My reply to “Five Reasons to Doubt the Resurrection by Matthew Hartke, Debunked”

 This is the reply to "scientific Christian's" defense of Paul's resurrection testimony, which I posted here.

The problems with Paul are legion, but for now:  I deny the Christian presupposition that we have some sort of "obligation" to believe whatever we read until we can prove it false.  Absent such obligation, I'm not seeing how the skeptic's complete apathy toward biblical evidence about apostle Paul breaks any rule of common sense, hermeneutics or historiography.  You won't be able to show such skeptical apathy to be "unreasonable".

And the case that the OT contradicts the NT concept of "hell" is solid, therefore, the concept of literal torture in literal hell fire is more than likely false, therefore, there is no "danger" to rejecting the gospel.  So even if Jesus really rose from the dead, why would it matter?  As an atheist I already happily embrace the permanent extinction of my consciousness at physical death.  On the other hand, I also see that adding "Jesus" to my life isn't limited to the good stuff constantly hawked by Christianity's carnival barkers.  It also means more uncertainty, rejection by one's church or social group, etc.  Too many Christians testify to sincere reservations about the whole Christianity business, to pretend that the skeptical rejection of the gospel is 100% unreasonable.  If I'm rejecting comfort and happiness, I'm also rejecting further sources of stress and misery.

Moroever, as is testified to by the millions of people who join "cults" (i.e., smaller Christian groups which Protestants say are a false form of Christianity), the skeptic is reasonable, if they wish, to completely avoid investigating any miracle claims.  You start investigating miracle claims, and you might end up in Mormonism, Jehovah's Witnesses, or some other "cult".  

Finally, skepticism is not some completely 100% bummer.  skepticism is also what keeps me away from those "cults", from Hinduism, from New Age, from wicca, etc, etc.  You don't be fairly representing skepticism unless you also affirm that it also operates to keep the skeptic free from all those other groups Christians say promote the doctrines of demons.

------------That's all I posted, but I'll now respond in more point by point fashion here:

Five Reasons to Doubt the Resurrection by Matthew Hartke, DebunkedThe first time I responded to someone’s attempt to show that the resurrection of Jesus amounted to a pile of myths was in 2018, when I dealt with the objections of Tim O’Neill. Tim O’Neill is an atheist and writes the History for Atheists blog which is, by far, the best blog that exists dealing with the misrepresentations of history offered by the rampant atheists flooding the internet and the atheist activists directing their thoughts. While O’Neill is basically impeccable when he talks about that sort of stuff, he’s much, much less impeccable when he turns his sights towards refuting Christianity.

I'll be glad to explain why apostle Paul poses not the least bit of threat to skepticism of Jesus' resurrection. 

In any case, a couple months ago I exchanged a few comments with Tim O’Neill and he directed me to a different argument against the historicity of the resurrection, published just earlier this year – Five Reasons to Doubt the Resurrection on Matthew Hartke’s blog. I admit, when I first read this, I was stumped myself. I thought about it for a while and I learned that the trick was simply to concede most of what Hartke was saying and then point out that all of this actually fails to give much good reason to doubt the resurrection at all.

But you are assuming you started out having good reasons to BELIEVE the resurrection in the first place.  You didn't.  A skeptic's case against the space-alien interpretation of the Bermuda Triangle might be false, but that hardly means that theory should be considered true.

Hartke’s article is divided into five sections, each of which are meant to show problems in the account of the historicity of the resurrection: 1) The nature of Paul’s conversion experience 2) Discord between the [Gospel] accounts 3) Signs of legendary development [in the Gospels] 4) Unrealistic features of the traditions 5) Dissonance reduction strategies. I’m going to begin by noting all the bad arguments in Hartke’s article, of which there are a number. In fact, section (1) and section (5) both fail.

Let’s start with what Hartke has to say about the nature of Paul’s conversion experience. I recommend first reading Hartke’s seciton itself. Here, Hartke is basically arguing that Paul’s letters and the Book of Acts indicates that the appearance of Jesus to Paul was simply a revelation, an internal vision, and so contradicts the standard narrative presented in the Gospels which presents the appearances of Jesus as physical and taking place in the real world. Hartke then says that we have no compelling reason to think that any of the historical appearances to any other of the early Christians were any different since, after all, Paul is the only firsthand testimony we have and Paul mentions all the appearances together in 1 Corinthians 15:3-8 anyways.

