Correcting Jason Engwer of Triablogue on the problems Mark creates for resurrection apologetics

This is my reply to an article by Jason Engwer at Triablogue entitled 

Did the resurrection accounts develop in a suspicious way?

In the debate I discussed in my last post, Alex O'Connor raised a common objection to the resurrection accounts in the gospels. Supposedly, the earliest gospel, Mark, has the simplest material on Jesus' resurrection, and each gospel after that gets increasingly advanced in the claims it makes on the subject. See Alex's comments here. He especially discusses an increase in the number of resurrection appearances in each gospel - in the order of Mark, Matthew, Luke, John - though he doesn't limit his development argument to that issue.

There are a lot of problems with that sort of objection. As Jonathan McLatchie mentioned in the debate, the material on the resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15 predates all of the gospels, yet is more advanced in some ways.

I don't care how early you date the Corinthian creed, your fundamentalist viewpoint forces you to say Jesus' family's viewing hi as insane was a fact of history years before this "creed" came into existence.  And it is this skepticism of Jesus' family toward him that renders reasonable the conclusion that they did not find his miracles the least bit miraculous.  And it is this skepticism toward Jesus' miracles that passes the historical criterion of embarrassment, which means they deserve more weight than 100 laudatory statements about Jesus rising from the dead.  Mark 3:21 is supplemented by 6:1-4, John 6:26 and 6:66.  And it is this inference of Jesus being the 1st century equal of a Benny Hinn that justifies the conclusion that God would never premise his second covenant upon the works of a deceiver, and thus would not have raised Jesus from the dead.

I want to add some other points.

There are some significant reasons for dating Mark first and John last. But we don't have much evidence to go by to determine whether Matthew predates or postdates Luke. That substantially lessens the confidence anybody can have in an argument like Alex's.

Nice to know you agree with most Christian scholars on Markan priority, but then you need to answer a skeptic's question about which Christian discussion of the Synoptic problem God wants the skeptic to read first.  If you trivialize that question in an effort to justify not answering it directly, you force yourself to take the position that this level of the skeptic's attempted submission to God's will is not appropriate.  Doesn't take a genius to tell how that kind of response will get you in trouble.  Exactly how detailed is Jesus' Lordship?  People need food, water, clothes, jobs, cars, books.  How do you know which of these Jesus is Lord over, and which he isn't?  If you answer that he is Lord over every possible element of the skeptic's life, then the skeptic is not doing anything the least bit unreasonable to demand from you the answer to the question of what God wants the skeptic to do next.  You may reply that answering that the question is irrelevant since the skeptic by definition in rebellion toward God, but that hardly gets you out of the jam:  you cannot even tell another member of Triablogue what God wants them to do next.  The problem of God's will being so hidden is not limited to the unspiritual nature of the skeptic.  Even spiritually alive people don't have the first fucking clue.  They merely suggest a plan of action in the modern world which they believe consistent with biblical ethics.  Sorry, I need to know God's will infallibly because my eternal salvation is more important than driving directions, food served at a restaurant or something else I'd accept upon a lesser standard of proof.  Thus skeptics are reasonable to reject the testimony of all persons who cannot speak infallibly for god. Everybody in the NT who sought after the divine will had access to a person who could speak infallibly for God.  Such people don't exist today.  Engwer loses here.

And as I explained in my last post, Luke and Acts are companion works. What's the significance of looking at something like the number of resurrection appearances in Luke without including Acts if Acts predates John and the two Lukan works reference each other (Luke 1:1 anticipating Acts and Acts 1:1 referring back to Luke, as discussed in my last post)? If Acts is added to Luke, as it should be, then Luke/Acts has more resurrection appearances than John. Even without adding the resurrection appearances of Acts to come up with a total number for Luke/Acts, Acts is relevant in providing some context for Luke. As Acts 1 demonstrates, Luke 24:36-53 is meant to refer to at least two appearances of Jesus, even though they could wrongly be counted as one. And verse 34 refers to an appearance to Peter without narrating it. So, even without counting the number of appearances in Acts, Luke includes more appearances than people often suggest. The gospel of Luke alone has at least as many resurrection appearances as John. (Whether Luke has more depends on how many are in Luke 24:36-53.) Luke/Acts has more than John, even though John probably was written after Luke and Acts were published.

