Cold Case Christianity: Yes, the resurrection is a late legend

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

The Truth About Easter: Is the Resurrection A Late Legend?

Posted: 01 Apr 2018 06:33 AM PDT

At the age of thirty-five, I was a skeptical detective at a large municipal police agency in Los Angeles County. I was also a committed atheist. I accepted several historical facts about Jesus of Nazareth – that he lived in the first century, preached sermons, was crucified by the Romans, and was buried in a tomb that was eventually found to be empty – but I didn’t believe that any of these facts meant the Resurrection of Jesus was true. I knew there were several ways to explain these basic facts without having to resort to a supernatural explanation. For that reason, I thought the Resurrection of Jesus as a mythological fairy-tale.

Sorry to see you degenerate into an attention-whore who has a pathological obsession with using Jesus to promote himself and his marketing gimmicks learned not from the bible but from capitalist billionaires interested in learning how to manipulate others into buying crap.  But if it motivates you to help relieve the suffering of others...

I suspected the gospel accounts related to Jesus had simply been corrupted over time;

You should have believed that the gospel originals corrupted what Jesus said and did.

the story of the Resurrection was little more than a late legend. In fact, I surmised the Resurrection passages were absent in early versions of the story; added later by those who wanted to recast Jesus of Nazareth as Christ, the Son of God.

Then that was your problem right there.  The fiction of the resurrection story doesn't necessarily imply it will be absent from the original.  The gospels are not historically valid biographies corrupted over time.  They are historically dishonest fictions that were corrupted over time.

But once I decided to employ my detective skills to examine the claims of the gospel authors, my view of the Resurrection (and the claims of Easter) began to change.

You never examined the credibility of any of the gospel authors, that's for sure, what with most Christian scholars saying the authors of those documents are anonymous, or it being unknown the degree to which the popularly ascribed author actually contributed to them.  Something's got to be wrong with your brain for you to change your entire life on the basis of 4 anonymous fictions from 2,000 years ago.

I found there were several good, evidential reasons to reject the idea that the Resurrection was a late legendary addition to the Jesus story:
The claims were early.

So were Mormonism's founding fictional claims.

How soon does a disciple of Benny Hinn start telling about what he saw Hinn do onstage?  Is this testimony "early", or do such people usually wait several decades before telling?

Paul famously saw the resurrected Jesus on the road to Damascus,

Acts 9, 22 and 26 are the NT's most explicit stories of Paul experiencing the resurrected Jesus, and none of them justify saying Paul was an "eyewitness", since, as the story goes, the men he traveled with could not see whatever it was Paul was seeing (9:7, or they saw a light, but not Jesus, 22:9).  It is YOUR problem if you wish to characterize as an "eyewitness" a person who claims to have "seen" things that cannot be seen by normal physical eyesight.

then wrote about it in his letter to the believers in Corinth. This letter was penned very early in history (in the mid AD 50’s), barely twenty years after the Resurrection. Paul repeated the earliest known Christian creed – or oral record – which included the Resurrection as a key component (1 Corinthians 15:3-8)

And the 'gospel' he received revolved solely around Jesus death, burial and resurrection, contrary to the allegedly risen Christ's own understanding in which the gospel consists of having future Gentile followers obey ALL that Jesus taught during his earthly ministry (Matthew 28:20).  Paul infamously is nearly totally apathetic on and silent toward the things Jesus said and did before the crucifixion.

and told his readers that there were hundreds of Resurrection eyewitnesses (still alive) who could be interviewed (verse 6).

And you don't have the first clue upon what basis Paul claims such a thing, when in fact the biblical possibilities include magical means like telepathy (Acts 16:9), telepathy from God (Galatians 1:1, 11), or trips to heaven that, 14 years after the fact leave Paul still ignorant of whether he was outside his own body during the experience (2nd Cor. 12:1-4).  FUCK YOU AND YOUR CREDIBILITY-LACKING "WITNESSES". 

The claims were taught. The earliest claims about Jesus were passed from the eyewitnesses to their personal students.

So if most Christian scholars are correct in saying Mark wrote nothing after 16:8, then the earliest claims about Jesus said nothing about him appearing to anybody after he died, which Mark surely would have included had he known such stories and believed them true, given that the resurrection is the defining attribute of the entire religion.  Sorry Wallace, there's a good reason why Jesus' resurrection appearances are not part of the earliest gospel's original story.  But since you don't plan on acknowledging reality, continue flying around the world and appearing for 2 minutes on various tv and radio shows. Attention whores rarely give up that which facilitates their being the center of attention.