I don't argue that way.  I keep Jesus in the ground even assuming the gospel accounts are talking about physical resurrection external to the disciples' minds. 

Hartke is in fact completely wrong on each point here. First, he bases his claim that the appearance to Paul in Acts was not physical because Acts 26:19 calls it a “vision”. But this is irrelevant because Hartke is only taking the word “vision” in the modern sense of the word and fails to account for the possibility that an ancient might have understood a physical appearance that imparts direct theological knowledge as a vision.

Well first, Paul's experience on the road to Damascus is a non-starter, because nothing about any of Acts' three accounts of it express or imply that Paul ever actually "saw" Jesus, thus, those acounts cannot properly support any theory that Paul was an "eyewitness" of the risen Christ.

But the Greek word for vision in Acts 26:19 is optasia, a rare word that Paul himself uses to describe that one time when he was unable to properly understand whether his flying up into the sky was physical or spiritual.  See 2nd Corinthians 12:1-4.   Let's just say your resurrection witness isn't causing skeptics to piss themselves with worry that his credibility might remain intact.  If such fool were the prosecutions witness against you in a murder trial, you wouldn't ask the Court to give a jury instruction about the viability of the supernatural, you'd be asking for charges to be dropped since no reasonable juror could possibly find such witness the least bit credible.

In fact, if we bother to take a look at more then just one verse in Acts describing Paul’s appearance, Hartke’s thesis that Acts actually suggests nothing more than an internal vision for Paul becomes ridiculous.

"ridiculous" ?  No, it's more correct to say Acts describes Paul's experience in fantastic terms which both do and don't implicate internal vision.  If what Paul experienced was external to his mind, why couldn't the traveling companions understand it?  Apparently, the Jesus who appeared to Paul is very different from today's apologists who want to make the risen Christ obvious and undeniable to just anybody and everybody. 

All the resurrection appearances in Luke and elsewhere in Acts are undeniably physical (Luke 24; Acts 1:6–11, Acts 10:41), and so, at most, the appearances to Paul are, at best, a less clear example of a physical appearance.

I don't believe in biblical inerrancy, so I don't pretend that what an author said over here needs to be "reconciled" with what he said over there.  I accept the conclusion of Christian scholars that Christian scholars often contradict themselves or use inconsistent logic.  So my refusal to reject a theory merely because it doesn't account for something Luke said elsewhere, it not unreasonable.

Furthermore, the narratives of Paul’s appearance in Acts tell us that the appearances are physical.

But the inability of the traveling companions to understand Jesus' voice is a "fact" that is not limited to a single reasonable explanation.  You will insist Jesus intentionally prevented the traveling companions from properly understanding Him.  So apparently the risen Christ is less interested that his modern-day apologists to make his resurrection plain to just anybody and everybody.  I will insist that if the traveling companions couldn't understand the voice, it is because they didn't hear the voice to begin with, and Luke is simply taking the companions' naturalistic version of the story and embellishing it to help "account" for it without sacrificing the fantastic element Luke wants to push. 

Acts clearly didn’t think the appearance was restricted to Paul’s head since Acts narrates that the people travelling with Paul saw a light and heard a sound.

That's no more likely than the skeptical theory that Luke knew better, and by lying converted Paul's internal vision to an external experience.  Once again, you seem to think that because Acts says X, Y, and Z, then X, Y and Z impose an obligation upon the skeptic to presume they are true until they can be positively falsified.  Most apologists could use a lesson in historiography.  It doesn't begin with Aristotle's "dictum", a thing that never existed in the first place. 

In Acts 9:3, a light from heaven “flashed around him”. In Acts 9:7, the people with Paul “heard the sound” that spoke to Paul but “saw no one”. In Acts 22:9, the people travelling with Paul “see the light” and Paul ends up blinded for three days.

Yup, that's what Luke's version of the story says alright. 

So clearly, these accounts record something beyond Paul’s internal perception.

Because the account is truthful, or because Luke is taking Paul's solely internal vision and adding fictional details to make it sound more plausible and concrete? 

It’s also worth pointing out that the bright light that Paul and his travelers saw was coming from the physical Jesus, since the ancients thought that heavenly beings were very bright, and so this detail directly requires the physical Jesus to have been present to the group that Paul was in and was the source of the light.

