by Graham Veale
Or at least he would have been if this story was true. But, however much we might want to believe this horror story, it is pure legend. 39 Medical records of the era do not mention a Mr Bartley, or anyone else, suffering from burns caused by stomach acids. A tale like this did make its way into the New York Times in 1896, but the paper was merely repeating a story that a journalist claimed to have read in the Yarmouth Mercury. Alas, the Mercury records no such incident; but it does mention that a whale ran ashore at Gorleston, just south of great Yarmouth. This inspired many tall tales in the vicinity. But crucially, no whaler named The Star of the East operated in the late 19th Century; and whaling off the Falkland Islands did not commence until 1909.
The Times succeeded in creating a legend. Christian apologists believed that this tale vindicated the story of Jonah; everyone else was mesmerised because this story taps into our primal fear of being devoured alive. But simple fact-checking proves the story was false. It survived and thrived because it was told thousands of miles away from where it was said to have taken place, and because this is the sort of story we want to believe.
A Brief History of the Historical Jesus
There are plenty of tall tales in the world, and we’ve all been taken in by one at some time or other. Christians, according to the sceptic, make the mistake of basing an entire religion on the Easter legend. What New Atheists find particularly offensive is Christians asserting that there is good historical evidence for this myth. It’s one thing to be taken in by a good yarn; that’s pitiable. But to insist that everyone else has a rational duty to believe your bunk is beyond contempt. New Atheists simply cannot take Christians insisting that the Resurrection of Jesus Christ is one of the best attested facts of ancient history.
Many Christian historians argue that three facts are indisputable: (1) Jesus’ closest followers believed that they had seen Jesus several days after the Crucifixion; (2) that these same witnesses believed that Jesus’ body had been resurrected; and (3) that the first Christians confirmed that Jesus’ tomb was empty. Now the sceptic needs a good explanation for those three facts. And the Christian alleges that the atheist does not have one, whereas the belief of the Early Church does neatly explain the data: Jesus really did rise from the dead. Or to put that another way, the first Christian’s faith in the Resurrection was based on facts and hard evidence. It was not the result of strange, spiritual experiences or a leap of faith.
Most sceptics assume that we can dismiss Jesus’ resurrection just as easily as we can dismiss James Bartley’s passage through a whale’s digestive system. Surely this is a story that was invented long after Jesus’ death to bring spiritual comfort to Jesus’ followers? It is nothing more than a pious ‘tall tale’. In fact, aren’t all the stories in the Gospels somewhat suspect? Didn’t the first Christians simply invent tales about Jesus that had no connection to reality?
That attitude could have been taken seriously in the first half of the twentieth century. Prominent scholars, like Rudolph Bultmann, argued that the Gospels could tell us a lot about the Churches who invented these stories, but nothing much about Jesus himself. These critics assumed that the first Christians had no method for preserving reliable information about Jesus; and in any case the first Christians did not try to remember accurate information about Jesus. If a story would help Jesus’ movement grow, Christians felt justified in inventing it.
But from the 1950’s onward, confidence in the Gospels general reliability grew. Scholars noticed that the Gospels included a lot of information that the Church was unlikely to invent—for example Peter’s denial and Judas’ treachery. It is also remarkable that the Gospels say very little about the issues that vexed the earliest Churches. The first Christian communities were bitterly divided over relationships between Jewish and Gentile Christians. Yet Jesus says nothing about circumcision. He says very little about Gentiles, and how Gentiles should treat the Old Testament law. If the early Church was in the habit of inventing stories, why did it not settle these disputes by fabricating a parable or two?
The Gospels address issues that were irrelevant to the gentiles joining the Churches in droves. Why invent teachings about the Temple tax, or about forgiving your brother before you offer a sacrifice? Why include a prophecy that tells Christians living near Jerusalem how to act in the face of an impending Roman invasion? These passages became completely irrelevant after the Roman-Jewish war and the destruction of the Temple in AD70. It only makes sense to include these stories in your Gospel if you are trying to preserve information about Jesus. And sociology teaches us that groups like the first churches generally do everything that they can to preserve information about their founder.
So we do not find evidence of creative storytelling where we would expect to find it. But we know that memorisation was an important part of Jewish education, and especially the education of a Rabbi’s disciples. If Jesus’ students followed the customs of their day, they would have memorised many of their master’s teachings. The Gospels were written within a generation of Jesus’ death—so these eyewitnesses could be consulted. We know that eyewitnesses, like the Twelve and Mary of Magdala, were highly esteemed in the Early Church. 40 We also know the mother Church at Jerusalem had some authority in the first decades of Church growth. So there was a ‘check’ on the types of story that could circulate about Jesus.
Scholars have long noticed that many passages in Matthew, Luke and Mark are similar, and some are identical. Most scholars believe that Matthew and Luke wrote after Mark, and used Mark as one of their sources. Whatever the case, it is certain that a deal of copying went on. This shows that the Gospel writers used their sources carefully—so much so that they could copy sections word for word. The first Christians had the motivation to keep their memories of Jesus intact, they had the means for accessing good information about Jesus, and the evidence is that they were trying to faithfully preserve his memory.
