Transcript
Hello and welcome to the Kathleen Noller podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Noller, former atheist turned Christian and biomedical scientist. Let's dive into Christianity and see if it can withstand some of our toughest objections. So, this is a new sub-series for our Kathleen Noller podcast. This is going to be a series of solo episodes that I'm going to do. Our typical episodes are about one to two hours long, and they feature an expert guest, which I'm interviewing. However, I'm going to start interspersing a few shorter solo episodes that revolve around a particular apologetics question. And we're going to do a really, deep dive into one specific question. I'm going to cite multiple primary sources, and this is going to be some question that I've either gotten from friends or from people that I've met who are non-believers out in the real world, or it's a question that I see over and over again on the internet in comments on other people's videos or in forums or things like that.
So, this is a question that I'm trying to take from the real world of things that people are struggling with right now. So, then we'll do about 20, 30 minutes of a deep dive into that based upon a series of research that I've done trying to address that question. So, I hope you guys enjoy this. I hope you can learn something and I hope that it'll be quick and efficient. um and that you can be able to address these questions whenever they come up in your own life. So, the question that we're addressing today is about the Christian resurrection myth. So, Jesus's bodily resurrection. And so, each of these questions will also be paired with an article or a transcript that I've written up on my sub stack called the Reformed Gadfly. So, you can find the article for this episode, which is called Resurrection Myths and Shoddy Scholarship. So, we'll touch on the shoddy scholarship piece in a little bit. So, the question we're attempting to address is how unique is the Christian resurrection archetype? So is the archetype of the crucified and resurrected Jesus present in religions other than Christianity, particularly ones that are predating Christianity? So oftentimes I'll hear this objection repeatedly, that Well, your Christian religion and your theology really hinge on the resurrection of Jesus. So, if you take that piece away, if you take away that miracle and you nullify in any way, you prove that it's false or that it didn't happen or if it was copied from a religion in the past, you really nullify the specialness of the Christian religion. So we're going to take a look at this event this resurrection event and see if that's actually true is it unique to Christianity or was it copied from one religion or from multiple other religions um that predated Christianity itself so we'll take a look at multiple other resurrection myths that I’ve combed through and found um And we'll see for ourselves whether this is true or not. So how this question first came to me was from a debate between a Christian apologist, William Lane Craig, who's a very famous analytic philosopher. And if you enjoy debate formats, I will highly suggest that you go look up some of his videos on YouTube. He's debated a lot of atheists and agnostics, and he's really a fantastic debater.
And he was debating Christopher Hitchens, So the late Christopher Hitchens is a was a journalist and he was a self-proclaimed anti-theist. And he also has a fun debate style. He's a very colorful speaker. He's very persuasive in his own way. And he's very, very funny to listen to, even if he sometimes sounds like he hates Christianity. He continued to engage repeatedly. he I know that he had friendships with folks that were devout Christians. And so, while he remained an anti-theist until his death, he really was engaged with religious folks, whether Christians or Muslims, in debate. And so, for those of you who want to check out the debate that I'm referring to, just look at the link in my sub stack. But they had a debate. And in this debate, Craig stated that there are three historical evidences that support Jesus's resurrection. And he again asserted how important it is that we can prove the authenticity and the historicity of Jesus's resurrection that it occurred. So, these three evidences for which Craig asserts there is no probable naturalistic explanation. So, there was no way that we could explain this away with science or with the actions of another human being. These three evidences are as follows. So, the first one is that on the Sunday after his crucifixion, Jesus's tomb was discovered to be empty by a group of female followers. The second assertion is that on separate occasions, different groups and individuals, whether they were believers, non-believers, or enemies, experienced appearances of Jesus alive as after his death. And so, this is important. I'll give a little sneak peek for some of the myths that we're going to discuss later because in some of those myths, there was a God who was said to be resurrected. However, there was no one present to witness the resurrection, or perhaps there was one other God from that same religion that was present to witness the resurrection. But here in Christianity, you have the listing of not even, oh, people witnessed it, but specific names of people who witnessed the resurrection or saw Jesus bodily resurrected after his death are given. And so, it just lends some credence to the account. And it also, by giving the names of the people or by asserting that there were observers, gives the people at the time something to follow up on, right? So it's a little bit harder to cover up a lie if it was a lie, if you're stating, oh, here are my multiple witnesses, eyewitnesses to this event, and then the third piece of evidence is that the original disciples suddenly came to believe in the resurrection of Jesus despite Jewish beliefs to the contrary. So again, a lot of people will argue that the disciples were sort of primed to either think that they were going to be bodily resurrected, so they weren't surprised, so they more easily accepted that fact afterwards.