The fact that non-Christian ancients believed this also justifies the skeptical theory that says Luke says "bright light" only because he, like Paul, wishes to embellish the more mundane historical truth so that the pagan Gentiles will find the account to be more acceptable to their religious proclivities.

See Dale Allison, “Acts 9:1–9, 22:6–11, 26:12–18: Paul and Ezekiel”, JBL (2016): 813-814. This fact also leads us to a misrepresentation in Hartke’s article: he says that the “usual apologetic response [to Acts 26:19 calling Paul’s appearance a “vision”] is to say that Paul’s word [in his letters] must take priority over Luke’s word here”. This is a complete misrepresentation. Firstly, the response is not apologetic, it is simply what the evidence says. Secondly, that’s not the response at all. The response is to point out that there is zero room for Paul experiencing nothing more than an internal vision according to the description in Acts if we bother to actually read the account of the appearances instead of selectively looking at a single throwaway verse (Acts 26:19) that appears later on.

The "room" we skeptics need to declare this experience as limited to Paul's mind is created by the story itself, which has Jesus speaking audibly to Paul while Paul's compansions cannot understand him.  If somebody told you that while they walked along the road with friends, suddenly, they heard the voice of Jesus in English, but the companions heard the voice and couldn't understanding, you probably wouldn't spend a great deal of time pretending the account is the least bit serious or compelling.

Then, Hartke argues that the appearance to Paul as described in his letters is also spiritual;

And yet even Paul himself, when recounting his conversion experience elsewhere, seems to use language more appropriate to a vision than to a physical appearance (Gal. 1:12, 16; cf., Gal. 2:2; 1 Cor. 14:6, 26; 2 Cor. 12:1, 7). In Galatians 1 he describes his experience as “a revelation of Jesus Christ,” using the same language he uses throughout his letters to describe non-bodily visions. The Greek word for “revelation” there is apocalypsis. It’s the same word he uses in 2 Corinthians 12 to describe his experience of being caught up to the “third heaven,” and in that case he says he doesn’t know whether it was “in the body or out of the body”. And in Galatians 1:16 he says that this revelation took place “in him”—not “to him”, but “in him”.

There are many problems here. First of all, Paul’s description of having a revelation “in him” is not inconsistent with the physical appearance of Paul recorded in Acts, where multiple people hear Jesus and see a light but the message is only understood by Paul.

And having a revelation "in him" is consistent with an internal vision. 

Secondly, Hartke does not address the evidence, perhaps he is unaware of it, that the appearance Paul writes about in his letters is physical and not only including a spiritual message.

That doesn't foist any intellectual obligation upon a skeptic.  Just because somebody makes it clear that they were at the store yesterday at precisely 9 p.m. doesn't obligate anybody to believe it. 

First of all, let’s begin by pointing out that the Greek word translated as “appeared” (ὤφθη) in 1 Cor. 15:8, where Paul is describing the appearances of Jesus, is not used elsewhere in his letters when describing purely internal revelations or visions such as in 2 Corinthians 12.

So you DO approve of arguments from silence.  

And once again, why are you pretending that Paul's different accounts must be harmonized?  Is there some rule of common-sense, hermeneutics or historiography, that says the reader is obligated to attempt all logically possible harmonization scenarios and make all the date fit together, before they can be reasonable to view the different accounts as contradictory?

And what fool ever said somebody must prove a contradiction with absolute certitude?  We can be reasoable to believe Paul's physical and non-physical descriptions are contradictory even if we can't prove it absolutely. 

Secondly, but even more importantly, Paul writes the following;1 Corinthians 15:8: and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.

Notice that Paul says “last of all” Jesus appeared to him. What does this mean? This means that Jesus stopped appearing to people after he appeared to Paul, so far as Paul is concerned.

then he disagrees with John the Revelator, whose visionary descriptions are worded in a way as to suggest that it was also what he was physically experiencing, and weren't completely mental. 

He was at the very end of the chain of the appearances of Jesus. But if Jesus was only giving Paul a purely internal vision and revelation of him, he was most certainly not the last person to experience an appearance of Jesus, and the appearance described in 1 Cor. 15:8 was most certainly not the last one. Jesus continues to appear in visions and revelations after the event described in 1 Cor. 15:8 transpires. Just look at 2 Corinthians 12:1-9.

