Herein I reply to Triablogue's Jason Engwer on the subject of Jesus' resurrection. Jason's post was from
First, it doesn't matter if Jesus really was the true messiah, I have excellent arguments against the "eternal conscious torment" version of hell (such as that the NT contradicts the OT on the point) and therefore, no apologist can pontificate that I'm irrationally ignoring a danger-alarm when I reject Christianity. As an atheist I already accept extinction of consciousness as my fate, and since the bible teaches that fate for unbelievers, I'm not ignoring danger signals by ignoring the bible. I ask myself "what if the bible is true!?" about as often as Engwer asks himself "what if the Koran is true!?"
The Christians feel comfortable that there comes a time when you can draw an ultimate conclusion without worrying about the gainsayers. So they cannot balk at skeptics who likewise draw an ultimate conclusion without worrying to stay up with the latest in Christian apologetics.
Jason's basic problem is common to all apologists: Whether he will allow a naturalistic inference from the story depends on whether it coheres with the story. In Jason's fantasy-land of bible inerrancy, all inferences that might challenge bible inerrancy are obviously stupid and fallacious. If Jason were a prosecutor faced with a criminal defendant whose alibi of being home asleep at the time of the murder could not be
positively falsified, he would drop charges. After all, the guy said he was home asleep at the time of the murder, and nobody is able to positively falsify that statement. You have no rational choice but to accept that testimony. And yet we know perfectly well that you can reasonably find such a man guilty even if you cannot positively falsify his alibi.
Jason EngwerMarch 23 ·
It's often claimed that Jesus' resurrection appearance to Paul isn't described as a physical appearance in Acts or elsewhere.
That's because the details of the story forbid classifying Paul as an "eyewitness", for if he truly saw the person of Jesus, the details would not fail to support the point.
But it is described as physical, in Acts and in Paul's letters.
Space aliens are also "described as physical". Doesn't mean the testimony foists the least bit of intellectual compulsion on anybody else. And Christianity evolves like Judaism, so I don't really care if the Paul of the epistles testifies to a physical experience of the risen Christ, all he is doing is embellishing his original experience to make it sound more concrete than it really was.
Acts tells us that Paul saw Jesus, not just a light (9:27, 22:14).
Your trouble is the the alleged eyewitness, Paul, never says he saw this person. Furthermore, Acts 9:27 indicates Paul's seeing Jesus was merely Barnabas' inference,
a person who did not have personal knowledge of this Damascus road experience:
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. (Acts 9:27 NAU)
Furthermore given the details in the story, it is reasonable to suppose Paul leaped from "all evidence indicates it was Jesus" over to "I saw Jesus". Your problem is that Luke would hardly tell the story the way he did if Paul had "seen" Jesus.
Luke's story details will not permit Barnabas' inference. In fact, if the light was "brighter than the noon-day sun" (Acts 26:13) and if it blinded Paul (Acts 22:11) we have the perfect right to assume Paul would have done what anybody does when hit with a bright light, and close his eyes. And since the light blinded him, we can also assume that he would have kept his eyes closed. In your arguments you frequently refer to what we can "naturally assume", and Paul's keeping his eyes closed until the light disappeared is a perfectly natural assumption.
Acts 9:8 only says his eyes were open
when he got up from the ground, it neither expresses nor implies he kept his eyes open the whole time or most of the time.
If you were being tried for murder and the prosecution's only witness said they saw you pull the trigger,
but at no time did they provide any detail that plainly alleged they "saw" you pull the trigger, you'd ask the judge the drop the case for lack of evidence. You would not trifle that because the prosecutor is the only one drawing the inference that the witness 'saw', that's good enough.
That Paul never opened his eyes during the encounter is also strongly implied by Acts 26:14. If you visited a friend and saw them physically, you would never later characterize their talking to you as "I heard a voice..." So Paul's phrase is reasonable
on the assumption that either his eyes were closed, or that he went blind before he heard the voice. Either way, you aren't going to demonstrate that the theory of Paul never "seeing" Jesus during this encounter, is "unreasonable".
What do you recommend skeptics do when apologists cannot show some skeptical theory to be unreasonable?
Paul says the same in his letters (1 Corinthians 9:1).
He also admits in the next verse that other Christians did not view him as an apostle (v. 2) which only makes sense if they rejected his story about seeing Jesus on the road to Damascus. Now we have Christians contemporary to Paul who thought his story was bullshit. but I'm sure that in your happy bubble world of inerrancy, the only testimony that matters is testimony in favor of your own doctrines.