But here, what K Craig is saying is really, they weren't expecting it. um They would not have been sort of primed and ready to look for a bodily resurrection of their leader. And so, their acceptance of it is not really something that we should take for granted. So... one way of countering what Craig is saying, particularly if you can't build a historical case against this evidence, is to really nullify their specialness. So, what I mean by that is that you might say that the conditions of Jesus' resurrection and his resurrection itself are unremarkable. They've been met elsewhere, therefore they don't really point to a divine miracle or to the Christian God's existence. Even worse, their appearance in older texts or older religions, would suggest that they are unoriginal or intentionally copied. So, I offer three statements in response to the skepticism. So, first, if you see a spiritual event observed outside of Christianity, it doesn't necessarily suggest the existence of a different God, just suggests the existence of a spiritual realm. So even the Bible, um, gives us of course, good spiritual beings, we have the angels that we see frequently appear in the Bible, especially in the Old Testament. We also have the Elohim in the Old Testament, which are sort of little G gods or spiritual beings that form a spiritual council. I've mentioned this before. If anyone's interested in that, I would suggest you read Michael Heiser's Unseen Realm, but they have a spiritual council and each of these Elohim is sort of in charge of a particular nation and they're given delegated responsibility by God himself. So, there are spiritual beings in the Bible. There are also evil spiritual beings in the Bible. There are also what the Bible calls magicians, which are capable of deceit with what appear to be miracles. So just because we see something happen that involves the spiritual realm, it doesn't mean that therefore, if our God is not performing it directly, that our God is not in control or our God is not the only God or the supreme God or anything like that. So, second, there are many archetypes such as the birth of the virgin or the self-sacrificial hero, which do appear across multiple myths independent of time or place. So, you can sort of view this reappearance of those archetypes in two different ways. You could say, well, they're unoriginal and therefore they were copied and only the original one, the one that appeared first, maybe is true, but the ones that appear after it are not. They were copies of that original. Or you might view them as what they are, which is patterns of truth that humanity has recognized repeatedly again. And so there might be, as we would say, sort of one true myth, which is the Christian myth. But you can see glimpses of that, shadows of it, reflections of it in other religions throughout history, throughout time, independent of cultural influence. So, I think in in either case, whatever tact you take with it, whether you accept the Christian explanation for it, you must ask yourself, why is something like the virgin birth appearing as an archetype again? Why is there this human fascination with it or does this human need to put it into their stories? The third explanation that I gave is that the resurrection myth isn't as common as you might think. So, in a lot of atheist or agnostic or just non-believer circles, you hear oftentimes that the Christian resurrection myth isn’t unique at all. I'm going to argue that it's not common, and it's even less common when you combine it with other features that were found in the Christian resurrection myth, such as the attestation of multiple observers, the later conversion of those observers, and a recording of the resurrection event within one generation of its occurrence. And the last bit is important because obviously if this miraculous event occurs, but you have a recording of its hundreds of years after its alleged occurrence, how much can you trust the recording really?
Can you trust that they got the dialogue correct? Can you trust that they got the details correct and the timing, correct? Was the recorder there in person? No. So that's an important detail to look at when we look at competing myths. So nonetheless, I just don't want to give general objections to this this objection to Christianity. So, I combed the internet and I combed multiple books and primary sources for the most common resurrection myths applied in apologetic debates. And so, what I ended up finding was that many of them were from a list compiled by a popular author named Kelsey Graves in his book titled 16 Crucified Saviors, Christianity Before Christ. And so, Graves' list has traveled surprisingly far and wide amongst those questioning Christ's resurrection. And what I found from this is I was surprised as to the level of scholarship or lack thereof, in Graves' writing and how wide his claims have been taken. um i don't think a lot of people are aware that these claims derive from Kelsey Graves, and they don't really know who he is. So, to me, this is sort of a cautionary tale for readers to really investigate shoddy scholarship. He is not an academic. He is not a professor. He is not a conscientious researcher. And so, as you read through these examples, it was honestly, as I wrote in my article, it was kind of frustrating for me to do all this research because it required a lot of digging. It required a lot of looking into independent sources. And honestly, it was kind of hard-to-find primary sources to back up what Graves asserted. So, I sort of had to do my best there and fill in a lot of holes in his scholarship to try to even defend his points. before I could respond to them to begin, Graves says that the oldest crucifixion myth is derived from someone named King Thouless of Egypt. So, it dates to approximately 1700 BC. However, Thule's story is recorded very long after his supposed death. So, the first record of Thule's comes from a work which was written 500 which is called Chronographia by John Malolus, who identifies Thule as the eighth king of Egypt. So, if you dive into who this is and what Thule’s account is, you can find something from a classic professor, Dr. Benjamin Garstad. And he writes that Thule’s account is likely fiction and it's modeled off Alexander the Great, who's real figure, obviously historically, also modeled off Sesostris and Osiris and even the name Thuli’s itself. It's meant to sound Egyptian and probably sounds Egyptian to us who are lay people in the West who are not experts in Egyptian history or language.
