my challenge to isjesusalive.com

Today I sent the following challenge to the person or persons who post to the isjesusalive.com website:

Cold Case Christianity: Wallace proves the resurrection of Jesus with blind faith in bible inerrancy.

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

Cold Case Christianity: 

A Brief Review of Explanations Offered for the Resurrection (Free Bible Insert)

Posted: 04 May 2018 01:01 AM PDT

 ...The following brief summary of explanatory deficiencies is excerpted from my book, Cold Case Christianity. I’ve omitted larger observations from the book related to my own case work and experience as a detective; this abbreviated list is merely a summary of the historic observations related to each explanation. A more comprehensive examination is included in the chapter explaining the process of abductive reasoning.  If we begin with a minimal list of evidences related to the Resurrection of Jesus (Jesus died on the cross and was buried, Jesus’s tomb was empty and no one ever produced His body, Jesus’s disciples believed that they saw Jesus resurrected from the dead, and Jesus’s disciples were transformed following their alleged resurrection observations), the following explanations, along with their deficiencies, must be evaluated:

...Were the Disciples Lying About the Resurrection?

1. The Jewish authorities took many precautions to make sure the tomb was guarded and sealed, knowing that the removal of the body would allow the disciples to claim that Jesus had risen (Matt. 27:62–66).

 To the contrary, Matthew 27:62 specifies that one day seperated Joseph of Arimathea's acquisition of the body and the time the guards show up at the tomb,thus a day in which anything could have happened to the body:

 57 When it was evening, there came a rich man from Arimathea, named Joseph, who himself had also become a disciple of Jesus.
 58 This man went to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus. Then Pilate ordered it to be given to him.
 59 And Joseph took the body and wrapped it in a clean linen cloth,
 60 and laid it in his own new tomb, which he had hewn out in the rock; and he rolled a large stone against the entrance of the tomb and went away.
 61 And Mary Magdalene was there, and the other Mary, sitting opposite the grave.
 62 Now on the next day, the day after the preparation, the chief priests and the Pharisees gathered together with Pilate,
 63 and said, "Sir, we remember that when He was still alive that deceiver said, 'After three days I am to rise again.'
 64 "Therefore, give orders for the grave to be made secure until the third day, otherwise His disciples may come and steal Him away and say to the people, 'He has risen from the dead,' and the last deception will be worse than the first."
 65 Pilate said to them, "You have a guard; go, make it as secure as you know how."
 66 And they went and made the grave secure, and along with the guard they set a seal on the stone.   (Matt. 27:57-66 NAU)

 Wallace continues:

2. The people local to the event would have known it was a lie

Would the people who preserved gospel histories have preserved hostile witness testimony?  Not likely.  Matthew's story about how the Jews bribed the guards to account for the missiing body by saying they were asleep when the disciples stole the body, is not preservation of hostile witnesses, it is fictional propaganda.

(remember that Paul told the Corinthians in 1 Corinthians 15:3–8 that there were still five hundred people who could testify to having seen Jesus alive after His resurrection).

remember also that Paul, who said Christ would be of no benefit to those who receive circumcision (Galatians 5:2), was willing to act in defiance of this theological truth whenever he thought lying would make things go easier between him and the Jews (Acts 16:3), despite the fact that in Acts 16:3, Paul surely knew that the Jews there were insisting on circumcision because they thought it was the basis of salvation for the Gentile (Exodus 12:48).  See Paul's willingness to lie about his true theological convictions when in the company of those he knows disagree with him (1st Cor. 9:20-21), a matter that caused Augustine and Jerome to disagree with each other.

3. The disciples lacked the motive to create such a lie (more on this in chapter 14).

 In the context of stealing a physical human body, that might be significant, but I maintain the original reports of Jesus' resurrection consisted solely of visions, which were themselves embellishments upon a gospel whose earlier form said nothing about a risen Christ appearing to anyone (Christian scholarly consensus that Mark 16 ends at v. 8).

4. The disciples’ transformation following the alleged resurrection is inconsistent with the claim that the appearances were only a lie. How could their own lies transform them into courageous evangelists?

The following passage from Acts 9 demonstrates a) after Saul converted and became Paul, he did not face persecution and threats of death fearlessly, he escaped by being lowered in a basket outside the city walls...and we also learn that the original disciples, after their experiences of seeing the risen Christ, would not believe reports that Saul the persecutor had converted, and remained fearful until Barnabas gave them concrete evidence that Saul had really converted, so this is biblical evidence that seeing the risen Christ did not transform them into "courageous evangelists":

 22 But Saul kept increasing in strength and confounding the Jews who lived at Damascus by proving that this Jesus is the Christ.
 23 When many days had elapsed, the Jews plotted together to do away with him,
 24 but their plot became known to Saul. They were also watching the gates day and night so that they might put him to death;
 25 but his disciples took him by night and let him down through an opening in the wall, lowering him in a large basket.
 26 When he came to Jerusalem, he was trying to associate with the disciples; but they were all afraid of him, not believing that he was a disciple.
 27 But Barnabas took hold of him and brought him to the apostles and described to them how he had seen the Lord on the road, and that He had talked to him, and how at Damascus he had spoken out boldly in the name of Jesus.
 28 And he was with them, moving about freely in Jerusalem, speaking out boldly in the name of the Lord. (Acts 9:22-28 NAU)

Wallace continues:

Did the Disciples Hallucinate the Resurrection?

