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CONTEMPORARY SCHOLARSHIP AND THE HISTORICAL EVIDENCE FOR THE RESURRECTION OF
JESUS CHRIST


WILLIAM LANE CRAIG

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After an appraisal of recent scholarship on the historicity of the resurrection
of Jesus Christ, Professor William Craig contends that "the resurrection
appearances, the empty tomb, and the origin of the Christian faith - all point
unavoidably to one conclusion: the resurrection of Jesus".

Source: "Contemporary Scholarship and the Historical Evidence for the
Resurrection of Jesus Christ," Truth 1 (1985): 89-95.

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"Man," writes Loren Eisley, "is the Cosmic Orphan." He is the only creature in
the universe who asks, Why? Other animals have instincts to guide them, but man
has learned to ask questions. "Who am I?" he asks. "Why am I here? Where am I
going?"

Ever since the Enlightenment, when modern man threw off the shackles of
religion, he has tried to answer these questions without reference to God. But
the answers that came back were not exhilarating, but dark and terrible. "You
are an accidental by-product of nature, the result of matter plus time plus
chance. There is no reason for your existence. All you face is death. Your life
is but a spark in the infinite darkness, a spark that appears, flickers, and
dies forever."

Modern man thought that in divesting himself of God, he had freed himself from
all that stifled and repressed him. Instead, he discovered that in killing God,
he had also killed himself.

Against this background of the modern predicament, the traditional Christian
hope of the resurrection takes on an even greater brightness and significance.
It tells man that he is no orphan after all, but the personal image of the
Creator God of the universe; nor is his life doomed in death, for through the
eschatological resurrection he may live in the presence of God forever.

This is a wonderful hope. But, of course, hope that is not founded in fact is
not hope, but mere illusion. Why should the Christian hope of eschatological
resurrection appear to modern man as anything more than mere wishful thinking?
The answer lies in the Christian conviction that a man has been proleptically
raised by God from the dead as the forerunner and exemplar of our own
eschatological resurrection. That man was Jesus of Nazareth, and his historical
resurrection from the dead constitutes the factual foundation upon which the
Christian hope is based.

Of course, during the last century liberal theology had no use for the
historical resurrection of Jesus. Since liberal theologians retained the
presupposition against the possibility of miracles which they had inherited from
the Deists, a historical resurrection was a priori simply out of the question
for them. The mythological explanation of D. F. Strauss enabled them to explain
the resurrection accounts of the New Testament as legendary fictions. The belief
in the historical resurrection was a hangover from antiquity which it was high
time for modern man to be rid of. Thus, in liberal theology's greatest study of
the historicity of the resurrection, Kirsopp Lake's The Historical Evidence for
the Resurrection of Jesus Christ (1907), Lake carefully plots the legendary
development of the resurrection narratives from the root historical event of the
women's visit to the wrong tomb. He concludes that it is not the end anyway:
what is vital for Christian theology is the belief in the immortality of the
soul, the belief that our departed friends and relatives are still alive and
that in time we shall be re-united with them. Thus, the NT has been replaced by
the Phaedo.

Liberal theology could not survive World War I, but its demise brought no
renewed interest in the historicity of Jesus' resurrection, for the two schools
that succeeded it were united in their devaluation of the historical with regard
to Jesus. Thus, dialectical theology, propounded by Karl Barth, championed the
doctrine of the resurrection, but would have nothing to do with the resurrection
as an event of history. In his commentary on the book of Romans (1919), the
early Barth declared, "The resurrection touches history as a tangent touches a
circle-that is, without really touching it." Existential theology, exemplified
by Rudolf Bultmann, was even more antithetical to the historicity of Jesus'
resurrection. Though Bultmann acknowledged that the earliest disciples believed
in the literal resurrection of Jesus and that Paul in I Corinthians 15 even
attempts to prove the resurrection, he nevertheless pronounces such a procedure
as "fatal." It reduces Christ's resurrection to a nature miracle akin to the
resurrection of a corpse. And modern man cannot be reasonably asked to believe
in nature miracles before becoming a Christian. Therefore, the miraculous
elements of the gospel must be demythologized to reveal the true Christian
message: the call to authentic existence in the face of death, symbolized by the
cross. The resurrection is merely a symbolic re-statement of the message of the
cross and essentially adds nothing to it. To appeal to the resurrection as
historical evidence, as did Paul, is doubly wrong-headed, for it is of the very
nature of existential faith that it is a leap without evidence. Thus, to argue
historically for the resurrection is contrary to faith. Clearly then, the
antipathy of liberal theology to the historicity of Jesus' resurrection remained
unrelieved by either dialectical or existential theology.

