Other Explanations

Matthew 28:13 is the oldest alternative explanation of Easter on record. The guards are to say that the disciples came by night and stole the body. It is worth reading slowly, because it teaches two things at once. It shows that from the beginning the resurrection was contested and that Christians knew what their opponents said. And it shows that the opponents, at least as Matthew reports them, did not dispute that the tomb was empty. They disputed why. That pattern has continued for two thousand years, and it is the pattern of this lesson.

The New Testament Survey lesson The Resurrection set out the main alternatives at their best: removal of the body, the wrong tomb, the swoon, visions, cognitive dissonance and legend, each with its strongest defenders and the main objections. That ground is not repeated here. This lesson does three new things. It gives a method for weighing explanations, so that a student can judge a new one he has never met. It states the two most developed sceptical cases in full, as complete accounts rather than separate theories. And it takes up three alternatives that the earlier lesson did not: the argument that Paul believed in a purely spiritual resurrection, and the two explanations held by the largest number of people in the world, both of which come from within the world of Islam.

Historians weigh competing explanations by a small number of tests, which the Australian philosopher of history C. Behan McCullagh set out in Justifying Historical Descriptions (1984), and which William Lane Craig has applied to the resurrection. Scope: does the explanation account for all the main facts, or only some? Power: does it make the facts likely, or merely possible? Plausibility: does it fit what we otherwise know about the world and the period? Ad hoc-ness: does it need extra assumptions invented only to make it work? And comparison: does it do better on these tests than its rivals? None of these is a machine. Each requires judgment. But they let a student ask the right questions instead of reaching for a slogan.

Fairness requires two further rules. First, state the explanation in a form its holders would accept, including its strongest evidence, before answering it; if you cannot, you are not ready to answer it. Second, remember that the sceptic does not have to offer any explanation at all. He may say, as some do, that he does not know what happened but that he is sure it was not a miracle. That is a legitimate position, and it should be answered as one: by asking whether 'I do not know' is really the best account he can give of facts he himself accepts, and why he is so sure of what it was not.

Bart Ehrman's fullest statement is How Jesus Became God (2014), and it should be taken as a whole, not cut into pieces. Ehrman accepts that Jesus was crucified under Pilate. He doubts that Jesus was buried by Joseph of Arimathea in a known tomb. Crucifixion was meant as a deterrent, and part of the deterrent was that the bodies were left exposed or thrown into a common grave; Pilate, whom Philo of Alexandria describes as stubborn and cruel, had no reason to grant a favour to a man executed as king of the Jews. The story of Joseph, Ehrman argues, is more likely a later tradition than a memory. If there was no known tomb, then the stories of its discovery are not reports but the narrative form of a belief that already existed, and so the empty tomb cannot be used as evidence.

What Ehrman does accept is that some of Jesus' followers had visions of him after his death. He thinks it is historically certain that some of them, he suggests Peter, Paul and perhaps Mary Magdalene, sincerely believed they had seen him alive. He explains these as the kind of visionary experience well documented among the bereaved and in religious movements, without deciding what, if anything, caused them. The key to his account is what came next. Jesus had preached that the end of the age was coming soon, when God would raise the dead. When his followers had visions of him after his death, the category they had for what had happened was resurrection: the end had begun, and he was the first. From there, Ehrman traces a development in which Jesus came to be seen as exalted to God's right hand, and then as a pre-existent divine being. And over the whole account stands his method: a historian works with probabilities, and a miracle is by definition the least probable explanation, so the historian as historian cannot conclude that God raised Jesus, whatever he believes as a person.

This is a strong account, and a Christian should say so. It accepts more than older scepticism did, it is internally consistent, and its apocalyptic explanation of why the language of resurrection was used is its best point. The answers to it should be equally careful. On the burial, the New Testament Survey lesson gave the evidence for and against at length; add here that the burial is in the creed Paul received (1 Corinthians 15:4), and that Mark 15:43 names Joseph as a prominent Council member, a strange invention for a movement whose story blamed the Council for Jesus' death, and one that could have been checked. On the visions, the question is whether visions in an apocalyptic setting would produce the specific claim the early Christians made. Wright's argument, in the previous lesson, was that visions of a vindicated righteous man would most naturally be described as exaltation to heaven, which Judaism already had a category for, rather than as a bodily resurrection of one man ahead of everyone else, which it did not. Ehrman's account also has to explain the conversion of Paul, who was not a grieving follower but an enemy, and of James, who had not believed, and the reported group appearances. And on method, the previous lesson and the New Testament Survey lesson both noted that the claim that a miracle is always the least probable explanation depends on a prior judgment about whether there is a God who acts, and that is a question history alone cannot decide.

