the message can change their lives for the better...than in whether the message is actually true.

A short time span – It’s hard enough to tell a lie once; even more difficult to repeat the lie consistently over a long period of time. For this reason, the shorter the conspiracy, the better. The ideal conspiracy would involve only two conspirators, and one of the conspirators would kill the other right after the crime. That’s a conspiracy that would be awfully hard to break.

Read Acts 21:17-24...Paul visits Jerusalem, but James complains to him that the thousands of Jews who have converted, believe in a rumor that says Paul teaches other Jews outside the mainland to abandon Mosaic customs, and James seems to think the situation is desperate because of this rumor (i.e., the fact that a rumor was false in the first century, did nothing to prevent thousands of people from accepting it as true anyway):

 17 After we arrived in Jerusalem, the brethren received us gladly.
 18 And the following day Paul went in with us to James, and all the elders were present.
 19 After he had greeted them, he began to relate one by one the things which God had done among the Gentiles through his ministry.
 20 And when they heard it they began glorifying God; and they said to him, "You see, brother, how many thousands there are among the Jews of those who have believed, and they are all zealous for the Law;
 21 and they have been told about you, that you are teaching all the Jews who are among the Gentiles to forsake Moses, telling them not to circumcise their children nor to walk according to the customs.
 22 "What, then, is to be done? They will certainly hear that you have come.
 23 "Therefore do this that we tell you. We have four men who are under a vow;
 24 take them and purify yourself along with them, and pay their expenses so that they may shave their heads; and all will know that there is nothing to the things which they have been told about you, but that you yourself also walk orderly, keeping the Law. (Acts 21:17-24 NAU)

Wallace continues:

Thorough and immediate communication – This is key. One (or more) of the conspirators will eventually be questioned by authorities.

If the authorities give a shit enough about the allegedly false religious claim to bother investigating it.  You only think Christianity bothered unbelievers so much in the first century because you still put stock in that romantic fiction called "Acts".  I only quote it because I know you accept it, not because I myself put any stock in it.  The truth is that if Christianity really was the pacifist crap that Jesus taught, it is not likely that the Romans or synagogue officials would give a fuck about what the apostles were preaching, except in extreme cases.  I'm quite aware of Benny Hinn's alleged history of doing miracles before thousands of eyewitnesses, but I don't lose any sleep at night in my positive certainty that all those witnesses are deluded fools.  Some original Christians may have been arrested due to rumors reaching the ears of the authorities, but it is unlikely that the mere preaching of Christ as risen would create half the fervor that Acts and other NT books pretend it did.

Other co-conspirators had better know everything (and every minute detail) offered in this interaction with questioners. Conspirators need to be able to tell each other what they’ve said to authorities, friends and family members.

Not in the case of the NT, whose 4 gospels were authored by various different persons who obviously didn't have perfect knowledge of the way Jesus-traditions were handed down outside their respective localities...or didn't care.  The tendency of some NT story characters to be open to the incredibly bizarre (2nd Cor. 12:1-4) also throws cold water on your efforts to show how conspiracy cannot explain the rise of the resurrection faith in the first-century church.  When they said they saw Jesus, it was always either 1) only his followers who "saw" him, or 2) they "saw" him in ways that forbid characterizing them as "eye"witnesses.

Conspiracies are greatly helped where the false religion at issue is built upon a garbled conglomeration of vision stories.

Significant Relational Connections – When all the coconspirators are connected in deep and meaningful relationships, it’s much harder to convince one of them to “give up” the other. When all the conspirators are family members, for example, this task is nearly impossible. The greater the relational bond between all the conspirators, the greater the possibility of success.

You seem to forget how meaningful it is that the family of Jesus, including James his brother and their mother, were not impressed by anything Jesus did during his earthly ministry, but either refused to believe him, or drew the conclusion that his claims constituted good evidence that Jesus had become authentically insane, John 7:5, Mark 3:21.  If Jesus' miracles during his earthly ministry were false, kiss your religion goodbye. If the miracles Jesus did during his earthly ministry were real, then the persistent disbelief in them by Jesus' own own family fatally impeaches their credibility for anything else they say, including later changing of the mind and starting to view Jesus as authentically divine.

Little or No Pressure – Few suspects confess to the truth until they recognize the jeopardy of failing to do so. Unless pressured to confess, conspirators will continue lying. Pressure does not have to be physical in nature. When suspects fear incarceration or condemnation from their peers, they often respond in an effort to save face or save their own skin. This is multiplied as the number of coconspirators increases. The greater the pressure on co-conspirators, the more likely the conspiracy is to fail.

