From: Brian Holtz [brian@holtz.org]
Sent: Friday, April 09, 2004 9:45 AM
To: KURT KOERTH
Subject: RE: Some thoughts

Hi Kurt, thanks for the thoughtful feedback. You write:

I was recently browsing through various resurrection sites on the net and came across yours, specifically, Arguments Against Christianity. While reading, I noticed your challenge that you gave to "any Christian apologist" back in Feb. 2003 to write as persuasively and powerfully for Christianity as you did in writing against it.You may or may not be familiar with the scholarly writings of Dr. William Lane Craig, Gary Habermas, J.P. Moreland, or former Chicago Tribune journalist Lee Strobel and his book The Case for Christ. I think you might find that their works on the subject of the Christian faith could give your article a run for your money.

Craig is indeed one of the best apologists, and I have some of his articles queued up for rebuttal. Nothing I've read in his oeuvre adequately answers my arguments. From the reviews I've read, Strobel's work is too weak for me to bother answering. As for Habermas and Moreland, let me know if any of their material is stronger than the pieces by Craig and others that I list here.

I'm not going to try to answer your article in its entirety, however, I would like to respond to your argument against the empty tomb. You said, "The Empty Tomb story could have resulted from a discreet reburial or removal -- perhaps by a disciple, as in a rumor reported in Mt 28." Do you really believe that, or are you just throwing out any possible theory?

Of course I believe it. The report in Mt 28 is devastating.

Neither the reburial or removal theory can answer the fact that the disciples saw, what they thought, was the resurrected Jesus and that these "appearances" radically transformed them.

I wouldn't call this a "fact". All we know is that some of the people who had committed their lives to following Jesus ended up as believers in him despite his well-anticipated execution.

For instance, Peter who had previously denied knowing Jesus when interrogated earlier during Jesus' arrest/trial, shortly after the suppossed resurrection is in the very streets where Jesus had walked preaching the message that Jesus had not only died for sin, but that he had risen from the dead (Acts 2). What happened? Why the dramatic change in Peter's countenance?

We don't know for a fact that Peter ever denied Jesus, although it does seem plausible -- and if true, it weighs heavily against the thesis that Jesus had claimed and demonstrated divinity and had prophesied his death and resurrection.

What probably happened is that some disciples began having epiphanies, perhaps involving the occasional dream, ecstatic vision, encounter with a stranger, case of mistaken identity, or outright hallucination (or fabrication). The disciples in their desperation and zeal initially interpreted these experiences as manifestations of a triumphant and vindicated (but not necessarily reanimated) Jesus, who had apparently predicted that he would in some sense return or at least that his ministry would require but survive his death. If a tomb had in fact been found empty, that doesn't necessarily imply that these early manifestations were initially interpreted as experiences of a physically reanimated corpse. The disciples might have just believed that Yahweh had “raised” Jesus' body to heaven so as to not “abandon [it] to the grave” and to “decay” [Ps 16:10, cited in Acts 13:35-37]. An empty tomb belief would greatly have helped the early epiphanic experiences be misinterpreted, exaggerated, and embellished over the subsequent half century into the reanimated corpse stories that appear only in the two oldest gospels (Luke and John).

What did he have to gain by promulgating such a story if it wasn't true; ostracism from his Jewish community, beatings, imprisonments, death?

Jesus' followers were already ostracized from mainstream Judaism, and like many fanatics sometimes seemed to take perverse pride in their travails. Suffering only indicates intensity of belief, not veracity.

Furthermore, if Jesus hadn't risen from the dead then Peter knew it! He was claiming to have been an eyewitness.

Utterly false. We have no first-hand accounts of a physically resurrected Jesus, from Peter or Paul or anyone else. This fact alone is devastating. A competent deity would have arranged for scripture to say something like "I, Fred, saw Jesus beheaded last week but had lunch with him this week and touched his sore neck." Instead, we have second-hand vague and contradictory accounts written decades later.

Also, if the tomb had been emptied by human agency, it's not necessarily the case that Peter or most of the disciples would have known it.

Peter, as well as many first century Christians died a martyr's death.

Peter and James are the only alleged resurrection witnesses who the New Testament names (John 21:18,19, Acts 12:2) as martyrs, but there is no evidence that recanting their alleged belief in physical resurrection could have saved them. They probably just died for their very sincere belief in some Easter-related experiences that they interpreted as evidence of a triumphant and vindicated Jesus. All other Christian martyrs died for what they were told about the alleged resurrection and not for what they witnessed about it.

Lastly, but certainly not exhaustively, if Jesus had been "discreetly reburied" or stolen then the enemies of Christ would have simply paraded his lifeless body through the streets of Jerusalem to silence his followers once and for all.

The point of "discreet" or "stolen" is that the enemies of Jesus wouldn't have known where the body was. Also, we know from Acts that Jesus' followers did not publicly proclaim the resurrection for weeks and weeks. That's a lot of time for a body to be disposed of or to become unrecognizable.

It's not even apparent that resurrection was falsifiable by corpse-checking. When some [Mk 6:14, Mk 8:28, Mt 16:14, Lk 9:19] -- including Herod [Mk 6:16, Mt 14:2] -- thought that John the Baptist had been "raised from the dead", at least a few of these people would have known that Jesus' body had (like the Easter gardener's) been animate before the Baptist's death. There is no record that anyone ever considered checking the Baptist's body (the grave of which was known his disciples [Mk 6:29, Mt 14:13]), and there is no record that anyone wondered why Jesus' neck did not show signs of John's earlier beheading.

They knew that if a rumor got out that Jesus had been raised from the dead then that information would have started a movement more powerful than the first, maybe a movement that would spread around the world.

Hardly. We know from Josephus that the Jesus movement was simply not significant during the first decades after Jesus' ministry.

If Jesus' disciple/s had taken the body, which is highly unlikely, then again they knew that Jesus hadn't really risen. Which begs the question, why were they willing to die for what they knew to be a lie?

Despite your "/s", you seem to assume that every disciple was in on the secret. If the body was moved by a follower, why would he discourage and deflate the increased zeal that the empty tomb was creating among the rest of Jesus' followers? At any rate, I consider bodily removal to be no more likely than the Empty Tomb story being an embellishment created decades later. Note that the empty tomb and physical resurrection are never mentioned in Paul's epistles, which are the earliest Christian writings.

I don't assume to be a leading authority, or defender of the Christian faith so I suggest that if your're looking for a more thorough rebuttal to your article that you read the writings of the aforementioned authors.

I have sought out and read the best Christian apologetics I could find. I recommend you do the same for anti-Christian writings if you want to have a balanced understanding of the evidence. My recommended readings on both sides are here.