Hi anonymous person,
Thanks for posting this excerpt from William Lane Craig. As I have said many times in different threads, everything that emanates from Craig is always untrue and easily refuted. In my search for answers to the problems of my faith, Craig's dishonesty and suave untruths were what turned my stomach with revulsion and when I contrasted him with atheists who are more honest, I began to look more at the arguments of atheists who do not seem to have to resort to a lie, unlike Craig.
I repeat that EVERYTHING Craig says is false and can be refuted. The only Craig gets right is the spelling of his own name.
This is a typical Craig-esque untruth. He appeals to his listeners that other scholars accept the resurrection as true, hence so must you. The fact is no scholar EVER accepts the resurrection as true or as he cleverly puts it, 'the facts undergirding the resurrection as true except Christian scholars. In fact some liberal Christian scholars have questioned the resurrection.
Here is another nonsense from Craig. The burial of Jesus in a tomb is NOT a fact. It's a myth that contradicts Roman history. Executed criminals were ALWAYS thrown in an unmarked gravesite along with the bodies of other criminals. It's a tall tale to say that Joseph of Arimathea gave a tomb to Jesus and the Roman guards did nothing to stop it. Let us now look at the supposed evidence Craig comes up with.
This is a quintessential Craig-esque lie. He does it in a suave and professional manner. First, all we have are some verses that St Paul wrote in his epistle which are not even marked as a quotation. But SOME scholars believe that it is probably a formula or hymn that was current at that time. That much I am prepared to accept. Some scholars may opine (but it's merely their conjecture) that it's an old hymn. This is pure speculation and it is wrong and dishonest of Craig to make it seem like a fact that it's an old hymn. And what is more, to say that it dates to 5 years after Jesus death is a lie that only Craig can make with such finesse.
I accept that Mark is the oldest Gospel but St Paul's writings are older - written some 40 years after Jesus' death. To say that the four gospel accounts did not diverge from one another until after the burial is false. Divergence can be seen from the word go in the four gospels. Of course when we talk about divergence, the divergence of John from the Synoptic gospels is the most marked and Princeton Bible scholar Elaine Pagel gives a very good reason for such a divergence which won't appeal to the average Christian but I won't digress. Because the four accounts in the gospels are always different and highly divergent from one another, the question is where can we find the highest level of divergence? Most scholars agree that the divergence is highest at events leading to and including the crucifixion, death and resurrection.
This again is highly speculative. Telling the story that an important person from the Jewish community who secretly accepts Jesus' story is extremely attractive to the early church. Scholars say that Christianity would not have survived if it didn't peg itself to Judaism in the Roman empire because people in those days respected antiquity in religion and a new-fangled religion that isn't pegged to an older religion was unlikely to survive. According to some scholars I've read, that accounts for the need for the early Christians to scour the OT for anything that they could seize and appropriate as prophecies for Jesus. They take even fulfilled prophecies and re-invent them for Jesus even when the prophecy specifies a time frame that is not in Jesus' time. That's how the church comes up with the dual prophecy doctrine. They even take verses that are not prophecy (eg the 'out of Egypt have I called my son' verse) and turn it into a prophecy about Jesus and one Evangelist at least told the tale of how baby Jesus went to Egypt. Hence Craig is wrong to say that the story of Joseph of Arimathea must be true. There are other instances too. In Jn 3, we read of another secret follower of Jesus who is in the sanhedrin. All these stories would appeal to the early Christians then and to say they could not have concocted the story is ridiculous.
This is so wrong, but hey, it comes from William Lane Craig so what do you expect? First, we must remember that Jesus was so unimportant that nobody noticed him or spoke about him. No Roman historian mentioned him. Josephus only mentioned him in the context of describing the Christian sect at the time. He said 'followers of Jesus'. If he had described the Zeus believers, he would have said 'followers of Zeus'. Because of the paucity or even absence of any non-religious reference to Jesus at the time, some scholars even doubt the historicity of Jesus. But I'll ignore that because it's easier to just assume that Jesus was real. But he was unimportant and he didn't feature in any historical text. He was only mentioned in religious texts. There was no competing legends because competing legends don't grow out of an unknown insignificant Jewish carpenter who was executed by the Romans.
Quote-mining means nothing to me. Of course the majority of NT scholars will say that. The majority of them are Christians. But this is neither here nor there. Even if an atheist says that, it's wrong. Jesus' tomb is not even a poorly attested fact. It's not a fact. It flies in the face of Roman history and Roman law. It's a concocted story for a religious purpose.