But a remarkable change has come about during the second half of the 20th
century. The first glimmerings of change began to appear in 1953. In that year
Ernst Käsemann, a pupil of Bultmann, argued at a Colloquy at the University of
Marburg that Bultmann's historical skepticism toward Jesus was unwarranted and
counterproductive and suggested re-opening the question of where the historical
about Jesus was to be found. A new quest of the historical Jesus had begun.
Three years later in 1956 the Marburg theologian Hans Grass subjected the
resurrection itself to historical inquiry and concluded that the resurrection
appearances cannot be dismissed as mere subjective visions on the part of the
disciples, but were objective visionary events.

Meanwhile the church historian Hans Freiherr von Campenhausen in an equally
epochal essay defended the historical credibility of Jesus' empty tomb. During
the ensuing years a stream of works on the historicity of Jesus' resurrection
flowed forth from German, French and English presses. By 1968 the old skepticism
was a spent force and began dramatically to recede. So complete has been the
turn-about during the second half of this century concerning the resurrection of
Jesus that it is no exaggeration to speak of a reversal of scholarship on this
issue, such that those who deny the historicity of Jesus' resurrection now seem
to be the ones on the defensive. Perhaps one of the most significant theological
developments in this connection is the theological system of Wolfhart
Pannenberg, who bases his entire Christology on the historical evidence for
Jesus' ministry and especially the resurrection. This is a development undreamed
of in German theology prior to 1950. Equally startling is the declaration of one
of the world's leading Jewish theologians Pinchas Lapid, that he is convinced on
the basis of the evidence that Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead. Lapide
twits New Testament critics like Bultmann and Marxsen for their unjustified
skepticism and concludes that he believes on the basis of the evidence that the
God of Israel raised Jesus from the dead.

What are the facts that underlie this remarkable reversal of opinion concerning
the credibility of the New Testament accounts of the resurrection of Jesus? It
seems to me that they can be conveniently grouped under three heads: the
resurrection appearances, the empty tomb, and the origin of the Christian faith.
Let's look briefly at each.

First, the resurrection appearances. Undoubtedly the major impetus for the
reassessment of the appearance tradition was the demonstration by Joachim
Jeremias that in 1 Corinthians 15: 3-5 Paul is quoting an old Christian formula
which he received and in turn passed on to his converts According to Galatians
1:18 Paul was in Jerusalem three years after his conversion on a fact-finding
mission, during which he conferred with Peter and James over a two week period,
and he probably received the formula at this time, if not before. Since Paul was
converted in AD 33, this means that the list of witnesses goes back to within
the first five years after Jesus' death. Thus, it is idle to dismiss these
appearances as legendary. We can try to explain them away as hallucinations if
we wish, but we cannot deny they occurred. Paul's information makes it certain
that on separate occasions various individuals and groups saw Jesus alive from
the dead. According to Norman Perrin, the late NT critic of the University of
Chicago: "The more we study the tradition with regard to the appearances, the
firmer the rock begins to appear upon which they are based." This conclusion is
virtually indisputable.