The apostle John, for example, taught what he observed and knew to be true about Jesus to his students, Ignatius and Polycarp.

You apparently know nothing of the critical problems present in the alleged 'writings' by these authors.

They then became leaders in the Church following the death of John, writing their own letters to local congregations. These letters describe Jesus in precisely the same way he was described by the eyewitnesses: born of a virgin,

Despite how important and useful the virgin birth of Jesus would be to help the apostle substantiate their claims about Jesus being the divine Son of God, the only NT authors that ever mention it are Matthew and Luke.  Let's just say all is not well in fundyville.

able to perform miracles

John 7:5, Mark 3:21, Jesus' own family members saw nothing more significant in Jesus' earthly ministry and miracles, except that he was unworthy of belief and likely had gone insane.  So were the brothers and mother of Jesus just brick stupid for denying obvious reality?  or were they possessed of ordinary intelligence, and there's more evidential problems with your miracle-working Jesus than you care to admit?

and having risen from the grave.

 He didn't appear to disinterested witnesses, despite his alleged ability to conduct all evangelism of all unbelievers by personally appearing to them individually. No, Jesus doesn't employ that miracle power because he has no such thing.  Don't say "God's mysterious ways" unless you are ready to accept that excuse as valid when employed by heretics to get their asses out of a theological jam. 

The claims were repeated.

Something that clearly never happens in clearly false religions like Mormonism.

In the earliest accounts of the disciples’ activity after the Resurrection, they are reported to have repeatedly cited this event as their primary piece of evidence to prove that Jesus was God.

No, the earliest account of the gospel of Mark's, and he likely wouldn't remain silent about Jesus actually appearing to witnesses had he believed any such thing were true.  The earliest gospel therefore doesn't constitute the earliest account of the disciples' activity after the resurrection, because the earliest form of the story did not have any "disciples activity after the resurrection" component to it just yet.  Legends take time to build.

From the earliest days of the Christian movement (as recorded in the Book of Acts), eyewitnesses consistently made the claim that Jesus rose from the dead.

The problem being that despite the allegedly 500 others who saw this resurrected Jesus, the NT authors didn't think readers could use the instruction and edification to be found in written accounts of all the other apostles and how they lived and taught.  Indeed Acts says virtually nothing about the Jerusalem apostles and focuses only on Paul's specific form of teaching starting in ch. 9.  It is highly unlikely that if the other apostles had anywhere near the miracle-working power or success that Paul allegedly did, the NT authors would judge such additional accounts irrelevant to Christian encouragement and learning.  Sorry, but they are silent about the majority of the alleged resurrection "witnesses" because most of the original apostles experienced failure and apostasy.  That's the more probable explanation even if you can resort to God's mysterious reasons for excluding such from the bible.  The winners in a historical debate are those whose theories are more plausible, not those who dream up mere possibilities.

In order for the Resurrection of Jesus to be a late legend, the story would have to be both late and a legend.

Mark says nothing useful about it, it IS a late legend.

It is neither. It’s a lot harder to lie about something when people are still alive to expose the deception.

 Tell that to Benny Hinn and Joseph Smith.

The accounts of the Resurrection were written while people who would have known better could still fact-check them.

Even though you are presumably aware of the Christian scholarly consensus that exactly who wrote the gospels and the degree to which "apostles" contributed therein, is a big fat unknown.

Despite this truth, the earliest New Testament documents include the Resurrection story,

The consensus of Christian scholars is that Mark is the earliest of the gospels, and there is also consensus among them that Mark did not write anything after 16:8.  Sorry, but the earliest NT documents do not include the resurrection.   I think this is the part where you insist that the unbeliever has an obligation to become as educated in biblical matters as these Christian scholars before he can be justified to adopt this majority view.  Well fuck you.

and the record of the early Church fathers demonstrates that the account was not altered over time.

That's bullshit in the eyes of many modern Christian "inerrantist" scholars who agree that Matthew and Luke often "softened" or otherwise changed Mark to get rid of problems created by his specific choice of wording.  It's not a large leap from their comfort in changing the inerrant word of God, to changing historical facts to suit literary needs, such as conservative resurrection scholar Licona and others say with respect to Matthew's zombie resurrection story in Matthew 27:52.

Whatever you may think of the Resurrection of Jesus, it is not a late legend.

Have fun trying to pretend that Mark wrote about it, but the ending was lost before the time of our earliest extant manuscripts. 

In fact, for millions of Christians around the world, the Easter account of Jesus’ Resurrection is still the most reasonable inference from the evidence.

Gee, really?