But it's likely a corruption of a Greek name. So, Dr. Garstad proposes that funny enough, he says that the Thuli’s narrative is fiction, but it was likely contrived to quote, advance the Christian precision. So, he says it's, quote, likely a straw man to prophesy the Trinity, which I found interesting. So, in either case, we see that Dr. Garstad is not someone who's aligning himself necessarily with the Christian position. But in either case, Thouless likely does not exist, and there is no record of his crucifixion. So that can rule out the oldest myth, according to Kelsey Graves. But what about diving into Osiris? So that was one of the three alleged inspirations for Thule, this fictional character. So, was Osiris resurrected from the dead? Was he bodily resurrected like Jesus? So, Osiris first appears in the pyramid texts. So, these are the earliest Egyptian funerary texts. They date all the way back to 2400 BC. And he's said to rule Egypt alongside Queen Isis. He's killed by Set, the god of violence, chaos, deserts, and storms. And there are different versions of the myth of Osiris. So, each of these versions differ in the mechanism of Osiris' death. So, in one version, for example, Set takes the form of a wild animal and he drowns Osiris. In another version, he cuts him into pieces and scatters the pieces across Egypt. But none of the versions refer to a crucifixion. So, we don't even have but none to Jesus there but what about resurrection? So, after Osiris dies, the myths generally say that Isis and the goddess Nephthys find him and they resurrect him, but there are no mortal observers present to verify his resurrection. So that's something that I mentioned before, which Craig also mentioned, which is that there were multiple observers of Jesus bodily resurrected after his death, most especially people who were his followers, right his disciples, who knew him very well, who wouldn't be tricked by some other man saying that he was Jesus. um They knew what this man looked like. They knew what he spoke like. They knew what he walked like. But here we have Osiris, which was resurrected by two gods, and there are no human observers. So, there's really no verification. How would we know that this is true? But regardless, even if this was true, could the Osiris myth have influenced Jesus's disciples and rural Galilean Jews? Even if it was just a story, right? Even if Osiris was, let's say in the worst case, not a real being, he was never resurrected, there's still the myth written about him. So, could that myth have influenced the disciples of Jesus?
So here I turn to Bart Ehrman, who is agnostic. He is a New Testament scholar. He's very well known. And he says that this is unlikely, that these men, Jesus' followers and disciples, would not have been familiar with Egyptian culture and they wouldn't have known the Osiris myth further Ehrman also notes that Osiris is quote, not raised physically like Jesus. His body remains a corpse and it's his soul, which is resurrected. His soul lives in the underworld. And that's something that you'll see very commonly in a lot of ancient myths is we don't have the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ. We have the resurrection of a soul and then the body will stay on earth. So that's another piece of verification, right is you can't if you were there at the time right How do you know if someone says his soul has been resurrected, but you see the dead body right there? You can't check for an empty tomb. You can't check for life in the body. There's no way that you can check that story and check its validity. So, in summary, the Osiris myth differs from the Christian story in that first, no mortal observers were present at the resurrection event. And second, Osiris was not resurrected bodily, neither was he crucified. So, let's tackle one more resurrection myth. This is common. So, a lot of folks talk about Krishna, the Hindu deity, who is depicted earliest in the Mahabharata. So, like Osiris, Krishna did not physically rise from the dead, nor was he crucified. Hindu texts depict a near immediate spiritual ascension. Um, so a sort of non-bodily resurrection followed a death causing by a hunting accident. So, I'll read you a quote from, um, uh, from the, these, uh, translated Hindu texts here. So, it says, quote, the hunter mistaking Keshava or Krishna, who was stretched on the earth and high yoga for a deer pierced him at the heel with a shaft the high-souled one comforted him and then ascended upwards. And then another quote from section 8 of book 16 of the Mahabharata says that we see, quote, Krishna has, with Rama, cast off his body and ascended to heaven. So, we can see here, again, we don't have a bodily resurrection of Krishna. He's cast off his body, as we see in the Mahabharata. So, it's not... and We don't have the crucifixion either. So, it's not that like the resurrection of Jesus. um So the Christian resurrection account is more unique than the average layman gives credit for. It's unique in nature. It's bodily, not just spiritual. and it's unique in how verifiable it is. So, it has a multitude of real observers who provide opportunities for verification. And so the final thing that I want to note is that if you're still doubting the uniqueness of the resurrection, or you're doubting the trustworthiness of the gospel accounts, you say, okay, maybe Jesus was bodily resurrected from the dead, but the accounts of it might be incorrect, or maybe he wasn't even resurrected from the dead. Maybe the entire New Testament is just a shoddy document and it's a made-up story. I would encourage you to look at an episode that we recorded previously with Peter J. Williams. He is a New Testament historian, and he has done a lot of work in researching as well as publishing for laypeople a book called “Can We Trust the Gospels? So, I suggest beginning with that, and that will really address other questions about the trustworthiness of the gospel counts. But for now, we can see that the resurrection myth in Christianity is unique. And a lot of these objections from popular sources or from apologetics debates, if you really, really dive into them, they really don't hold up. They're not that similar, or there's just not a lot of evidence supporting them. And a lot of scholars, very famous scholars in the field who are not even Christian scholars, will say that they don't really have much credence to them historically, or that they're not like the Christian myth. So, I hope that helps you to address this question, and I will see you next time.
Thank you so much for tuning in.
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