Again, this is not a fact. There is a lot of scholastic dispute about the empty tomb which I have explained below to refute some of Craig's points. But the empty tomb is not a fact. It was concocted at least 40 years after Jesus' death. It's to be noted that St Paul never once mentioned an 'empty tomb' in any of his epistles. To understand what went on in St Paul's mind about the resurrection, we need to understand early Jewish idea of what the resurrection entails. See below for details.
For once, I don't dispute this.
Some scholars have made it clear that the early Jewish thought on the resurrection is quite different from our idea today. They believed that a resurrected body is a copy of the earthly body but the resurrected body leaves the earthly body behind in the tomb. They think St Paul's view accords with this. Now, I must stress that this is one possibility but I don't agree with it because of my faith. If you are interested you can read the scholar Gregory Riley's book Resurrection Reconsidered. But it doesn't matter one way or another. But I raise this to show that there are other possibilities and Craig's conclusion cannot be drawn from the factual matrix he sets up because they are flawed.
Scholars have a good explanation why an early Christian would have concocted the story that the women found the missing tomb and wrote the Gospels to reflect that story. St Paul has never once mentioned the empty tomb. Following the understanding of ancient Jews that a resurrection would leave the old body in the grave, St Paul's silence on the empty tomb is troubling. Modern Christians might infer from St Paul's mention of resurrection in the flesh as an indication that St Paul believed in the empty tomb but you can only do that if you fail to consider that Paul's idea would have accorded with ancient Jewish idea of a resurrection with the old body still in the grave and hence there is no empty tomb.
Hence, if the Evangelists write that there was an empty tomb, early Christians will question the truth of that because they'd not heard of the empty tomb and even St Paul didn't mention it once in any of his epistles. So, if you want to concoct the story of the empty tomb, the best bet is to say that women saw the empty tomb and because their stories were always discounted. Together with that, you will notice that in the Gospel stories, the angels kept telling them not to say a word and not to tell anyone. Why should that be so? I used to ask my self why the angels wanted secrecy for the resurrection. Scholars say it's the best way to concoct an untrue in the Gospels because if early Christians say, "why have I not heard of the empty tomb?" the answer is obvious - because women saw it and nobody believed them anyway and besides the angel told them to be silent and that is why you didn't hear it and St Paul didn't mention but now the Gospels say it for the first time but it's true.
I hope you can see why it's attractive for the evangelists to say the women discovered the empty tomb and why they also got the angels to tell the women to tell nobody about it.
This is totally untrue. There is no early Jewish allegation at all. It was concocted in the Gospel. The earliest Jewish historian Josephus didn't even talk about Jesus. That is the problem with Craig. He took what the Gospel says about what the Jews was supposed to have said and say this is evidence from the opponents of Christians. It's not evidence from the opponents of Christians. It's an allegation made by a Christian writer (the Evangelist) about the Jews that has no basis at all.
Rubbish! Like I cared what another Christian says about the resurrection.
This is not reliable. Of course the writings of early Christians in their holy book would say wondrous things about witnesses to the resurrection. The fact is Jesus wasn't even mentioned in non-religious texts.
Unreliable. Craig is using the Gospels as evidence that Jesus' brothers didn't believe in him and he's using the NT again to say that the brothers did become Christians. And even if they did, you cannot conclude that, 'Ah ha! They must have seen the resurrected Christ!' There are a million reasons why anyone would believe in something without evidence and without seeing the resurrected Christ. The funny thing about us Christians is we believe in God without seeing any evidence and we believe in the resurrected Christ without seeing him but we are quick to say that if James became a Christian, he must have seen the resurrected Christ and so Christ must have resurrected. That's flawed beyond words.
This in fact explains why early Christians mined the OT for verses to squeeze Jesus in. I've mentioned this above on this post. And as for point (3) above, they couldn't have preserved their Master's tomb because Jesus was thrown into an unmarked grave as all executed prisoners were. There was no tomb to begin with.
This is nonsense. First, there is current scholarship that disputes the horrid deaths the apostles were supposed to have undergone. Now, even if they did die horrid deaths, all through the centuries, it's not uncommon for superstitious people to be willing to die for their beliefs. You can't conclude from their willingness to die that they MUST HAVE seen the resurrected Jesus, just as you can't conclude that Muslim suicide bombers must have seen Allah or anyone who is willing to die for their faiths must have faiths that are backed by evidence, etc.
In summary, Craig fails as he always does.