That passage doesn't express or imply that Paul saw Jesus during that time. 

The only way for Paul’s appearance to have been the last one is if Jesus truly, literally appeared to him, because visions of Jesus don’t stop with Paul in 1 Cor. 15:-8, unlike appearances.

What is unreasonable about the skeptic who takes Paul's "last" to be contradictory to other NT appearances of Jesus?

Now, let’s move on to section (5): Dissonance reduction strategies. Hartke writes;

Of course, the disciples would have experienced Jesus’ death as more than just the loss of a loved one. After all, they had hoped that he was the long-awaited deliverer of Israel (Mk 8:29; Lk 24:21; Jn 1:41; Acts 1:6) and he was crucified precisely because he encouraged that association (Mk 14:61-62; 15:2, 26). As far as they were concerned, then, his death would have been experienced both as the loss of a dear friend and as a crushing blow to their eschatological expectations. Based on what we can tell from the sources, in other words, the situation of the disciples in the days after Jesus’ death was very similar to that of other apocalyptic movements after the failure of their eschatological expectations. Which invites the question: How do such groups typically respond in those situations? What usually happens when prophecy fails?

Here, Hartke is framing the death of Jesus as causing a sort of cognitive dissonance in the disciples. They had such massive, deep, and entrenched hopes in Jesus as the coming Messiah and whatnot and, all of a sudden, Jesus catastrophically is crucified by the Romans. What Hartke is implying is that, soon, the disciples, due to their inability to reconcile their expectations with reality, would simply have come to the belief that Jesus, who knows, was risen or something, and so their expectations were right all along! This doesn’t work. Though Hartke claims to have read N.T. Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God (2003), he seems to have forgotten that Wright already anticipates and refutes this line of reasoning. Just read pp. 697-701 of Wright’s book. Completely refuted, though Hartke doesn’t spend a word discussing Wright’s points. Let’s take a closer look at what Hartke says before refuting his cognitive dissonance theory yet again. Hartke goes on;

As it turns out, social psychologists and historians have been asking precisely this question for over half a century, and they haven’t come back empty-handed. In a 1999 survey of some of the most important studies on the social and psychological dynamics of failed prophecy, Jon R. Stone observes that “disappointed believers tend to adjust their predictions and beliefs both to fit such disconfirmations and to fit changing empirical conditions.” Instead of completely abandoning their expectations, apocalyptic groups tend to “reconceptualize the prophecy in such a way that the element of ‘failure,’ particularly the failure of the Divine to perform as promised, is removed.” The two primary ways they do this are (a) by reinterpreting the prophecy to better fit with reality through a process of “spiritualization” and/or partial fulfillment, and (b) by projecting the still-unfulfilled elements (usually the most important parts of the prophecy) into the future.

One of the best examples of this phenomenon is the response of the Millerites to William Miller’s proclamation that Christ would return to the earth on October 22, 1844—a date commonly referred to as the Great Disappointment. Like the disciples, many of the Millerites gave up everything in anticipation of the imminent arrival of the kingdom. After the expected day came and went, however, many Millerites came to believe that the prediction had in fact come to pass, but that instead of Christ coming to the earth as they previously thought, October 22, 1844 marked his entering the inner sanctuary in heaven in preparation for his return to the earth. These reinterpretations were accommodated by the creative exegesis of several biblical texts and bolstered by a series of visions reported by Ellen G. White—and they are now a central pillar of Seventh-Day Adventist theology.

The Millerites didn't run around with their leader for three years and then experience his death.  Failure of prophecy is not analogous to the traumatic news that one's revered religious leader has failed in his mission. 

Also instructive are the responses of the Jehovah’s Witnesses to the failure of their eschatological predictions in 1878, 1881, 1914, 1918, and 1925. Despite their initial disappointment, in all five of these instances the Witnesses discovered through a closer reading of Scripture that the predictions had, in fact, been partially fulfilled, or that significant developments related to the predictions had actually occurred on the dates in question. Unlike the original predictions, however, the “events” identified to substantiate this claim were of a heavenly (read: nonempirical) nature and therefore not open to falsification.

And Luke is guilty of making Paul's Damascus-road experience equally unfalsifiable by calling it a "heavenly" vision, Acts 26:19. 