In Luke, some of the women who joined Jesus early in his ministry (8:1-3) were expecting him to still be dead as they went to his grave on Easter morning (24:1-4).  Apparently, despite their being with Jesus at least one year before he died, they didn't think anything he said or did credibly supported his resurrection prediction (which the woman allegedly also heard before he died, 24:8).

The fact that Luke says the disciples regarded the resurrection testimony of the women as "nonsense" (24:11) is massively unexpected for a group of men who had, allegedly, seen Jesus do genuinely supernatural miracles for three prior years and heard him announce his death-and-resurrection predictions throughout.  Sure, that argument goes away if you say 24:11 contains some falsehoods, but you believe in biblical inerrancy, so the reasonableness of my inferences, supra, will exist as long as Luke 24:11's inerrancy does.

Furthermore, we have to look at more than just the number of resurrection appearances. 1 Corinthians 15:6 has the most advanced material in terms of the number of witnesses to an appearance.

The advancement is why the creed is likely late.  If Matthew seriously believe Jesus rose from the dead, he would more than likely not have "chosen to exclude" resurrection appearances that he knew about, such as those that Matthew allegedly participated in from Luke and John.  If Matthew was as high on resurrection appearances the fools at Triablogue are, he would not have "chosen to exclude" resurrection appearances from his own gospel any more than Jason Engwer would "choose to exclude" the Corinthian creed from his resurrection apologetics.

Matthew's gospel has the most advanced evidence for the empty tomb.

That is false, Matthew's risen Christ gives a speech that anybody could state in 15 seconds or less (28:18-20), while Luke's risen Christ speaks over a period of 40 or many days (Acts 1:3).

Luke mentions more women at the tomb than any other source, is the only one to narrate an appearance to a non-Christian (Paul in Acts), is the only one to narrate an appearance in which Jesus' body has the sort of glorious form commonly expected of resurrected individuals in ancient Judaism (the appearance to Paul), etc. Though John probably was the last gospel written, he makes a couple of references to Jesus' not being recognized after his resurrection under ordinary circumstances, even after he had begun speaking (20:14-16, 21:4-7). That's something that can be, and has been, used against Christianity.

I wouldn't use it against Christianity.  The author obviously has a dramatic purpose in saying divine intervention prevented some from recognizing Jesus. 

In that sense, John's material is the least advanced.

Nice try at taking the most obviously embellished part of the resurrection legend and implying it was early or not embellished.  Try again.

Luke has the men on the road to Emmaus not recognizing Jesus, but Luke explains that "their eyes were prevented from recognizing him" (24:16, 24:31). Should we conclude that Luke was correcting John by suggesting that any failure to recognize Jesus was only because of Divine concealment, so that Luke's gospel must have been written after John? I suspect we'd be hearing that line of reasoning a lot if the situation were reversed, with John referring to Divine concealment while Luke had material like John's. Then we have Luke's reference to "many convincing proofs", "forty days" (Acts 1:3), and James' conversion (1:14), all of which go beyond what John reports. These are just several examples among others that could be cited.

John's material is the most advanced in some ways, such as the length of the appearance narrative in John 21. But Luke/Acts is more advanced overall. And, as I've argued elsewhere, Acts probably was completed no later than the mid 60s. I doubt that Luke/Acts predates Mark, but Luke could easily have been written and published second among the canonical gospels, and it's very likely to have been written before John. It probably was written something like two or three decades before John, for reasons I've discussed elsewhere.

That brings up another problem with arguments like Alex's. The amount of time from one gospel to another is highly unlikely to have been significant on every occasion. I've argued that the similarities among the Synoptics make the most sense if those three gospels were written closer in time rather than further apart. I suspect all three were published within less than a decade. But even if you don't hold a view like that, you have to ask what significance the differences in dating have. If Mark was published something like five or eight years before Matthew, for example, so what? How much evolution is likely to have occurred in that sort of timeframe?