At the same time that biblical scholarship has come to a new appreciation of the
historical credibility of Paul's information, however, it must be admitted that
skepticism concerning the appearance traditions in the gospels persists. This
lingering skepticism seems to me to be entirely unjustified. It is based on a
presuppositional antipathy toward the physicalism of the gospel appearance
stories. But the traditions underlying those appearance stories may well be as
reliable as Paul's. For in order for these stories to be in the main legendary,
a very considerable length of time must be available for the evolution and
development of the traditions until the historical elements have been supplanted
by unhistorical. This factor is typically neglected in New Testament
scholarship, as A. N. Sherwin-White points out in Roman Law and Roman Society tn
the New Testament. Professor Sherwin-White is not a theologian; he is an eminent
historian of Roman and Greek times, roughly contemporaneous with the NT.
According to Professor Sherwin-White, the sources for Roman history are usually
biased and removed at least one or two generations or even centuries from the
events they record. Yet, he says, historians reconstruct with confidence what
really happened. He chastises NT critics for not realizing what invaluable
sources they have in the gospels. The writings of Herodotus furnish a test case
for the rate of legendary accumulation, and the tests show that even two
generations is too short a time span to allow legendary tendencies to wipe out
the hard core of historical facts. When Professor Sherwin-White turns to the
gospels, he states for these to be legends, the rate of legendary accumulation
would have to be 'unbelievable'; more generations are needed. All NT scholars
agree that the gospels were written down and circulated within the first
generation, during the lifetime of the eyewitnesses. Indeed, a significant new
movement of biblical scholarship argues persuasively that some of the gospels
were written by the AD 50's. This places them as early as Paul's letter to the
Corinthians and, given their equal reliance upon prior tradition, they ought
therefore to be accorded the same weight of historical credibility accorded
Paul. It is instructive to note in this connection that no apocryphal gospel
appeared during the first century. These did not arise until after the
generation of eyewitnesses had died off. These are better candidates for the
office of 'legendary fiction' than the canonical gospels. There simply was
insufficient time for significant accrual of legend by the time of the gospels'
composition. Thus, I find current criticism's skepticism with regard to the
appearance traditions in the gospels to be unwarranted. The new appreciation of
the historical value of Paul's information needs to be accompanied by a
reassessment of the gospel traditions as well.

Second, the empty tomb. Once regarded as an offense to modern intelligence and
an embarrassment to Christian theology, the empty tomb of Jesus has come to
assume its place among the generally accepted facts concerning the historical
Jesus. Allow me to review briefly some of the evidence undergirding this
connection.

(1) The historical reliability of the burial story supports the empty tomb. If
the burial account is accurate, then the site of Jesus' grave was known to Jew
and Christian alike. In that case, it is a very short inference to historicity
of the empty tomb. For if Jesus had not risen and the burial site were known:

(a) the disciples could never have believed in the resurrection of Jesus. For a
first century Jew the idea that a man might be raised from the dead while his
body remained in the tomb was simply a contradiction in terms. In the words of
E. E. Ellis, "It is very unlikely that the earliest Palestinian Christians could
conceive of any distinction between resurrection and physical, 'grave emptying'
resurrection. To them an anastasis without an empty grave would have been about
as meaningful as a square circle."

(b) Even if the disciples had believed in the resurrection of Jesus, it is
doubtful they would have generated any following. So long as the body was
interred in the tomb, a Christian movement founded on belief in the resurrection
of the dead man would have been an impossible folly.

(c) The Jewish authorities would have exposed the whole affair. The quickest and
surest answer to the proclamation of the resurrection of Jesus would have been
simply to point to his grave on the hillside.

For these three reasons, the accuracy of the burial story supports the
historicity of the empty tomb. Unfortunately for those who wish to deny the
empty tomb, however, the burial story is one of the most historically certain
traditions we have concerning Jesus. Several factors undergird this judgment. To
mention only a few.

(i) The burial is mentioned in the third line of the old Christian formula
quoted by Paul in 1 Cor. 15.4.

(ii) It is part of the ancient pre-Markan passion story which Mark used as a
source for his gospel.

(iii) The story itself lacks any traces of legendary development.

(iv) The story comports with archeological evidence concerning the types and
location of tombs extant in Jesus' day.

