Faith, History and the Resurrection

Overview

Recall questions on scientific and Enlightenment challenges to the resurrection, Hume on miracles, fictional, mythical and experiential interpretations, alternative explanations of the empty tomb, Morison and Wilson on the historical evidence, and the strengths of each case.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   What kind of challenge does modern science pose to the resurrection?

   Model answer

   Not a direct experimental one, since a unique past event cannot be tested in a laboratory, but a challenge of principle. If the natural order is regular and its regularities are what we have overwhelming evidence for, then a bodily return from death is by definition the least probable kind of event, and any alternative explanation of the reports will be more probable than the reported event itself. Defenders reply that this assumes in advance that nothing outside the ordinary order can act.

2. 2

   What did the Enlightenment contribute to the debate beyond Hume?

   Model answer

   It made the gospels objects of ordinary historical enquiry rather than sacred exceptions. One influential strand argued deliberate deception, proposing that the disciples removed the body and reinvented Jesus' message when his political hopes failed. Another attempted rationalist reconstruction, explaining the events as natural occurrences misunderstood. Both share the assumption that the accounts must be explained in terms the modern reader already accepts.

3. 3

   What does it mean to call the resurrection a fictional event?

   Model answer

   It is the claim that nothing happened at all and that the narratives are invention, whether as conscious fraud designed to save a failed movement or as a story that grew in the telling. Supporters point to the discrepancies between the accounts and to the absence of any independent record. Opponents reply that fraud is hard to reconcile with the willingness of the witnesses to suffer, and that invention would probably have produced a tidier and more impressive set of stories with more suitable first witnesses.

4. 4

   What is the mythical interpretation of the resurrection?

   Model answer

   It holds that the narratives are neither factual reports nor deliberate lies but myth: the expression of a religious conviction in story form. On this reading the community's conviction that Jesus was vindicated by God clothed itself in narrative, in the way religious communities generally express what they cannot state directly. The approach claims to take the texts seriously as bearers of meaning while declining to treat them as accounts of something that happened.

5. 5

   Explain the view that what happened at Easter was an event within the disciples' own experience.

   Model answer

   It is the position that what can be established historically is the rise of Easter faith rather than the raising of a body. On this account something genuinely happened to the disciples, a transformation from despair to proclamation, and the resurrection language is the way they expressed the meaning of the crucified Jesus for their faith. Its supporters regard the empty tomb as secondary; its critics say it relabels the event without explaining what caused the change.

6. 6

   What alternative explanations of the empty tomb have been proposed?

   Model answer

   That the disciples removed the body; that the authorities or the tomb's owner moved it; that Jesus was not dead when taken down and later revived; that the women went to the wrong tomb in the half-light; that the body was placed in a common grave and no identifiable tomb existed; and that the empty tomb tradition is a later addition to accounts that originally spoke only of appearances. Each is offered as more probable than a resurrection, and each faces its own objections.

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