1. While individuals have hallucinations, there are no examples of large groups of people having the exact same hallucination.

But a theory that the apostles experience similar hallucinations in a religiously charged context, is enough to get the cult started, even assuming they didn't share the exact same mental images.

2. While a short, momentary group hallucination may seem reasonable, long, sustained, and detailed hallucinations are unsupported historically and intuitively unreasonable.

Google the Brownsville Revival and Toronto Blessing.  Christians don't even need "visions" to get some bullshit group started.  And the famine of 43 a.d. (Acts 11:28) would motivate many starving individuals to align themselves with groups.   The notion that nothing but true miracles can explain Christianity's start in the first century, is bullshit.

3. The risen Christ was reported seen on more than one occasion and by a number of different groups (and subsets of groups). All of these diverse sightings would have to be additional group hallucinations of one nature or another.

 I don't see the implausibility of one religious fanatic causing others to get caught up in the moment and stand around convincing themselves they are all having the same experience.  Ask any group of fundamentalist Pentecostals to give you the gift and power of the Holy Spirit, and you'll find out rather quickly how 10 different people can falsely convince themselves that they are all having the same religious experience.

4. Not all the disciples were inclined favorably toward such a hallucination. The disciples included people like Thomas, who was skeptical and did not expect Jesus to come back to life.

While such stories might appear to fulfill the criteria of embarrassment, they likely were intended to make the lesson learned, all the more dramatic, and as such, they ARE something a forger would likely invent.  Thomas's doubt gives rise to the "blessed are they who have not seen and yet have believed" stuff.  There is literary purpose to stories of apostolic skepticism.

5. If the resurrection was simply a hallucination, what became of Jesus’s corpse?

 It was buried in a common graveyard with other criminals' corpses.  Once again, the lack of a physical body for the early Christians wouldn't prevent them from seeing Jesus in visions (see Revelation 1:1-4).

The absence of the body is unexplainable under this scenario.

On the contrary, the hallucination hypothesis seeks only to explain the sightings.  There's plenty of historical evidence to warrant the other conclusion that the body of Jesus was disposed of in a common graveyard.

Were the Disciples Fooled by an Imposter?

1. The impersonator would have to be familiar enough with Jesus’s mannerisms and statements to convince the disciples. The disciples knew the topic of the con better than anyone who might con them.

2. Many of the disciples were skeptical and displayed none of the necessary naïveté that would be required for the con artist to succeed.

3. The impersonator would need to possess miraculous powers; the disciples reported that the resurrected Jesus performed many miracles and “convincing proofs” (Acts 1:2–3).

4. Who would seek to start a world religious movement if not one of the hopeful disciples? This theory requires someone to be motivated to impersonate Jesus other than the disciples themselves.

5. This explanation also fails to account for the empty tomb or missing body of Jesus.

I'm a skeptic, but I don't put any stock in any imposter-theory.

Were the Disciples Influenced by Limited Spiritual Sightings?

1. The theory fails to account for the numerous, divergent, and separate group sightings of Jesus that are recorded in the Gospels.

No, the theory simply doesn't believe that eveyrthing stated in the bible is true.  We don't need to "account" for all NT evidence anymore than Christians need to "account" for the lost origins of popular fairy tales, to know that they are false.

These sightings are described specifically with great detail.

The gospel authors were good storytellers.

It’s not reasonable to believe that all these disciples could provide such specified detail if they were simply repeating something they didn’t see for themselves.

But its reasonable once you remember that the problematic details were happening in 33 a.d., and had until 50 a.d. to work out the bugs and kinks before putting anything down in writing.

2. As many as five hundred people were said to be available to testify to their observations of the risen Christ (1 Cor. 15:3–8).

You don't have the first clue as to whether Paul knew this by experience or hearsay, yet you continue talking of these "500 witnesses" as if they and what they saw was gospel truth.

Could all of these people have been influenced to imagine their own observations of Jesus?

Yes, read about how 120 people can experience delusions in groups, in Acts 2.

It’s not reasonable to believe that a persuader equally persuaded all these disciples even though they didn’t actually see anything that was recorded.

Let's first establish the veracity of these "500 witnesses" before we start pretending they are the crossbeam holding everything together.

3. This explanation also fails to account for the empty tomb or the missing corpse.

The hallucination hypothesis explains the sightings, not the empty tomb or missing corpse.  Those matters are answered under the theories of embellishment, since by Christian scholarly consensus, Mark is the earliest gospel and he stopped at 16:8, thus the original form of the gospel didn't tell about Jesus "appearing" to anyone, that crap was created later.

Were the Disciples’ Observations Were Distorted Later?

1. In the earliest accounts of the disciples’ activity after the crucifixion, they are seen citing the resurrection of Jesus as their primary piece of evidence that Jesus was God.

That's what they do in the Book of Acts, but this wasn't written until at least 62 a.d., at the earliest, and so the stories of the initial preaching had time to be embellished. 

From the earliest days of the Christian movement, eyewitnesses were making this claim.

Eyewitness also routinely provide alibis for their friends who are in court facing criminal charges.  You never suspected until just now that eyewitnesses might actually lie about something.  You gain nearly nothing by merely pointing out that eyewitnesses preached the resurrection at an early period.  Hell, the gnostics were early too (1st John 4:3), so what?

2. The students of the disciples also recorded that the resurrection was a key component of the disciples’ eyewitness testimony (more on this in chapter 13).

No, Mark was traditionally a student of Peter, and Mark's gospel ends at 16:8 by Christian scholarly consensus.  Apparently, when Peter was preaching in Rome with Mark walking behind him, Peter did not say anything about witnesses actually seeing a risen Christ, since otherwise Mark would surely have recorded such a thing.

3. The earliest known Christian creed or oral record (as described by Paul in 1 Corinthians 15) includes the resurrection as a key component.

 But the risen Christ himself makes his pre-crucifixion teachings the key component, Matthew 28:20.

4. This explanation also fails to account for the fact that the tomb and body of Jesus have not been exposed to demonstrate that this late legend was false.

You also fail to demonstrate that skeptics of Christianity in the days immediately following Jesus' death would have given two shits about the Christian claims enough to bother "exposing" it as false.  You also wrongfully trivialize the possibility that there was criticism, but like much else in early Christianity, records of such have disappeared.  I don't care of Acts has the disciples preaching the bodily resurrection of Jesus within two months after he died, Luke is a liar who embellishes details.

Were the Disciples Simply Telling the Truth?

1. This explanation has only one liability: It requires a belief in the supernatural; a belief that Jesus had the supernatural power to rise from the dead in the first place.

Wrong, that explanation has another liability, that those who believe it, accept as true that which was written by religious fanatics 2,000 years ago, whose identities cannot be established sufficiently to justify trusting them.

Every explanation offered for a particular set of facts has its own set of unique deficiencies. Even a true explanation will suffer from some apparent liability. As a cold-case detective, my cases (even those in which the defendant confessed to the crime following his conviction) have always presented unanswered questions and apparent deficiencies. Jurors were encouraged to make a decision in spite of these deficiencies by selecting the best inference from the evidence: the explanation that best explains the facts of the case while possessing the fewest liabilities.

 This juror gives the following explanation:  Most Christian scholars agree that Mark ends at 16:8, and if true, it means the the original Christian preaching did not say a risen Jesus was seen by anybody.  Christian scholars also agree in majority that Matthew and Luke borrowed substantial amounts of text from Mark, and its no coincidence that these later gospels suddenly come up with richly detailed resurrection narratives.  They certainly didn't get that shit from their source material (Mark).  They were making it up.

With that in mind, it’s important to recognize the deficiency of the Christian explanation: It requires a belief in the supernatural.

 And "supernatural" implies the existence of something whose location constitutes an incoherency: "above" nature, "beyond" nature, or "outside" of time.

For many people, this is a deal killer; this is the reason they simply cannot accept the Christian account.

For this skeptic, the incoherence of religious language is just one reason among many that break the Christian deal with me.  The others are the failure of Christians to make a good case for apostolic authorship of the gospels and the biblical silence toward most of the original 11 disciples of Jesus, when under Christian assumptions, they likely conducted ministries just as successful as Paul's.  I say Luke didn't give a shit about most of the apostles because he knew they left the faith.

But as I’ve written in the past, we cannot begin our investigation of supernatural claims (like the Resurrection) by rejecting supernaturalism from the onset.

 That's your problem:  you claim to be able to make a historical case that Jesus rose from the dead, then you admit that the case cannot be made if the investigator doesn't believe in magic.  FUCK YOU.

We cannot start with our conclusions predetermined.

Then you must have been irrational everytime you strongly suspected, but couldn't immediately prove, that somebody was lying to do.

While the Christian explanation does present a deficiency of sorts, this liability is actually a matter of presupposition rather than evidential sufficiency.

 So let's debate the presupposition.  Before we ask whether God exists, we need a working definition.  You have none.  Your bible says God is inscrutible, you describe him as filling up the universe, that he is "outside of time", that he hears your prayers but doesn't have ears, he speaks without vocal cords, he causes things to happen inside time meaning he somehow transfers back and forth between the dimension of time and the dimension of eternity.  Sorry, you lose.