Thor's Day: What counts as evidence…

…for the resurrection of Jesus?

By Kyle Garza

Have you heard of the massive Olympic-class ship that sank in 1898? It was the largest vessel in the ocean at the time, described as virtually unsinkable. Unfortunately, it hit an iceberg in the North Atlantic Ocean in the middle of April, and more than 1,500 of its passengers and crew lost their lives at sea.
    I of course am speaking of the Titan. The RMS Titanic, which you probably thought of, did not sink until 14 years later, on April 15, 1912. To date, no one thinks that the real-life events of 1912 were based on the 1898 fictional novella, Futility, or the Wreck of the Titan, by Morgan Robertson. Even though the wreckage of the RMS Titanic would not be discovered until 1985, no one told its 705 survivors during the intervening 73 years that their story was fictitious. The fact of the matter was plain and obvious: there were eyewitnesses attesting to the fact that something tragically momentous happened, and there were many missing bodies.
    Why is it then so common today to nonchalantly discount the eyewitness testimony of more than 500 people who claimed the missing status of one body—Jesus of Nazareth’s?
    The common skeptic’s answer is often, “Dead bodies don’t rise from the dead. You can’t prove it.” Because of this kind of answer, we should read Josh McDowell’s The Resurrection Factor: Does the historical evidence support the resurrection of Jesus Christ? If you are admitting only the scientific method, McDowell actually agrees with the skeptic, because you can’t prove it scientifically. The scientific method involves testing data with repetition. But Jesus’ resurrection isn’t a matter of science; it’s a matter of history. Historical evidence isn’t privy to the scientific method because it involves events that are non-repeatable—they happened in the past and they stay in the past. McDowell’s book provides different evidence for Christ’s resurrection—not “weaker” evidence. But can we find any merit in historical evidence that parallels that of the scientific?

To answer this, let’s start with how we evaluate the difference between scientific and historical evidence. Hopefully, no one asserts that an event is believable only if it is repeatable. For the sake of the credibility of my college education, I certainly hope not, and I imagine every modern scientist would agree. We only have slips of paper from professors—eyewitnesses, mind you—that we are educated, credible scholars. If we could only trust what was repeatable, then works like John Carey’s Eyewitness to History would be of no value to us. Before you can begin to test eyewitnesses’ claims of seeing a dead man rise, you ought to first read this. In his work, Carey anthologizes the written accounts of over 300 eyewitnesses to different historical events ranging from battles, atrocities, disasters, coronations, assassinations, and discoveries that shaped the course of history, all related in vivid detail by observers on the scene. These events are universally accepted as matters of fact, and they certainly don’t read like they came from an impersonal, matter-of-fact textbook. They are personal accounts from real people. The plague in Athens in 430 BC is told by a man who survived the plague himself! The descriptions of the burning of Rome in AD 64 come from Tacitus, one of the greatest Roman historians of his time. The Roman siege of Jerusalem in AD 70 is recounted by the Jewish historian Josephus—then a defector to the Romans. Hand this book to just about anyone and ask, “Are these accounts believable?”
    A layman will hopefully answer, “Yes,” and credible historians and scientists alike should not deny the veracity of these events. But for different reasons, when it comes to Jesus’ resurrection one won’t give the same credence to eyewitnesses of the past as one does to scientists in the present. Why is this? It is because contemporary laymen are familiar with scientific descriptions but have lost touch with the method for justifying historical descriptions. For this reason, everyone should read Behan C. McCullagh’s aptly named Justifying Historical Descriptions. It presents a seven-step formula that historians use to validate their own hypotheses about historical evidence. Granted, it is different from the scientific method, but scientists and historians alike want answers to the same question: “What is the likelihood that my theory is true?” They go about finding those answers using different methodology, but they share a common interest in the search for truth.

Whether we like it or not, we cannot nitpick what we want to believe about the past from eyewitnesses just because something seems far-fetched. As Joseph Epstein put it in “Who Killed the Liberal Arts?,” “[we] must acquire knowledge of the best thought of the past, which will cultivate in [us] the intellectual depth and critical spirit required to live in an informed and reasonable way in the present.”
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Copyright © 2013 by Kyle Garza

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