Thus, 1878 marked the time when the “nominal Christian Churches were cast off from God’s favor”; 1881 marked the point at which “death became a blessing” to the saints; 1914, the year WWI began, marked the “End of the Time of the Gentiles” (i.e. the Christian nations); 1918 marked the moment Christ “entered the temple for the purpose of judgment”; and 1925 marked the establishment of a “New Nation” with Christ as its head. The unfulfilled portions of the original predictions were simply projected into the future.

No analogy.  death of a loved one is more personal, traumatic, and likely to cause cognitive dissonance, than simply proof that somebody's predictions were false. 

It’s clear Hartke doesn’t see the massive, gaping flaw in the examples he cites and how they fail to support his conclusion whatsoever that the disciples completely fabricated and deluded the idea of Jesus having risen from the dead after the crucifixion.

My theory is that the earliest resurrection belief was entirely spiritual in nature, and over time began to become more physical in order to make it less implausible. 

He talks about how both the Millerites and Jehovah’s Witnesses had predicted the coming of Jesus on a specific date and, when Jesus did not return on that specific date, they simply pushed the date back later. But this is not in the slightest analogous to the early Jesus sect. These people didn’t already believe that Jesus was going to return one day, let alone on a specific date. They had no concept of the Second Coming of Jesus, let alone the resurrection of Jesus. That Jesus was going to die at all is something that they did not anticipate. All Hartke’s examples show is that when some modern religious sect already believes that some prediction will be fulfilled at some specific point in time, and it isn’t fulfilled in that specific point in time, they just push back that same event to a later point in time. That’s it. That’s all his examples show. Now, when Hartke asks us what happens in religious sects “when prophecy fails”, he is alluding to Leon Festinger’s 1959 study When Prophecy Fails, the basic premise of which is described by Tim O’Neill (see where I quote O’Neill in my response to him here);

The classic psychological study of this phenomenon is Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter’s When Prophecy Fails, which analyses a case study of a UFO cult that expected the end of the world in December 1954. When the cataclysm and expected alien rescue for the believers did not eventuate, the core of the cult managed to reinterpret the failure into a victory by saying their faith had led God to spare the world. So total failure suddenly transformed into a great victory. We can see various other examples of this phenomenon – eg the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ repeated reinterpretations of their predictions of the end of the world when it failed to happen or the reaction of New Age believers when the recent “2012 Mayan Prophecy” turned out to be wrong.

That's precisely what happened in the case of Jesus.  he failed, he died, and the only way for the disciples to avoid having to admit it is to pretend Jesus rose from the dead.  Snip, jumping to:

As we’ve just seen, Hartke’s arguments on both Paul’s conversion experience and cognitive dissonance explaining the origins of the belief in the resurrection of Jesus fail. This brings us to sections 2-4 of Hartke’s article, which is more promising. Before citing Hartke’s arguments that are correct and cannot be simply refuted, I note a number of problems and errors in Hartke’s article in the three of these sections. Hartke writes;

There are no appearances in Mark, just the mysterious expectation of a meeting in Galilee (Mk 14:28; 16:7). 

There’s nothing “mysterious” about this expectation. Read it for yourself: Mark 14:28: “But after I have risen, I will go ahead of you into Galilee.” Or what about Mark 16:7: “But go, tell his disciples and Peter, ‘He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.’” This is exremely straight forward and there are literally no mysteries.

Sure there are: authentic Mark doesn't ever say anybody saw the risen Christ, and most Christian scholars say Mark is the earliest gospel.  That makes it reasonable to say the more detailed resurrection narratives in the later gospels are mere legendary embellishments. 

In Mark 14:28, Jesus says He will rise from the dead and meet His disciples in Galilee.

I would deny that Jesus ever said that, so I'm not bothered by resurrection predictions in Mark, he was just as dishonest as John in putting in Jesus' mouth words Jesus never actually spoke...especially in a heresy-heavy climate where making Jesus say what you want would serve a purpose. 

In Mark 16:7, the angel

No, it is a "man" in a white robe, meaning other human beings had been to the tomb and opened it before the earliest witnesses, the women, got there. 

tells the women that Jesus has already risen from the dead and that they should tell His disciples that they are to meet Him in Galilee. Where’s the mystery? Hartke only calls it “mysterious” to make it sound more weird and (gasp) religious! so that he can dismiss it. What a joke. Hartke writes;

And the problem isn’t just the lack of corroboration between the accounts; it’s the numerous irreconcilable conflicts between them. At the end of Mark the women flee from the tomb and “said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid,” yet in Matthew they depart from the tomb “with fear and great joy, and ran to tell his disciples” (Mk 16:8; Mt 28:8).

