The Case for the Real Jesus

by Lee Strobel

  “Why not?”

  “Because at best it can only account for Paul’s belief that he had seen the risen Jesus. It doesn’t account for the conversion of the skeptic James, and it doesn’t account for the empty tomb. And it doesn’t explain the beliefs of the disciples that they had seen the risen Jesus. You’ve got to account for what changed them to the point where they were willing to suffer continuously and even die for their beliefs that they had seen the risen Jesus. So it’s a bad historical hypothesis.”

  “Do you think that any of the psychological factors mentioned by Carrier could explain Paul’s sudden change of mind?”

  “Paul himself is crystal clear about why he converted: he says he saw the risen Jesus,” Licona replied. “So we have his eyewitness testimony of what happened. On the other hand, what do we have for Carrier’s view? There’s not a shred of evidence to support it. Paul’s writings don’t indicate that he converted because he felt guilty or that he secretly admired Christians or that he had a disdain for his fellow Pharisees. This is pure conjecture and speculation on Carrier’s part. He’s reading things into the text that simply aren’t there.

  “Besides, there’s something else Carrier is forgetting. Luke, who may have been Paul’s traveling companion, reports on Paul’s conversion in Acts 9, 22, and 26. In all three accounts, it says others were present when Paul encountered Jesus, and they either saw the light or heard the voice but didn’t understand it. So this was not merely a subjective experience that occurred in Paul’s head. Others were partakers in the experience, which would indicate it’s not the product of hallucination or some sort of epiphany.”

  I jumped in. “Skeptics might object that Luke’s accounts contradict each other.”

  “On the contrary, I think they can be harmonized,” he replied, “and don’t forget that Luke wrote all three of them. Why would he knowingly write contradictory accounts in the same book? We have to study how the ancients wrote. There might be different things that Luke was trying to emphasize in each of those passages. Frankly, I don’t think there are any major tensions between the three accounts that are going to call their credibility in question. What is certainly clear in all three accounts is that there were others with Paul at the time he saw Jesus who noted that phenomena too.

  “If you accept what Acts says about Paul’s experience, then you can’t simply ignore what else Acts reports. For instance, in Acts 13 Paul says David died and was buried and his body decayed but Jesus died and was buried but his body didn’t decay. He said God raised Jesus. Thus, Paul believed in the bodily resurrection of the corpse of Jesus.”

  “Hold on a minute,” I said. Licona’s emphasis on the bodily resurrection of Jesus prompted me to pursue a related line of questioning.

  PHYSICAL OR SPIRITUAL RESURRECTION?

  For years, skeptics and liberal scholars have sought to dilute the impact of the resurrection by attributing it to merely a spiritual experience rather than a physical phenomenon involving the material body of Jesus. For instance, Marcus Borg of the Jesus Seminar said he sees the post-Easter Jesus as “an experiential reality” and not as the “resuscitation” of a corpse.8

  “Critics cite some of Paul’s own words to prove he saw an immaterial Jesus who had a spiritual resurrection, not a bodily one,” I said to Licona.

  “In 1 Corinthians 15,” I continued, “Paul talks about the resurrection of the dead by saying in verse 44, ‘It is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body.’ Verse 50 says, ‘I declare to you, brothers, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.’ Tabor says Paul equates his own ‘sighting’ of Jesus, which was ‘clearly visionary,’ with the other apostles—‘possibly implying that their experiences were much like his.’9 Do these Corinthian passages indicate Paul’s encounter was visionary in nature rather than a bodily, corporeal resurrection?”

  Obviously, this was a hot-button issue for Licona. He moved to the edge of the couch and his voice became more animated. “First let’s examine this term ‘flesh and blood,’” he said. “For the past thirty years, most experts have concluded that this term was an ancient figure of speech, probably a Semitism, that simply meant ‘a mortal being.’ That’s what it means every time it appears in the New Testament, the Septuagint, and throughout the Rabbinic literature. It’s kind of like when Americans call a person ‘cold blooded,’ ‘hot-blooded,’ or ‘red-blooded.’ They’re not referring to the temperature or color of their blood.