(v) No other competing burial traditions exist.

For these and other reasons, most scholars are united in the judgment that the
burial story is fundamentally historical. But if that is the case, then, as I
have explained, the inference that the tomb was found empty is not very far at
hand.

(2) Paul's testimony supports the fact of the empty tomb. Here two aspects of
Paul's evidence may be mentioned.

(a) In the formula cited by Paul the expression "he was raised" following the
phrase "he was buried" implies the empty tomb. A first century Jew could not
think otherwise. As E. L. Bode observes, the notion of the occurrence of a
spiritual resurrection while the body remained in the tomb is a peculiarity of
modern theology. For the Jews it was the remains of the man in the tomb which
were raised; hence, they carefully preserved the bones of the dead in ossuaries
until the eschatological resurrection. There can be no doubt that both Paul and
the early Christian formula he cites pre-suppose the existence of the empty
tomb.

(b) The phrase "on the third day" probably points to the discovery of the empty
tomb. Very briefly summarized, the point is that since no one actually witnessed
the resurrection of Jesus, how did Christians come to date it "on the third
day?" The most probable answer is that they did so because this was the day of
the discovery of the empty tomb by Jesus' women followers. Hence, the
resurrection itself came to be dated on that day. Thus, in the old Christian
formula quoted by Paul we have extremely early evidence for the existence of
Jesus' empty tomb.

(3) The empty tomb story is part of the pre-Markan passion story and is
therefore very old. The empty tomb story was probably the end of Mark's passion
source. As Mark is the earliest of our gospels, this source is therefore itself
quite old. In fact the commentator R. Pesch contends that it is an incredibly
early source. He produces two lines of evidence for this conclusion:

(a) Paul's account of the Last Supper in 1 Cor. 11:23-5 presupposes the Markan
account. Since Paul's own traditions are themselves very old, the Markan source
must be yet older.

(b) The pre-Markan passion story never refers to the high priest by name. It is
as when I say "The President is hosting a dinner at the White House" and
everyone knows whom I am speaking of because it is the man currently in office.
Similarly the pre-Markan passion story refers to the "high priest" as if he were
still in power. Since Caiaphas held office from AD 18-37, this means at the
latest the pre-Markan source must come from within seven years after Jesus'
death. This source thus goes back to within the first few years of the Jerusalem
fellowship and is therefore an ancient and reliable source of historical
information.

(4) The story is simple and lacks legendary development. The empty tomb story is
uncolored by the theological and apologetical motifs that would be
characteristic of a later legendary account. Perhaps the most forceful way to
appreciate this point is to compare it with the accounts of the empty tomb found
in apocryphal gospels of the second century. For example, in the gospel of Peter
a voice rings out from heaven during the night, the stone rolls back of itself
from the door of the tomb, and two men descend from Heaven and enter the tomb.
Then three men are seen coming out of the tomb, the two supporting the third.
The heads of the two men stretch up to the clouds, but the head of the third man
overpasses the clouds. Then a cross comes out of the tomb, and a voice asks,
"Hast thou preached to them that sleep?" And the cross answers, "Yea". In the
Ascension of Isaiah, Jesus comes out of the tomb sitting on the shoulders of the
angels Michael and Gabriel. These are how real legends look: unlike the gospel
accounts, they are colored by theological motifs.

(5) The tomb was probably discovered empty by women. To understand this point
one has to recall two facts about the role of women in Jewish society.

(a) Woman occupied a low rung on the Jewish social ladder. This is evident in
such rabbinic expressions as "Sooner let the words of the law be burnt than
delivered to women" and "Happy is he whose children are male, but woe to him
whose children are female."

(b) The testimony of women was regarded as so worthless that they were not even
permitted to serve as legal witnesses in a court of law. In light of these
facts, how remarkable must it seem that it is women who are the discoverers of
Jesus' empty tomb. Any later legend would certainly have made the male disciples
to discover the empty tomb. The fact that women, whose testimony was worthless,
rather than men, are the chief witnesses to the empty tomb is most plausibly
accounted for by the fact that, like it or not, they were the discoverers of the
empty tomb and the gospels accurately record this.