Gerd Lüdemann, professor of New Testament at Göttingen, developed the most complete psychological explanation, in The Resurrection of Jesus (1994) and the shorter What Really Happened to Jesus (1995). Like Ehrman, he treated the stories of the empty tomb as later legend: Jesus' body, he argued, simply decayed. His account of the appearances begins with Peter. Peter had denied Jesus three times and then watched him die, and he was left with grief and guilt he could not resolve. In that state he had a vision of Jesus, which Lüdemann understood as the resolution of his guilt through an experience of forgiveness. Peter's experience then spread to others in the group by a kind of contagion, and the appearance to more than five hundred was, Lüdemann suggested, an experience of mass ecstasy, perhaps the same event that Acts later describes as Pentecost. Paul, for his part, had been drawn to the faith he was persecuting without admitting it to himself, and his vision on the road to Damascus was the eruption of that inner conflict. Lüdemann accepted that the disciples had real experiences in which they believed they saw Jesus. What he denied was that anything outside their minds caused them.

Lüdemann followed his conclusions through. He declared publicly in 1998 that he was no longer a Christian, because, as he put it, Jesus did not rise, and his debate with William Lane Craig, published in Jesus' Resurrection: Fact or Figment? (2000), is one of the clearest places to see both cases argued by people who meant them. The British scholar Michael Goulder argued a similar view, describing the appearances as conversion visions spreading within a group under stress.

The answers to Lüdemann are partly the answers to all visionary theories, given in the New Testament Survey lesson: bereavement visions reassure the bereaved that the dead are at peace, they do not produce the claim that a body has been raised, and group experiences of the same kind are much rarer than individual ones. Three further points apply to him in particular. First, his method depends on reconstructing the inner lives of people who lived two thousand years ago from a handful of texts. Psychological explanation of the living, with the person in front of you, is difficult enough; psychological explanation of Peter and Paul from their letters and from stories about them is speculation, however learned. Second, the identification of the five hundred with Pentecost does not fit the texts. Acts 1:15 gives the gathering as about a hundred and twenty, and Acts 2 describes the coming of the Spirit, not an appearance of Jesus, while 1 Corinthians 15:6 describes an appearance and says most of the witnesses were still alive to be asked. Third, his account of Paul reads into Paul a hidden attraction to the faith that Paul himself, describing his past in Philippians 3 and Galatians 1, does not report; Paul says he was confident and zealous, not torn. None of this proves the resurrection. It shows that the most developed psychological alternative needs a good deal that the evidence does not supply.

A different kind of alternative does not explain the appearances away. It argues that the earliest Christians, Paul above all, never claimed a bodily resurrection, and that the empty tomb and the physical appearance stories are a later development. Richard Carrier argued this in an essay in The Empty Tomb (2005), edited by Robert Price and Jeffery Jay Lowder, and versions of it appear in many popular writers. State it at its strongest. Paul is our earliest witness, and in 1 Corinthians 15:44 he says the dead are raised a spiritual body, not a natural one, and in 15:50 that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God. Paul's own experience, which he lists alongside the others in 15:8, is described in Acts as a light from heaven and a voice, which his companions heard without seeing anyone (Acts 9:3-7), and Paul himself calls it a heavenly vision (Acts 26:19) and a revelation of God's Son in him (Galatians 1:16). If Paul's experience was a vision and he lists it with the others, perhaps they were all visions. The Gospel stories in which Jesus is touched and eats fish, especially Luke 24:39-43, would then be later answers to Christians and pagans who said he had been a ghost.

The reply begins with Paul's words, which the inquiry asked you to look up. Psychikon and pneumatikon in 15:44 are the same adjectives Paul uses in 1 Corinthians 2:14-15 for the natural man and the spiritual man, and there no one takes him to mean a man made of soul and a man made of spirit. They describe what animates and directs a person, not what he is made of. So a spiritual body is most naturally a body animated by the Spirit of God, as Robert Gundry argued in Soma in Biblical Theology (1976) and N. T. Wright argued at length in 2003. Flesh and blood, in Galatians 1:16 and Matthew 16:17, means human beings as they are, mortal and weak; in 15:50 Paul explains the phrase himself in the next clause: the perishable does not inherit the imperishable. And the whole chapter argues for continuity between the body that dies and the body that rises: what is sown is raised (15:42-44), the mortal is clothed with immortality (15:53), and in Philippians 3:21 Christ will transform our lowly bodies to be like his glorious body. A man who believed the body was simply left behind would not choose the image of a seed. Finally, Paul's creed says that Christ was buried and then raised. For a Jew of the Pharisee party, as Paul says he was, raised after burial meant the body.