  “Now, you can’t equate that with what Luke reports Jesus as saying when he appears to the disciples: ‘Hey, I’m not a ghost, because ghosts don’t have flesh and bones as you see that I have.’10 He said flesh and bones, not flesh and blood.”

  “What about the way Paul contrasts the words natural and spiritual?” I asked.

  “I recently analyzed each time these words appeared between the eighth century BC through the third century AD. These words have multiple definitions, but what’s really interesting, Lee, is that I never found a single instance in which the Greek word translated ‘natural’ meant ‘material’ or ‘physical.’ Never. Not once.

  “It’s also important to see how Paul uses these terms elsewhere, especially in the same letter. A few chapters earlier, in 1 Corinthians 2:14–15, referring to spiritual truths, Paul writes that the ‘natural’ man rejects and cannot understand the things of God, because they are ‘spiritually’ discerned. But, he adds, ‘spiritual’ people understand them.

  “So when we come to chapter 15, Paul gives a number of differences between our bodies. They’re sown in weakness, they’re raised in power. They’re sown in dishonor, they’re raised in glory. They’re sown perishable, they’re raised imperishable. They’re sown natural—bodies with all their fleshly and sinful desires and with hearts and lungs—but raised and transformed into a new body with spiritual appetites and empowered by God’s Spirit. There’s no thought about a contrast between physical versus spiritual.

  “And here’s one other thing: if Paul had meant to draw a comparison between material versus immaterial, he had a better Greek word at his disposal, which he had already used a few chapters earlier with a similar analogy of sowing.11 He doesn’t use that word here, though. That’s more evidence that this has nothing to do with material versus immaterial. So to claim that Paul is saying that Christians will have an immaterial body in heaven is no longer sustainable.”

  I raised a related issue. “Paul says in Galatians 1:16 that God was pleased ‘to reveal his Son in me.’12 Doesn’t that suggest that Jesus’ appearance to Paul was an inward or subjective experience rather than an objective reality?”

  Licona frowned. “This is a difficult verse, I admit, because Paul doesn’t clarify what he means and the context doesn’t help us,” Licona replied. “And there’s no consensus among experts as to what this means. Some think it’s referring to the Damascus Road experience, and he’s referring to the inward illumination that coincided with the outward experience of encountering Jesus. Still others translate it as ‘to me’ instead of ‘in me.’ The Greek allows this, and this is the way Paul uses the term in 1 Corinthians 14:11. But we really don’t know.”

  “In light of that, how do you employ responsible historical methodology here?” I asked.

  “When we come across a passage with an ambiguous meaning, we’re required to interpret it according to other passages by the same person that are more clear. So if Paul is referring to a bodily resurrection elsewhere—as he does in at least three other places—then it’s irresponsible to translate this passage in a manner that has Paul contradicting himself.”

  “So Paul is not saying this is merely a spiritual resurrection.”

  “No, and I think the evidence is so obvious. In 1 Corinthians 15:20, Paul is clear that he regards Jesus’ resurrection as a model for our future resurrection. He says in Romans 8:11 that ‘he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit, who live
s in you.’ And he stresses in Philippians 3:21 that the Lord Jesus Christ ‘will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body.’13

  “Moreover, in 1 Corinthians 15:53–54, Paul states plainly that in resurrection our present perishable and mortal bodies will ‘put on’ the imperishable and immortal like a person puts on a sweater over clothing. It’s not an abandonment of the body but a further clothing that completely swallows up and transforms. As N. T. Wright shows in his book The Resurrection of the Son of God, when Jews talked about resurrection, they were talking about the resurrection of the corpse. This wasn’t something that happened just as a vision to Paul.

  “One more thing,” he said. “We have to keep in mind that Paul’s experience came after Jesus’ ascension into heaven, so it would make sense that he describes it differently than the disciples, who encountered Jesus before he ascended. Even so, he still believed Jesus rose bodily. He makes that quite apparent.”