(6) The earliest Jewish polemic presupposes the empty tomb. In Matthew 28, we
find the Christian attempt to refute the earliest Jewish polemic against the
resurrection. That polemic asserted that the disciples stole away the body. The
Christians responded to this by reciting the story of the guard at the tomb, and
the polemic in turn charged that the guard fell asleep. Now the noteworthy
feature of this whole dispute is not the historicity of the guards but rather
the presupposition of both parties that the body was missing. The earliest
Jewish response to the proclamation of the resurrection was an attempt to
explain away the empty tomb. Thus, the evidence of the adversaries of the
disciples provides evidence in support of the empty tomb.

One could go on, but perhaps enough has been said to indicate why the judgment
of scholarship has reversed itself on the historicity of the empty tomb.
According to Jakob Kremer, "By far most exegetes hold firmly to the reliability
of the biblical statements concerning the empty tomb" and he furnishes a list,
to which his own name may be added, of twenty-eight prominent scholars in
support. I can think of at least sixteen more names that he failed to mention.
Thus, it is today widely recognized that the empty tomb of Jesus is a simple
historical fact. As D. H. van Daalen has pointed out, "It is extremely difficult
to object to the empty tomb on historical grounds; those who deny it do so on
the basis of theological or philosophical assumptions." But assumptions may
simply have to be changed in light of historical facts.

Finally, we may turn to that third body of evidence supporting the resurrection:
the very origin of the Christian Way. Even the most skeptical scholars admit
that the earliest disciples at least believed that Jesus had been raised from
the dead. Indeed, they pinned nearly everything on it. Without belief in the
resurrection of Jesus, Christianity could never have come into being. The
crucifixion would have remained the final tragedy in the hapless life of Jesus.
The origin of Christianity hinges on the belief of these earliest disciples that
Jesus had risen from the dead. The question now inevitably arises: how does one
explain the origin of that belief? As R. H. Fuller urges, even the most
skeptical critic must posit some mysterious X to get the movement going. But the
question is, what was that X?

If one denies that Jesus really did rise from the dead, then he must explain the
disciples' belief that he did rise either in terms of Jewish influences or in
terms of Christian influences. Now clearly, it can't be the result of Christian
influences, for at that time there wasn't any Christianity yet! Since belief in
Jesus' resurrection was the foundation for the origin of the Christian faith, it
can't be a belief formed as a result of that faith.

But neither can the belief in the resurrection be explained as a result of
Jewish influences. To see this we need to back up a moment. In the Old
Testament, the Jewish belief in the resurrection of the dead on the day of
judgment is mentioned in three places (Ezekiel 37; Isaiah 26, 19, Daniel 12.2).
During the time between the Old Testament and the New Testament, the belief in
resurrection flowered and is often mentioned in the Jewish literature of that
period. In Jesus' day the Jewish party of the Pharisees held to belief in
resurrection, and Jesus sided with them on this score in opposition to the party
of the Sadducees. So the idea of resurrection was itself nothing new.

But the Jewish conception of resurrection differed in two important, fundamental
respects from Jesus' resurrection. In Jewish thought the resurrection always (1)
occurred after the end of the world, not within history, and (2) concerned all
the people, not just an isolated individual. In contradistinction to this,
Jesus' resurrection was both within history and of one individual person.