Here, Hartke insinuates a contradiction between Mark and Matthew that has refuted by Licona (another author, besides N.T. Wright, that Hartke claims to have read);

Except that Mark wouldn't likely have ended with the silence of the women, if he seriously believed they eventually told other people.  Mark could just as easily have ended on that note because the earliest form of the story only had the women running away from the tomb.  There is nothing compelling the skeptic to grant probability to the Christian attempt to harmonize that ending with other gospel endings.  We are reasonable to draw inferences from Mark 16 alone, without worrying whether those inferences harmonize with later accounts which we skeptics believe are mere embellishments.

In Mark 16:8, the women fled from the tomb in fear and astonishment. And they said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid. However, in Matthew, Luke, and John, the women informed the disciples of the empty tomb. This appears to be a contradiction. However, a resolution is certainly possible;

But you don't win a bible debate by positing possibilities, otherwise, every theory that is "possible" would be a winner.  You either show the possibility you like is more probable than the theory you attack, or you aren't showing that skeptics are under the slightest intellectual compulsion to give a fuck. 

for example, earlier in Mark 1:44, Jesus told a man whom he had just healed of leprosy, “See that you say nothing to anyone. But go show yourself to the priest.” The command in both instances is very similar. Thus, it could be that Mark is saying, as implied in 1:44, that the women did not stop along the way to speak with anyone else but went directly to the disciples. (Licona, Why Are There Differences in the Gospels? Oxford University Press, 2016, 177.)

But it is also "possible" that the accounts seem to be contradictory...because they actually are.

So, what Mark actually says is “Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid” (16:8). Licona points out it’s pretty clear that, based on how Mark describes pretty similar commands elsewhere in the Gospels, we’re not being told that the women refused to listen to the angel because they were afraid of telling anyone, but that simply, on the way to go to the disciples, they did not tell anyone else.

The similarity argument is not persuasive enough to pretend that it imposes some obligation upon skeptics to either refute it or admit defeat.

Anyways, Hartke later writes;

Christian apologists often claim that the Gospels cannot contain significant legendary accretions because they were written within a generation of the events they ostensibly record, while legends generally take centuries to develop. Given the nature of the evidence we have, however, there is good reason for wondering whether this claim itself is an apologetically motivated myth.

To illustrate why, consider the resurrection narrative in one of the non-canonical sources, the Gospel of Peter, which most scholars (both liberal and conservative alike) date to the early or mid second century.

According to the Gospel of Peter, at the time of Jesus’ resurrection the tomb was being watched, not just by a couple guards as in Matthew, but by a whole troop of soldiers, a centurion named Petronius, the Jewish scribes and elders, and (just for good measure) by a “multitude from Jerusalem and the region round about” (31-33). All together this crowd witnessed “three men come forth from the tomb, and two of them supporting one, and a cross following them: and of the two the head reached unto the heaven, but the head of him that was led by them overpassed the heavens. And they heard a voice from the heavens, saying, ‘Hast thou preached to them that sleep?’ And a response was heard from the cross, ‘Yea’” (39-42).

Whatever their conclusions about the canonical Gospels, most scholars wouldn’t hesitate to say that Peter’s resurrection narrative is chock-full of legendary accretions, accretions that rest on but go far beyond earlier traditions (e.g. Matthew’s guards, Luke’s two angels). So whatever generalizations might be made about how long it usually takes for legends to develop, the Gospel of Peter (and the same point could be made from other non-canonical writings from around the same time) gives us a specific example that is directly relevant to the subject at hand.

And here’s the problem: Peter was written only a few decades after John. It stands, in fact, at relatively the same distance in time from John (the latest canonical Gospel) that Mark (the earliest canonical Gospel) stands from Jesus himself. So if we are in agreement that Peter’s resurrection narrative is largely legendary, by what rationale of dating can we still insist that the canonical Gospels must be categorically different?

This is a complete botching of logic. It makes no sense whatsoever. “The Gospel of Peter, written decades after any of the four Gospels, is full of mythology and whatnot. Therefore, we can’t say that the four Gospels are any different unless proven otherwise!” Huh?