I don't see any reason to think the original post-resurrection preaching of the apostles would have created any more "pressure" on them than is felt by Benny Hinn when he goes around preaching his lies and gaining converts despite how easy it is to debunk his miracle claims.  If the book of Acts says the apostolic preaching was resisted actively by secular authorities, I find that to be about as believable as stories about today's secular authorities doing the same to religious fanatics today. As long as they aren't doing anything violent or upsetting the social calm, secular authorities typically don't give a shit.

That’s why I now reject the claim that the disciples of Jesus lied about the Resurrection. The number of conspirators required to successfully accomplish the “Christian conspiracy” would have been staggering.

How many conspirators were involved in substantiated Mormon prophet Joe Smith's claim to have possessed real golden plates?  So many that the number was staggering?

The book of Acts tells us that there were as many as 120 eyewitnesses in the upper room following Jesus’s ascension (Acts 1:15),

It also doesn't name James the brother of the Lord among them nor among the 12 named apostles.  Apparently, this brother of Jesus did NOT just suddenly starting believing Jesus rose from the dead merely because a bunch of followers started saying he did.  Worse, we don't know how it was that James became a leader in the Jerusalem faction of the church, but if we credit certain statements of early church fathers, James was voted into his office, by the others.  Having a brother of Jesus be the leader of the Jerusalem faction has more to do with politics and planning and less to do with what exactly James might have personally believed.

and Paul told the believers in Corinth that hundreds of people claimed to see the risen Christ (1 Corinthians).

And you don't have the first fucking clue whether Paul is speaking from first-hand knowledge or merely repeating hearsay, yet you pretend that this unverifiable bit of mystery is as concrete as the FBI testifying to the existence of cars.

It’s unreasonable to believe the disciples conspired to lie about the Resurrection for the following reasons:

There would have been too many disciples involved in the conspiracy.

False, Acts 21:20 says there were "tens of thousands" of Jews who converted to Christ...and v. 21-24 indicate that they believed as true a rumor that Paul abandoned the customs of Moses when teaching outside Jerusalem.  Apparently, lies could indeed deceive thousands in the first century.

The apostles would have been required to protect their conspiratorial lies for too long (over six decades).

Benny Hinn's miracle claims have been deceiving people for far less than 6 decades, and in modern culture where checking on his claims would be somewhat easier than it would have been in the 1st century.

The apostles had little or no effective way to communicate with one another in a quick or thorough manner, given the limited communication technology of the first century and the geographic distance between the disciples.

Hence explaining the theological inconsistencies and contradictions the NT gave to the world.

While there were pairs of family members in the group of apostolic eyewitnesses, most had no familial relationship to each other at all.

James and Mary are sufficiently close to Jesus, being his immediately biological family members, to justify crediting as truthful their skepticism toward Jesus for the entire 3-4 years that he allegedly worked genuinely supernatural miracles during his earthly ministry.  Don't forget about the famine of 44 a.d. which would have motivated many to join any cause regardless of lack of merit in its claims, like welfare mothers who join the Mormon church today.

The apostles were aggressively pressured and persecuted as they were scattered from Italy to India.

Sure is funny how apostle John allegedly escaped all such travail and lived to a ripe old age.   Sorry, but Acts is mostly fiction, and extra biblical traditions about what the apostles experienced in their preaching is a tangled mixture of legends and truth-stretching.

Don’t get me wrong, successful conspiracies occur every day. But if you think you know of one, it’s because it wasn’t successful.

You are stupid, "success" isn't decided by whether the conspiracy is found out by others, but whether the conspiracy continues to fool millions.  Sure, we both know that Mormonism is a false form of Christianity, but what fool would say Mormonism wasn't "successful"?

If you had salivating delusional followers who continually donated their money to you in spite of how easy it is to prove you to be a fraud, would you really give a shit about a few people in the world who claim to have "exposed" you witih "facts"?  Jerald and Sandra Tanner have been doing an excellent job for nearly 50 years of exposing Mormonism for the lie that it is, yet Mormonism continues to grow and grow and grow.

Apparently, people are not truth-robots.  They will continue hanging onto a religious claim even if they are aware there is heavy and virtually unanswerable opposition to it. Its still reasonable to say that the apostles were successful for much the same reason Benny Hinn and Mormonism were.  People want to join a cause that has something positive to say and more so if the cause feeds them, and if it be religious, they are very uncaring toward outsiders who claim to have evidence against the movement.  So you do not support the resurrection preaching as true by noting that opposition from outsiders didn't slow it down.