With regard to the first point, the Jewish belief was always that at the end of
history, God would raise the righteous dead and receive them into His Kingdom.
There are, to be sure, examples in the Old Testament of resuscitations of the
dead; but these persons would die again. The resurrection to eternal life and
glory occurred after the end of the world. We find this Jewish outlook in the
gospels themselves. Thus, when Jesus assures Martha that her brother Lazarus
will rise again, she responds, "I know that he will rise again in the
resurrection at the last day" (John 11.24). She has no idea that Jesus is about
to bring him back to life. Similarly, when Jesus tells his disciples he will
rise from the dead, they think he means at the end of the world (Mark 9.9-13).
The idea that a true resurrection could occur prior to God's bringing the
Kingdom of Heaven at the end of the world was utterly foreign to them. The
greatly renowned German New Testament scholar Joachim Jeremias writes,

> Ancient Judaism did not know of an anticipated resurrection as an event of
> history. Nowhere does one find in the literature anything comparable to the
> resurrection of Jesus. Certainly resurrections of the dead were known, but
> these always concerned resuscitations, the return to the earthly life. In no
> place in the late Judaic literature does it concern a resurrection to doxa
> (glory) as an event of history.

The disciples, therefore, confronted with Jesus' crucifixion and death, would
only have looked forward to the resurrection at the final day and would probably
have carefully kept their master's tomb as a shrine, where his bones could
reside until the resurrection. They would not have come up with the idea that he
was already raised.

As for the second point, the Jewish idea of resurrection was always of a general
resurrection of the dead, not an isolated individual. It was the people, or
mankind as a whole, that God raised up in the resurrection. But in Jesus'
resurrection, God raised just a single man. Moreover, there was no concept of
the people's resurrection in some way hinging on the Messiah's resurrection.
That was just totally unknown. Yet that is precisely what is said to have
occurred in Jesus' case. Ulrich Wilckens, another prominent German New Testament
critic, explains:

> For nowhere do the Jewish texts speak of the resurrection of an individual
> which already occurs before the resurrection of the righteous in the end time
> and is differentiated and separate from it; nowhere does the participation of
> the righteous in the salvation at the end time depend on their belonging to
> the Messiah, who was raised in advance as the 'First of those raised by God.'
> (1 Corinthians 15:20)

It is therefore evident that the disciples would not as a result of Jewish
influences or background have come up with the idea that Jesus alone had been
raised from the dead. They would wait with longing for that day when He and all
the righteous of Israel would be raised by God to glory.

The disciples' belief in Jesus' resurrection, therefore, cannot be explained as
the result of either Christian or Jewish influences. Left to themselves, the
disciples would never have come up with such an idea as Jesus' resurrection. And
remember: they were fishermen and tax collectors, not theologians. The
mysterious X is still missing. According to C. F. D. Moule of Cambridge
University, here is a belief nothing in terms of previous historical influences
can account for. He points out that we have a situation in which a large number
of people held firmly to this belief, which cannot be explained in terms of the
Old Testament or the Pharisees, and these people held onto this belief until the
Jews finally threw them out of the synagogue. According to Professor Moule, the
origin of this belief must have been the fact that Jesus really did rise from
the dead:

> If the coming into existence of the Nazarenes, a phenomenon undeniably
> attested by the New Testament, rips a great hole in history, a hole of the
> size and shape of the Resurrection, what does the secular historian propose to
> stop it up with?. . . the birth and rapid rise of the Christian Church. . .
> remain an unsolved enigma for any historian who refuses to take seriously the
> only explanation offered by the church itself.

The resurrection of Jesus is therefore the best explanation for the origin of
the Christian faith. Taken together, these three great historical facts--the
resurrection appearances, the empty tomb, the origin of the Christian
faith--seem to point to the resurrection of Jesus as the most plausible
explanation.

But of course there have been other explanations proffered to account for the
resurrection appearances, the empty tomb, and the origin of the Christian faith.
In the judgment of modern scholarship, however, these have failed to provide a
plausible account of the facts of the case. This can be seen by a rapid review
of the principal explanations that have been offered.