  HALLUCINATIONS AND DELUSIONS

  So far, I felt that Licona had adequately responded to challenges about Jesus’ appearance to Paul. But what about the other appearances of Jesus? As for Carrier, his position is quite forthright:

  I believe the best explanation, consistent with both scientific findings and the surviving evidence…is that the first Christians experienced hallucinations of the risen Christ, of one form or another…. In the ancient world, to experience supernatural manifestations of ghosts, gods and wonders was not only accepted, but often encouraged.14

  “Doesn’t this,” I pressed Licona, “neatly account for the appearances of Jesus?”

  “First,” responded Licona, “I think we can note that ghosts, wonders, and gods aren’t unique to antiquity. People believe in the supernatural today too. In fact, that’s probably increasing.”

  “Maybe that’s so,” I conceded. “But that doesn’t really mean anything in terms of what happened in the first century.”

  “I agree,” he said. “Actually, I’d say if all we had was Jesus appearing to Peter, then maybe I’d buy into the hallucination theory.”

  That admission startled me. “You would?” I asked.

  “Maybe,” Licona stressed. “He’s grieving, he’s full of anxiety—maybe.”

  That seemed like a significant concession to me. But Licona wasn’t finished. “But that’s not all we have,” he continued. “We’ve not only got multiple appearances to individuals, but we’ve got at least three appearances to groups of people. And a group of people isn’t going to all hallucinate the same thing at the same time.”

  “Can you back that up?”

  “I lived in Virginia Beach for fourteen years. Half the Navy Seals are stationed there, and I got to know a number of them. To become a Seal, they have to go through ‘hell week.’ They start Sunday night, and they go through Friday, during which they get maybe three to five hours of sleep the whole time. They’re being barked at continually, there’s high stress, they’re constantly exercising, and inevitably fatigue and sleep deprivation set in.

  “About 80 percent of the guys hallucinate due to the lack of sleep. A lot of time they’re out on a raft doing an exercise called ‘around the world,’ where they go out in the ocean, around a buoy, and they come back to shore. They’re trying to be first because then they’ll be rewarded with rest. It’s at this time that many start seeing things.

  “One Seal told me he actually believed he saw an octopus come out of the water and wave at him. Another guy believed that a train was coming across the water toward the raft. He’d point to it and the others would say, ‘Are you crazy? There are no trains out here in the ocean.’ He believed it so strongly that before what he perceived as the train hit him, he rolled into the ocean and they had to retrieve him.

  “A Seal told me about another guy who was waving his oars wildly in the air. When he was asked what he was doing, he said, ‘I’m trying to hit the dolphins that are jumping over the boat.’ I asked the Seal, ‘Did you see the dolphins?’ He said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘Did anyone else see the dolphins?’ He said, ‘No, they were busy having their own hallucinations!’

  “You see, hallucinations aren’t contagious. They’re personal. They’re like dreams. I couldn’t wake up my wife in the middle of the night and say, ‘Honey, I’m dreaming of being in Hawaii. Quick, go back to sleep, join me in my dream, and we’ll have a free vacation.’ You can’t do that. Scientists will tell you that hallucinations are the same way.

  “We’ve got three group appearances at least, so the hallucination theory doesn’t work. On top of that, hallucinations can’t account for the empty tomb. They can’t account for the appearance to Paul, because he wasn’t grieving—he was occupied with trying to destroy the church. And in the midst of that, he believes he sees the risen Jesus. James was a skeptic; he wasn’t in the frame of mind for hallucinations to occur either.”

  I knew that Licona’s analysis of the hallucination theory was solid. According to psychologist Gary Collins, who was a university professor for more than two decades, authored dozens of books on psychology, and was the president of a national association of psychologists and counselors:

  Hallucinations are individual occurrences. By their very nature only one person can see a given hallucination at a time. They certainly aren’t something which can be seen by a group of people. Neither is it possible that one person could somehow induce a hallucination in somebody else. Since a hallucination exists only in the subjective, personal sense, it is obvious that others cannot witness it.15

  I decided to try another approach. “What about the idea that ‘groupthink’ could have taken over in those groups,” I asked. “Maybe people were suggestible and perhaps talked into seeing a vision.”

  “At best, that only would account for the beliefs of the disciples that they had seen the risen Jesus. It would not account for the empty tomb, because then the body should still be in there. It would not account for the conversion of Paul, since it’s unlikely an opponent like him would be susceptible to groupthink. Same with the skeptic James. In fact, with the crucifixion of Jesus, James was probably all the more convinced that he was a failed Messiah, because he was hung on the tree and cursed by God.”16

  I wasn’t ready to give up yet. “If these weren’t technically hallucinations, could these people have been deluded?” I asked. “You know—like Marshall Applewhite of the Church of Venus, who committed suicide with more than three dozen of his followers because they believed a spaceship hiding behind the Comet Hale-Bopp would pick them up.”

  “You’re right—hallucinations and delusions aren’t the same,” Licona said. “A hallucination is a false perception of something that’s not there; a delusion is when someone persists in a belief after receiving conclusive evidence to the contrary. In the case of Applewhite, his followers were delusional. They persisted in their belief that they were seeing a spaceship behind the comet even after astronomers assured them they were actually seeing Mars.”

  “Well, then,” I said, “we could postulate the theory that Peter saw a hallucination of Jesus and then he convinced the other disciples—he deluded them—into believing Jesus had risen from the dead.”

  “Sorry,” came the reply. “That doesn’t account for all the facts. For example, it doesn’t account for the empty tomb, because the body would still be there, right? And it wouldn’t account for the conversion of Paul. Listen—you weren’t sucked in by the Church of Venus, were you, Lee? Most people weren’t. Paul, who’s opposing the church, wasn’t going to get sucked into believing Jesus returned from the dead, and neither was James. At best, the delusion theory could only conceivably account for why some of the disciples believed; it doesn’t account for most of the facts. So therefore it’s not a good historical theory.”

  Deftly, using evidence and logic, Licona had deflected the biggest objections to the appearances of the risen Jesus that have been promoted by critics in recent years. His “minimal facts”—that Jesus’ disciples, the persecutor Paul
, and the skeptic James believed they had encountered the risen Jesus—appeared to survive intact.

  Still, there was the remaining issue of the burial place of Jesus: Was his tomb empty on the first Easter—and why?

  PAUL AND THE EMPTY TOMB

  I began addressing the issue of the empty tomb by recapping to Licona the way that Carrier and Uta Ranke-Heinemann, a professor of the history of religion at the University of Essen in Germany, try to account for it.

  “According to Carrier,” I said, “Paul didn’t believe in an empty tomb, because he believed Jesus had a spiritual body, which is why he never mentions the empty tomb. Later, Mark made up the empty tomb story—for him, it was not historical but symbolic, representing Jesus being freed from his corpse. According to Carrier, Jesus’ body was the empty tomb. Then legendary embellishment took over in Matthew, Luke, and John.17

  “As for Ranke-Heinemann, she says the empty tomb’s legendary nature is proven because Paul, ‘the most crucial preacher of Christ’s resurrection and the earliest New Testament writer besides, says nothing about it. As far as Paul is concerned, it doesn’t exist.’”18 Lüdemann agrees: “If he had known about the empty tomb, he would certainly have referred to it in order to have an additional argument for the resurrection.”19

  With that background, I said to Licona, “You believe the empty tomb is important enough to be included in your five minimal facts, right?”

  “That’s right,” he said.

  “Then if it’s important in building your case for the resurrection, why wouldn’t it be equally important for Paul in building his case?” I asked. “Why wouldn’t Paul have stressed it every bit as much as you did when he was trying to convince others that the resurrection was true?”

  Licona looked a little perplexed that this issue was even coming up. “I don’t think he had to,” came his reply. “It is like when you say a baby died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. No one has to speak about an empty crib. It’s clearly implied.