I would never argue the way Hartke did. 

If Hartke wants to convince anyone besides the already convinced that the four Gospels contain legendary development, he’ll have to do so by showing that they actually include legendary development, not that decades later texts do.

That's easy, most Christian scholars accept Markan priority and say 16:8 is the end of authentic Mark, therefore, the reason later gospels describe people seeing the risen Christ is legendary development.  It is highly unlikely that Mark would have known that stuff to be historical fact and merely "chose to exclude it", if we allow the Christian assumption that the resurrection of Jesus is supposed to be the most important event in world history.  Mark wasn't quite as skippy about it as you are.

Hartke repeats this same point several more times in his article. Hartke writes;

Equally puzzling is why the appearances should be constrained to the days immediately following the crucifixion with few to none at all occurring soon afterward … And what about the high concentration of appearances early on followed by few or none at all soon afterward? To my knowledge, neither Wright nor any other proponent for the historicity of the resurrection has tried to explain why the risen Jesus should have stopped visiting his followers. And yet the literature on bereavement hallucinations shows us that “the number of recognized apparitions decreases rapidly in the few days after death, then more slowly, and after a year or more they become far less frequent and more sporadic.” Indeed, “The cases reported to us tend to occur most frequently within a week of the death, and the number falls away as the length of time since the death increases.”

This reason is not puzzling but actually very obvious. It’s called the Great Commission, Hartke, the idea that, in the aftermath of Jesus’s death and resurrection, He appeared to several important disciples and figures so that He would both show them who He is and commission to then, themselves, take the message of the cross to the rest of the world.

The point of the appearances was to commission the movement that is Christianity today, which now holds the responsibility of bringing the message to the rest of the world.

I disagree.  Jesus was the leader of the Judaizers, and the Christianitys of today are a far cry from the mere extension of Judaism that was original Christianity.  It wouldn't matter if the bible was the inerrant word of God, no Christianity of today fits the mold apparently intended by Jesus, which is not a problem skeptics need to reconcile with an inerrant bible, they only need be reasonable to say it looks like Jesus' mission failed. 

It’s as simple as that. Jesus doesn’t need to keep appearing because the point was to create the movement and let it spread.

But you don't know that Jesus stopped appearing for that reason.  He could have stopped appearing because the Christian fabricators recognized how implausible the story would be if they kept saying Jesus was repeatedly appearing to others.  If you've ever watched a trial, then you recognize full well that just because an excuse is plausible, doesn't mean it is "correct". 

And it did. There are over 2 billion Christians now, though there were less than 20 at that time.

You wouldn't have any Christianity if Constantine hadn't criminalized non-Christian religions and given Christianity a political shove in the 4th century.

Now that we’ve noted all the errors in sections 2-4 of Hartke’s article, let’s take a look at Hartke’s good arguments;

There are no appearances in Mark, just the mysterious expectation of a meeting in Galilee (Mk 14:28; 16:7). Only Matthew tells of an appearance to the eleven disciples on a mountain in Galilee (Mt 28:16-17). Only Luke tells of an appearance to a pair of disciples on the road to Emmaus (Lk 24:13-31), and he is the only one who narrates the ascension (Lk 24:51; Acts 1:9). Only John tells of the appearances to Thomas and the seven disciples by the Lake of Galilee (Jn 20:24-29; 21:1-22). In none of the Gospels do we see an appearance to James or the “more than five hundred brothers” mentioned by Paul (1 Cor 15:6-7). And of all the things the risen Jesus is reported to have said, only one stock phrase—“Peace be with you”—is recorded by more than one Gospel writer (Lk 24:36; Jn 20:19). How could memories diverge so widely on something as unforgettable as the words of the Messiah from beyond the grave?

Mark’s Jesus tells the disciples that he will meet them in Galilee,

But it is still unreasonable to presume that Mark would desire to leave the fulfillment of such details unmentioned.  After all, weren't the disciples (thus Peter, mark's alleged source) "amazingly transformed" by Jesus' resurrection?   

and he does so in Matthew, but Luke’s Jesus appears only in or around Jerusalem, and he actually tells the disciples not to leave the city (Mk 14:28; 16:7; Mt 28:16-17; Lk 24:6-7, 49). In Luke, moreover, all the appearances take place on Easter day, while in Acts they take place over a forty day period! What are we to make of such a mess?