Notice what is still genuinely open. That the earliest Christians proclaimed a bodily resurrection is the strong majority view, held by many scholars who do not believe it happened. But what the risen body was like, how it related to the body that died, and how it could appear and disappear, are questions on which the texts give hints rather than a full account, and Christians have held different views about them since the second century. Do not defend more than the texts say. They say he was raised, bodily and transformed, the firstfruits of the new creation. They do not give you a physics.

The alternative explanation of Easter held by the most people alive today is not any of the sceptical theories above. It is the Islamic belief that Jesus was not crucified at all. The Qur'an at 4:157-158 says that the Jews' claim to have killed the Messiah, Jesus son of Mary, is false: they did not kill him or crucify him, but it was made to appear so to them, and God raised him up to himself. Describe the range of interpretation as a well-informed Muslim would. The majority of classical commentators understood the verse to mean that God cast Jesus' likeness onto another man, who was crucified in his place, and they proposed various candidates, including Judas and a willing disciple. A smaller number of Muslim scholars, including in modern times the Lebanese-American scholar Mahmoud Ayoub, have read the verse as denying not that Jesus died but that his enemies had the final word, since it was God who raised him. Interestingly, the idea of a substitute on the cross is older than Islam: Irenaeus, around AD 180, reports that the second-century teacher Basilides taught that Simon of Cyrene was crucified in Jesus' place while Jesus watched.

A different explanation is held by the Ahmadiyya movement, founded in nineteenth-century India by Mirza Ghulam Ahmad and now present across West Africa, South Asia and beyond. Ahmadis regard themselves as Muslims, though many other Muslims do not accept them as such, and in some countries they face persecution for it. In his book Jesus in India, written in 1899, Ghulam Ahmad taught that Jesus was put on the cross but did not die there; he was taken down unconscious, recovered from his wounds, and travelled east in search of the lost tribes of Israel, dying at a great age in Kashmir, where a tomb in Srinagar is shown as his. This is a swoon theory, held today by millions, and a student in Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone or Pakistan may meet it before he meets any other alternative.

Answer both with respect and with history. The crucifixion of Jesus is one of the best attested facts of ancient history. It is reported by Paul within about twenty-five years, by all four Gospels, by Josephus on the majority reconstruction, and by Tacitus, and it is accepted by nearly every historian of every faith and none. A substitution theory is a theological claim, not a historical one; it cannot be tested by historical methods, and a Christian should say so rather than pretending to disprove it. What can be said is that it requires that God allowed Jesus' mother, his disciples and the women at the cross to be deceived, and that the whole earliest church was founded on that deception. Muslims have answers to that question and you should listen to them, but it is a fair question to ask. Against the Ahmadiyya swoon, the decisive point was made by David Friedrich Strauss in 1864, as the New Testament Survey lesson reports: a half-dead man nursed back to health could never have given his followers the impression that he had conquered death, and Roman executioners were practised at their work. The Module 5 lesson Talking With Muslim Friends goes further into these conversations. And remember what that lesson and this module both say: where leaving Islam is dangerous, never press a friend toward a step that could cost him his safety, and read the Missions lesson The Persecuted Church before you advise anyone who is thinking of it.

Finally, a word about combinations, because a well-read sceptic will often combine several explanations, saying for instance that the body was moved by Joseph, that the women went to the wrong place, that Peter had a grief vision and that the rest is legend. A combination can cover more facts than any one theory. But each part brings its own improbability with it, and the more parts are needed, the more the account looks built to avoid a conclusion rather than to explain the evidence. The sceptic's fair reply is that even a strained natural account is more probable than a miracle, if miracles are almost impossible. That reply is honest, and it shows again where the argument really lives: not in any single fact, but in what each person believes about God before the evidence is weighed.

Add the fifth paragraph to your page headed My defence: Jesus. This one answers the explanation of Easter you are most likely to meet.

Take the explanation you wrote down in the inquiry. On the left side of a page, write it in four or five sentences as its best defender would state it, including the strongest point in its favour. Then ask yourself, honestly, whether a person who holds it would recognise your statement and agree it is fair. If you are not sure, rewrite it until you are. On the right side, test it against the five questions in section 1: scope, power, plausibility, ad hoc-ness and comparison, with one line for each.

Then write your paragraph, no more than 150 words. Begin by stating the alternative fairly. Give the one or two answers that matter most. End with one sentence saying what remains open, or what the disagreement finally turns on. If your alternative is the Islamic or the Ahmadiyya view, read your paragraph aloud and ask whether you could say it with kindness to a Muslim neighbour over a meal, without a single word of contempt. If you could not, rewrite it.