The amount of evolution that obviously can be seen by comparing Mark's non-existent resurrection appearance narrative with Matthew's one written about 8 years later.  The hypothesis that Mark originally wrote a resurrection narrative and it got lost, is not the only reasonable one.  It's also reasonable to say authentic Mark stops at 16:8 because Mark wrote nothing more.

If Mark deliberately left out material he could easily have included (e.g., the 1 Corinthians 15 appearances, the appearance anticipated in Mark 14:28 and 16:7), how is it favorable to arguments like Alex's if Matthew includes much less material than Mark was aware of and chose not to include and did so something like five or eight years after Mark was published?

It is not reasonable to expect a gospel author to "chose to exclude" anything they knew about Jesus' resurrection appearances.  It's reasonable to assume that had they known of any such story and thought it true, they would have included it.  There are a number of reasons, harmonious with that, for why John doesn't record the other signs Jesus allegedly did, like lack of paper, or circumstances disallowing further elaboration.

Whatever view a person holds of Mark's ending, we know that more appearances than the ones mentioned in Matthew's gospel were widely known before Mark was published.

And skeptics, being reasonable to assume Mark would never have "chosen to exclude" them had he known them, are also reasonable to assume that he excludes them precisely because he doesn't know about them, i.e., assuming Mark got most of it from Peter, Peter's original resurrection testimony did not include matters beyond what we find in Mark 16.  If Acts 2 says otherwise, we stick with our inference and we call Luke a liar, agreeing therein with most Christian scholars that Acts is at best kernels of historical truth wrapped in embellishment. 

It's highly unlikely that Mark hadn't heard of that material or rejected all of it. You can't judge Christians' or Mark's view of Jesus' resurrection at the time Mark was published, or their view of resurrection appearances in particular, solely by Mark's gospel.

Sure we can, because we are perfectly justified to believe Mark would never have "chosen to exclude" resurrection appearance stories had he known about them.

All writers are selective, have certain unspoken assumptions, write with a particular purpose in mind and not another purpose, have a particular audience in mind, and so on.

Which is why your dogmatism about what we should imply from the biblical resurrection accounts is uncalled for.  You don't have the first fucking clue why any gospel author wrote.  They could have written with a purpose of edifying fiction, and you don't have persuasive historical evidence that any gospel author knowingly risked their lives in any preaching activity. 

Lydia McGrew6/07/2022 9:22 AM☍

Yes, these are all important points showing the poverty of a developmental thesis.

No, showing poverty of a development hypothesis requires showing that an hypothesis of Mark's original resurrection appearance narrative was more likely than a theory that he stopped at 16:8.

Every single such developmental thesis I've ever examined about the gospels falls apart upon examination.

Skeptics could say the same with regard to non-developmental hypotheses.  But if it makes you feel better to pontificate... 

The evidence is cherry-picked, stated in a tendentious way, and so forth. The points you make here show that to be the case here. Of course, the issue of the ending of Mark *all by itself* casts a huge question mark over the assertion that Mark is somehow more primitive *because* it doesn't include appearances.

But I've made my arguments that Mark's shorter ending was the original.  You cannot just cry "we don't know!" whenever a reasonable skeptical hypothesis is argued, otherwise, you'd have to allow a skeptic to cry "we don't know!' every time YOU set forth a reasonable reliability-hypothesis. 

The "count the appearances" thing is obvious nonsense, especially since they are *different* appearances. E.g. Matthew has an appearance in Galilee but John has a different appearance in Galilee. Luke has the Emmaus appearance and not the Doubting Thomas appearance, John has Doubting Thomas but not Emmaus. And so forth.

Once again, we skeptics are reasonable to insist that if any gospel author both knew about, and thought true, any resurrection appearance story, it would be highly unlikely for them to have "chosen to exclude" it.  Jesus' resurrection was supposed to be the crowning purpose of Jesus' mission.  Mark's dedicating less attention to it than Luke, Matthew and John remains reasonably suspicious.