Even Mike Licona, a conservative Baptist scholar, tacitly admits this, citing the angel(s) at the tomb and the resurrection of the saints in Matt. 27:52-53 as possible examples of what he (euphemistically?) calls “a literary device” on the part of the Gospel writers, which they employ to drive home “their belief that a divine activity had occurred.”

But what Licona and others like him fail to do, despite all their best efforts, is to show how these “literary devices” are not part of a larger trend of legendary development. If the Gospel of Peter can turn Matthew’s two guards into a hundred, then why can’t Matthew (or Matthew’s source) be just as creative? Why can’t the two guards be another example of the elasticity of ancient biographical standards, showing Matthew’s belief that a divine activity had occurred? Given the lack of independent corroboration for that detail, and the clear apologetic value it holds for Matthew’s narrative, there is good reason for thinking that it too is probably legendary.

But then the floodgate is opened and it can’t be shut. If we can attribute the bodies of the saints coming out of their tombs and appearing to many in Jerusalem to Matthew’s creative license, then why can’t we do that with any of Jesus’ appearances? John’s story of Jesus’ appearance by the Lake of Galilee (Jn. 21:1-17) bears so much similarity to Luke’s story of Peter’s first encounter with Jesus (Lk. 5:1-11) that it becomes quite sensible to ask whether one of the authors moved the story to a different setting for their own literary purposes, or even if this might be the result of memory-conjunction error, the combining of two separate memories to create one hybrid memory. And what about the anachronistic content of Jesus’ final words in Matthew? Or the 40 days of Acts? Or the ascension narrative? And on and on the questions come.

And aside from the suspiciousness of any one tradition, there is the more general observation that the scope of post-resurrection material grows with each Gospel: Mark is the earliest, and he contains no actual record of any appearances, but only the expectation of one in Galilee (Mk 16:7); then comes Matthew, who spends 190 words on two appearances (Mt 28:9-20) and then Luke, who spends 641 words on three appearances (Lk 24:13-53); and finally John, who spends 930 words on four appearances (Jn 20:14-21:25).

One of the more puzzling features of the resurrection narratives is how the appearances of the risen Jesus are all short-lived and sporadic: Jesus appears in the middle of a room, gives a brief word of comfort or exhortation, and then disappears just as quickly as he appeared (Lk 24:31, 36-37; Jn 20:19, 26).

None of this requires any refutation. All one has to do, at this point, is point out that all of Hartke’s evidence of development or legendary features only applies to the Gospels of Matthew, Luke, and John. These are traditions that develop beyond the account in Mark and may very well contain literary imagination.

But if so, we can reasonably infer that Mark himself would have felt equally as free to embellish truth for theological purpose. 

Of course, the historicity of the resurrection is generally argued for on the basis of the evidence we find in Paul’s letters and Mark alone. Consider Michael Licona’s The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach (2010).

I have, and I have refuted it comprehensively. 

Hartke says he’s read it in the beginning of his article, but this whole mass of objections just quoted doesn’t apply to literally any of Licona’s evidence. It’s completely untouched.

Wrong:  if Licona can admit Matthew and John changed some of the facts, then apparently, changing historical facts to suit theology was considered acceptable by 1st century Christians and we can reasonably infer that Mark felt the same way. 

In other words, Hartke has simply failed to respond to the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus as adduced by either N.T. Wright or Michael Licona, or anyone else, for that manner.

he didn't need to, as only three of the NT accounts of Jesus' resurrection are first-hand at best (Matthew, John and Paul), the rest is vision or hearsay.  That's a pretty sad case for proving a miracle from 2,000 years ago, especially if we pepper this sad case with accusations from Licona, such as that Matthew's zombies are fiction and John's Christ-sayings tell us more about John's theology and less about what Jesus actually said.  And more especially if we concede with most conservative scholars and Licona and Mcgrew that the gospels don't give us the ipsissima verba (actual words) , but only the vox (gist).  

if you found out that the witness who authored the affidavit now used against you in a murder trial, took the same type of liberties in her "recollection" of "facts", you would make a motion to have the case dismissed on the grounds that no reasonable jurors could possibly find beyond a reasonable doubt that you were guilty.