So sceptics cannot dismiss every story recorded in the Gospels as a tall tale. At least some of the information in the Gospels accurately reflects the life of Jesus. 41 So what about our three facts? Are they tall tales or solid truths? Let’s start with fact (1) Some of Jesus’ closest followers believed that they had seen Jesus several days after the Crucifixion. The Crucifixion of Jesus is attested outside the New Testament by historians like Tacitus. And Crucifixion was such a scandalous way to die that it is absurd to suppose that any group would pretend that their leader had been crucified! Consider the most loathsome criminal known to you. That is how people felt about the victims of crucifixion in the Ancient World.
We know of ‘messianic’ types who tried to found movements in this period. Theudas claimed that he would part the waters of the Jordan; an Egyptian who said that he would cause the walls of Jerusalem to come tumbling down. Would-be kings like the shepherd Athronges or John of Gischala. In each case Rome executed the leader; in each case the movement died. So the question arises: ‘what was different about Jesus’ movement?’ The simplest answer is the answer provided by Paul (in 1 Corinthians) and the Gospels. Jesus’ followers, on the basis of eyewitness reports, believed that their leader had returned from the dead.
There is nothing extraordinary about fact (1). Sceptics enthusiastically point out that people can have all kinds of visions and hallucinations. And we need some event to explain the survival of Jesus’ movement. So there is a strong consensus that (1) is true. Noted scholar Maurice Casey states ‘I conclude that the evidence for early appearances, from the women to St Paul, is unimpeachable, but we should not believe in the literal truth of the resurrection stories.’ 42 And, as you can tell from the last half of that sentence, Casey isn’t exactly sympathetic to the case for the Resurrection.
‘There are a lot of tall tales going about the world…’
So why does Casey believe that the Resurrection didn’t happen? Casey believes in the ‘legendary development hypothesis’. Initially the first Christians, including Paul, believed that Jesus’ spirit had survived
crucifixion. Religious visions convinced them that Jesus’ spirit was alive and well with God in heaven. But over time the stories became exaggerated. As Christianity spread into the Gentile world, Christians began to tell taller and taller tales about their Lord, until Christians came to believe that Jesus’ body rose from the dead. Pious legends developed and the doctrine of Jesus’ resurrection was born.
This sounds like a plausible theory; the only problem with it is that it can’t explain away the facts. Gentile culture wasn’t happy with the idea of bodily resurrection. Greek philosophy tended to think that the body was an impediment to spiritual development. Jews, however, believed that the body was good because it belonged to God, and they looked forward to the resurrection of their bodies on Judgment day. But the legendary development hypothesis asks us to believe that Jewish Christians first believed that Jesus only spiritually survived the cross; then Greek and gentile Christians hijack this idea to promote a physical resurrection. This is wildly implausible.
Then there’s that odd word—‘resurrection’. 43 Paul clearly teaches that Jesus was ‘resurrected’. We know from Galatians that Paul’s message had the approval of the mother church in Jerusalem. 1 Corinthians cites Peter and the Twelve as witnesses to this resurrection. And the Corinthian Christians all believed in Jesus’ resurrection; they just didn’t want to believe that they would be resurrected one day. They were looking forward to escaping from their bodies. But Paul argued that the Corinthians were going to have to get used to the idea. They already believed, with the apostles, that Jesus had risen bodily from the grave; therefore they should believe that they too would rise bodily from the dead.
You see the word ‘resurrection’ could only mean one thing in Jewish thought. It meant bodily rising from the grave to be judged by God. You could no more have a ‘spiritual’ resurrection than a ‘square triangle’ or a ‘married bachelor’. Paul referred the Corinthians to the traditions that he and the other Apostle’s had passed on from the Churches inception. And the message of those traditions was that Jesus had risen bodily from the grave, been accepted by his father, and that he was now at the Father’s right hand.
Of course Jews were not expecting anyone to be resurrected until judgment day, when all the faithful would rise from the grave. Then God would create the New Heavens and New Earth. No-one was expecting one person to be resurrected on his own before the end of the world! So why on earth did the first Christians conclude that Jesus had been resurrected? A mere vision of Jesus might have led the disciples to believe that Jesus’ ‘angel’ was visiting them, or that Jesus’ soul was waiting with God. They might even have convinced themselves that God had transformed Jesus into a star, or had translated him into the heavenly realm. But something led Jesus’ Jewish followers to believe that he had been resurrected. It is difficult to explain what would convince them of this—unless it had actually happened.
‘…the worst of it is that some of them are true.’ 44
So is the ‘legendary development’ hypothesis dead? Not quite. The New Testament scholar James Crossley has no quarrel with facts 1&2. However, he argues that the Empty Tomb is a legend. The first disciples based their belief in the Resurrection on their visions of Jesus and little else. No one checked to see if Jesus’ body was still in the ground. The empty tomb was not proclaimed by the first Christians in Jerusalem. As a matter of fact, Jesus body might never have made it to a tomb—he might have been buried in a common grave.