Paul might have said he saw the risen Christ (v. 1), but he's also a self-confessed liar (v. 20-21). There is no way Paul could have viewed himself free from the law, then pretend to be under the Law when in the company of Jews,
and do all this without giving a false impression of his beliefs. The Jews knew of a rumor that he set aside the Law of Moses in his Gentile preaching (Acts 21:18-24), so we can safely assume that if Paul ever fellowshipped with Jews, they would not be satisfied with external apperances, or his merely going along with their rituals...they would have asked him whether he believes obedience to the law puts one in right standing with God.
If he truthfully answered "no", they would thrust him out of the Synagogue as an apostate. So the only way Paul's "be a Jew to the Jew" strategy could possibly work, is if he falsely confessed to believing in the efficacy of the Law the exact same way that his non-Christian Jewish friends understood it.
How would you like it if your local Satanist became a "Christian to the Christians" whenever he visited your church? If you found out he denied the faith, wouldn't you subject him to some seriously clarifying questions before allowing him back in your church? Or would you just shine him on as he joins the others in singing "Old Rugged Cross"? If he honestly said he only
pretends to be a Christian when among Christians, would you allow him back into your church? DUH. Once again, the only way Paul could believe his "be a Jew to the Jews" strategy could work, is if he lied to them an affirmed he agreed with them about the salvific efficacy of the Law.
Resurrection in Paul's letters and early Christianity in general involves the raising of the physical body that died, so a physical appearance of Jesus would make more sense than a non-physical one in that context.
or maybe like everything else in Judaism and Christianity, Paul's understanding of his Damascus road experience changed during that time he spent in Arabia (Galatians 1:17). Gee, eyewitnesses never alter their testimony due to the passing of time, do they?
Similarly, the context of the remainder of Luke and Acts and earlier resurrection appearances in general is a context in which all of the earlier appearances were physical ones.
Sorry, the details in the 3 versions of the story of Paul's experience on the road to Damascus will not permit characterizing it as having the same physicality as other alleged appearances.
So, it makes more sense for the appearance to Paul to be physical than it does for the appearance to be non-physical.
The fact that you have to argue the point proves Luke's data is sufficiently ambiguous as to render the skeptical position reasonable.
But given the fact that the bible doesn't assign to unbelievers a fate any worse than the consciousness-extinction that I already accept as an atheist, I'm not seeing why I should CARE whether Jesus rose from the dead. I only bother refuting apologists because I feel sorry for those fundamentalists who experience anguish from their cognitive dissonance (i.e., everything the bible says is true, but actual real life disproves many biblical statements). Some people just have less tolerance for the "god's ways are mysterious" excuse, Mr. Engwer. You aren't going to change that by ceaselessly trifling about everything under the sun.
But you also forget that Paul was a stupid mystic who couldn't even tell when some of his instances of flying up into heaven were spiritual or physical (2nd Corinthians 12:1-4). Incidentally, Paul characterizes that dementia with the Greek word for vision, "optasia"...
the same word he uses in Acts 26:19 to characterize his experience of Christ on the road to Damascus.
The objective, physical nature of how Paul and his companions heard Jesus' voice, with different people having heard him to different degrees, makes more sense if the voice came from Jesus' body than if Jesus wasn't physically present.
Then apparently you aren't familiar with the absurd mysticism of Acts. In a "vision" Paul is able to hear the voice of another earth-bound human being who was, at that exact moment, 200 miles away across the ocean. Acts 16:9.
And passages like Acts 22:15 group the hearing and seeing involved together, suggesting that both the hearing and the seeing of Jesus were of a physical nature.
If that's how the prosecutor had to fix the testimony of the only witness, to say they experienced you shooting somebody else, you'd be asking for charges to be dropped for lack of evidence. Once again, Paul says he "heard a voice..." which is not the way you describe that talk to another person, if the source of the voice had been a physical person you SAW. The story details are stilted because what actually happened was not clearly a physical experience. Of course, I'm reasonable to accuse Luke of fabricating most of the account, such as the detail about the traveling companions partially experiencing this thing.
22:14 refers to the voice coming from the "mouth" of Jesus.
That's Ananias, v. 12, and he didn't have personal knowledge of the road experience. DISMISSED. It must suck to be you...the only way you can get "physical" out of the eyewitness's testimony is to smoosh it together with the inferences draw by those who came along and talked to Paul at a later time.
That terminology normally refers to a portion of the human body.
Terminology that says "I heard a voice behind me..." also normally refers to a portion of the human body, but it is still employed the author of Revelation to describe an experience limited to his mind (Revelation 1:10).
Jesus is a human
That terminology normally refers to a person who lacks the ability to float up into heaven solely by non-physical means. Discover, then, the purely Ad Hoc nature of Christian apologetics. If a prosecutor had to qualify normal terms in a criminal case as often as Christianity requires qualification of normal terms, he would probably be disciplined by the Bar for bringing charges without sufficient probable cause. And he'd probably be referred for mental health services.
who was speaking in the context of a resurrection appearance,
There is no reason to characterize Acts 9 as a "resurrection" appearance, except of course for your indefatigable need to make everything in the bible harmonize. This appearance occurred after Jesus "ascended" in Acts 1. And don't even get me started on how a god of truth would never act in a way that helps a person confirm the truth of their scientifically inaccurate viewpiont that heaven is physically "up there".
which involves a raised physical body, so the reference to a mouth in 22:14 is most naturally taken as a reference to Jesus' being bodily present during the appearance to Paul.
Except that Paul was the sort of person who sometimes couldn't tell whether an event happened only to his spirit, or also to his body (2nd Corinthians 12:1-4). Any witness in court who admitted this kind of gullibility could never persuade a reasonable jury, especially if their testimony about an interaction with another person had so conspicuously lacked plain indicators of where the other person was, the way Paul's bullshit story of conversion lacks these.
There's no reason to think that something like an anthropomorphism is involved in 22:14.
There's also no reason to believe the story. Contrary to popular belief, there is no rule of common sense or historiography that says the objective person will accept testimony as true
until it can be positively falsified. Josh McDowell was lying when telling the world about Aristotle's Dictum. When a stranger on the bus tells you his real pet snake sometimes talks to him in English, trying to get him to commit a sin, you do not assemble a team of investigators to check out the snake, the man, his friends, his family, his possible credibility supports or problems, and then only reach a verdict after careful deliberation. You call him a crazy cocksucker, and you'd be "reasonable" to do so even if by some freak space-warp his pet snake really did talk to him.
The passage is most naturally taken to refer to Jesus' bodily presence.
A point you wouldn't have to argue if the original eyewitness had made that clear. Do you also 'argue' that Jesus was a man?
Furthermore, Paul groups the appearance to him with the appearances to others (1 Corinthians 15:5-8),
Yeah, those other appearances that the canonical gospels strangely omit, like the appearances to Peter, then James, then to the 500 at once. Paul could just as easily be implying he thinks the other apostles' experiences of Christ were similar to his own. You resist that conclusion by noting the obvious physical nature of the gospel resurrection appearances, but the earliest of these, Mark, said nothing about Jesus being seen by anyone, an argument from silence that is very certain, since if Mark felt anybody saw the risen Christ, he surely would have mentioned it. James Patrick Holding insists Mark chose to leave the resurrection appearances out of the written version but this is fucking ludicrous. Shall we think Mark thought the parable of the sower (Mark 3) deserved to be included in the writing, but not the details of the event that is allegedly infinitely more important?
And don't even get me started on how the expectation of the women going to the tomb that Jesus would still be dead on the third day, makes the skeptic reasonable to say they didn't find any of the miracles Jesus did before the crucifixion to be the least bit compelling.
And don't even get me started on how, in light of Luke 24:23, ANY part of the canonical gospel story of Jesus' resurrection might have been a "vision".
and early Christian tradition, reflected in a large number and variety of sources, portrays the appearances to the other resurrection witnesses as bodily appearances.
What are you gonna say next? The Jews were monotheists, hoping the reader won't read every other page of the NT that shows them being polytheists?
Sorry, those who denied Jesus' fleshly reality existed in the days of the apostles (2nd John 7),
and he says there are "many" such Christians. Such a movement could hardly have gotten started sufficiently to blossom into "many" or become important enough for John to warn his church against, if denying Jesus' fleshly reality was an obvious stupidity.
Did any heretics deny the fleshly reality of Nero?
Like Paul's writings, the book of Acts portrays Paul as a resurrection witness in the same category as the others (13:31-32, 22:15), and those other witnesses are said to have seen bodily appearances of Jesus.
There is no reason to equate the appearances to the disciples, with the appearance to Paul.