A. The disciples stole Jesus' corpse and lied about the resurrection
appearances. This explanation characterized the earliest Jewish anti-Christian
polemic and was revived in the form of the conspiracy theory of eighteenth
century Deism. The theory has been universally rejected by critical scholars and
survives only in the popular press. To name only two considerations decisive
against it: (i) it is morally impossible to indict the disciples of Jesus with
such a crime. Whatever their imperfections, they were certainly good, earnest
men and women, not impostors. No one who reads the New Testament unprejudicially
can doubt the evident sincerity of these early believers. (ii) It is
psychologically impossible to attribute to the disciples the cunning and dering-
do requisite for such a ruse. At the time of the crucifixion, the disciples were
confused, disorganized, fearful, doubting, and burdened with mourning-not
mentally motivated or equipped to engineer such a wild hoax. Hence, to explain
the empty tomb and resurrection appearances by a conspiracy theory seems out of
the question.

B. Jesus did not die on the cross, but was taken down and placed alive in the
tomb, where he revived and escaped to convince the disciples he had risen from
the dead. This apparent death theory was championed by the late eighteenth/early
nineteenth century German rationalists, and was even embraced by the father of
modern theology, F. D. E. Schleiermacher. Today, however, the theory has been
entirely given up: (i) it would be virtually impossible medically for Jesus to
have survived the rigors of his torture and crucifixion, much less not to have
died of exposure in the tomb. (ii) The theory is religiously inadequate, since a
half-dead Jesus desperately in need of medical attention would not have elicited
in the disciples worship of him as the exalted Risen Lord and Conqueror of
Death. Moreover, since Jesus on this hypothesis knew he had not actually
triumphed over death, the theory reduces him to the life of a charlatan who
tricked the disciples into believing he had risen, which is absurd. These
reasons alone make the apparent death theory untenable.

C. The disciples projected hallucinations of Jesus after his death, from which
they mistakenly inferred his resurrection. The hallucination theory became
popular during the nineteenth century and carried over into the first half of
the twentieth century as well. Again, however, there are good grounds for
rejecting this hypothesis: (i) it is psychologically implausible to posit such a
chain of hallucinations. Hallucinations are usually associated with mental
illness or drugs; but in the disciples' case the prior psycho-biological
preparation appears to be wanting. The disciples had no anticipation of seeing
Jesus alive again; all they could do was wait to be reunited with him in the
Kingdom of God. There were no grounds leading them to hallucinate him alive from
the dead. Moreover, the frequency and variety of circumstances belie the
hallucination theory: Jesus was seen not once, but many times; not by one
person, but by several; not only by individuals, but also by groups; not at one
locale and circumstance but at many; not by believers only, but by skeptics and
unbelievers as well. The hallucination theory cannot be plausibly stretched to
accommodate such diversity. (ii) Hallucinations would not in any case have led
to belief in Jesus' resurrection. As projections of one's own mind,
hallucinations cannot contain anything not already in the mind. But we have seen
that Jesus' resurrection differed from the Jewish conception in two fundamental
ways. Given their Jewish frame of thought, the disciples, were they to
hallucinate, would have projected visions of Jesus glorified in Abraham's bosom,
where Israel's righteous dead abode until the eschatological resurrection. Thus,
hallucinations would not have elicited belief in Jesus' resurrection, an idea
that ran solidly against the Jewish mode of thought. (iii) Nor can
hallucinations account for the full scope of the evidence. They are offered as
an explanation of the resurrection appearances, but leave the empty tomb
unexplained, and therefore fail as a complete and satisfying answer. Hence, it
seems that the hallucination hypothesis is not more successful than its defunct
forebears in providing a plausible counter-explanation of the data surrounding
Christ's resurrection.

Thus, none of the previous counter-explanations can account for the evidence as
plausibly as the resurrection itself. One might ask, "Well, then, how do
skeptical scholars explain the facts of the resurrection appearances, the empty
tomb, and the origin of the Christian faith?" The fact of the matter is, they
don't. Modern scholarship recognizes no plausible explanatory alternative to the
resurrection of Jesus. Those who refuse to accept the resurrection as a fact of
history are simply self-confessedly left without an explanation.

These three great facts--the resurrection appearances, the empty tomb, and the
origin of the Christian faith--all point unavoidably to one conclusion: The
resurrection of Jesus. Today the rational man can hardly be blamed if he
believes that on that first Easter morning a divine miracle occurred.