Then, as Christianity grew, people wanted to know where and how Jesus had been buried, who discovered that the body was missing and so forth. So the early Church indulged in a bit of creative story telling. It claimed that Jesus had been buried in Joseph of Arimathea’s tomb, and then fabricated a story about a group of women discovering this tomb was empty. According to Mark’s Gospel, the same women were so scared by an angelic messenger that they forgot to tell the other disciples about their discovery, and that the tomb was empty. 45 The story of the discovery of Jesus’ empty tomb is a fiction, creatively invented by the Church decades after the events of the first Easter.
This stretches credibility to breaking point. The reader must assume that the women told someone about their discovery, as Mark knows about it. Luke and John clearly understand Mark to mean that the women passed their story on to the disciples, but then failed to proclaim Jesus’ resurrection publicly. That seems to be a saner reading of Mark 16:1–8. And why would the Church invent this particular story? Granted, women were important to the first Churches. But a woman’s testimony would not be taken seriously by outsiders; it had no value in court. It would have been tremendously embarrassing to admit that the first witnesses to the events of Easter were women!
If this story is an invention of early apologists we have to ask why they were so extraordinarily incompetent. A child could have created a story that would have been easier to sell! Why not invent a story in which a male follower visited Jesus’ burial place, to be told by an angel not to mention this empty tomb to anyone in case they should be tempted to worship there? Why not spin a tale, in which Jesus was buried in a common grave with the poor, to fulfil the Scriptures? In fact, there seems to be very good sermon material in such a story. The poor were buried in unmarked patches of land. Losing track of Jesus’ burial place would have been understandable in such circumstances. The shame of a pauper’s burial was nothing compared to the shame of Crucifixion; and unlike the story of Jesus’ honourable burial by a member of the Sanhedrin, this story would have been difficult to verify.
Finally, Matthew’s Gospel has to respond to the charge that the disciples stole Jesus’ body. Now grave robbing was associated with witchcraft, so this was a serious accusation. Matthew would not have included it in his Gospel lightly. This seems to have been the standard Jewish response to the Easter message, and Matthew cannot ignore it. Even so, it is interesting to see what Jew and Christian were agreed on. Both parties agree that Jesus was buried in Joseph of Arimathea’s tomb. They agree that disciples were at the tomb on Easter morning. And they agree that this tomb was empty. And we would expect Jesus’ friends and enemies to check on the status of his body. And, by itself, there is nothing miraculous about a missing body. This is not a claim that requires extraordinary evidence. 46
The Last Myth-Makers
So if we can safely conclude that Jesus’ followers had experiences of his presence after his death, we can also safely conclude that Jesus’ tomb was inspected and found to be empty. We also know that the experiences were of a risen body. From the very beginning Jesus was said to be ‘resurrected’. If the Church was in the habit of inventing stories it had a wider range of concepts to draw on; and the Church could have invented a story that was impossible to falsify. They could have preached that Jesus’ spirit was yet alive at the Father’s right hand, and that he would be reunited with his body on the last day, when God would proclaim him Messiah. It would have been impossible for Jesus’ enemies to prove such a message was wrong. Instead the first Christians preached a message that could have been overturned by the discovery of a corpse.
So sceptics have to explain three inconvenient truths. (1) Jesus’ closest followers believed that they had seen Jesus several days after the Crucifixion; (2) that these followers believed that Jesus’ body had been resurrected; and (3) that the first Christians confirmed that Jesus’ tomb was empty. The sceptic must explain these three facts, and he must do so without recourse to conspiracy theories. These abounded in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. One scholar explained the feeding of the 5,000 as an elaborate magic trick; Jesus conspired with Essenes, who hid in caves, handing out loaves as Jesus required them. Jesus’ simulated walking on water by placing planks just below the surface. Jesus didn’t mean to say ‘be calm’ to the storm; he was addressing the disciples. As luck would have it, at that very moment, the storm calmed down.
In the 19th Century David Strauss tore such theories out of the history books. Strauss did not believe that Jesus had performed
any miracles. He insisted that the miracle stories were myths that developed over successive retellings of the life of Jesus. But to Strauss’ mind explanation by a conspiracy theory was no more plausible than an explanation by a miracle. The ‘just so’ stories produced by rationalist theologians were as improbable as any miracle. Serious scholarship has never again conjured up the nonsense that Strauss decisively refuted.
Some complain that we do not have an ‘eyewitness’ document which describes the Resurrection. Only this sort of primary source should be taken seriously by historians; or so the argument goes. Historians, on this view, should just go through eyewitness accounts and stroke out what seems unreliable. What is left is history. This is ill-informed nonsense. As if the discovery of a first century document in Palestine, saying ‘I, Mary of Magdala, witnessed the Resurrected Christ’ would somehow improve the case for the Resurrection! This wouldn’t even tell us something we didn’t already know—that Mary believed that she had witnessed the Resurrected Christ. 47
If we were to follow the New Atheist’s methodology, most of ancient history would find its way to the wastepaper basket. The New Atheist is advocating what Roger Collingwood called a ‘scissors and paste’ approach to history. Christian historians are not abandoning critical history by inferring events which are not described in their sources. Philosopher of history Mark Day makes this clear: