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If Miracles Are Possible, Are Legends Impossible?
Once one sees the circular character of Craig's enterprise, it begins to make a bit more sense that he would retreat to the old red herring of "naturalistic presuppositions" as a way of doing an end run around the most fundamental postulate of critical historiography. That is, Craig tells us that no one would reject miraculous reports like the resurrection narratives unless already dogmatically committed to Deism or atheism. Since it is in the vested interest of all those unregenerate sinners like Strauss and Schleiermacher to deny miracles, they had no choice but to deny that God had raised Jesus from the dead. Again, this is the most blatant kind of scurrilous mud-slinging, no different from Creationist stump debater Duane Gish charging that "God-denying" evolutionists must want society to become a den of murderers and pornographers.
And it's also just nonsense, another tricky shell-game on behalf of a higher Truth. I'm not saying Craig is wittingly distorting the truth to win his point. No, it's worse than that: he is so committed to a dogmatic party line that he cannot see "truth" as meaning anything but that party-line dogma. By definition, his gospel could never prove untrue because he has begun by defining it as the truth. In Craig's lexicon, you look up "truth" and it says "see 'gospel'." To borrow Francis Schaeffer's terminology, for the apologist "truth" has become merely a "connotation word." As when liberal theologian Albrecht Ritschl said "Jesus has the value of God for us," Craig might say, "Christianity has the value of Truth for us." As for William James righteous endeavor was "the moral equivalent of war," for apologists Christianity is "the moral equivalent of truth." Only it doesn't work. For Ritchlianism, Jesus was in fact not God; for James, moral endeavor was in fact not war. Even so, anything that substitutes for the truth may be preferred to the truth, but then it is a lie.
And thus it is no wonder that apologists show themselves ready to use every rhetorical trick in the book, since all means are justified by the end of making new converts. Craig at one point needs the Johannine pseudo-character of the Beloved Disciple to be a historical witness of the events, and, as a trump, he says, "If it be said that the evangelist simply invented the figure of the Beloved Disciple, then 21:24 becomes a deliberate falsehood."[5] But why should the notion of an apologist, in this case an ancient one, resorting to pious fraud surprise anyone? Indeed, after careful acquaintance with the works of evangelical apologists, it is precisely what we should expect.
If the charge that unbelievers are hiding behind a smoke screen is a mirror image of their own strategy of using scholarly argument like smoke and mirrors, a charge I have cited Craig as pretty much admitting, then the "naturalistic presuppositions" business is a specific instance of such childish "I know you are, but what am I?" tactics. Does it take a blanket presupposition for a historian to discount some miracle stories as legendary? No, because, as even Bultmann recognized, there is no problem accepting reports even of extraordinary things that we can still verify as occurring today, like faith healings and exorcisms. However you may wish to account for them, you can go to certain meetings and see scenes somewhat resembling those in the gospels. So it is by no means a matter of rejecting all miracle stories on principle. Biblical critics are not like the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. But a selective, piecemeal, and probabilistic acceptance of miracle stories is not what apologists want. They take umbrage that critics do not wind up accepting any and all biblical miracles. Otherwise how are we to understand the constant refrain that it is inconsistent for critics to strain out the gnat of the virgin birth while swallowing the resurrection?
So if it would not require a blanket principle to reject the historicity of particular miracle stories, we must ask if it would take a blanket principle to require acceptance of all biblical miracle stories. Clearly it would. And that principle cannot be simple supernaturalism, openness to the possibility of miracles. One can believe God capable of anything without believing that he did everything anybody may say he did. One can believe in the possibility of miracles without believing that every reported miracle must in fact have happened. No, the requisite principle is that of biblical inerrancy, the belief that all biblical narratives are historically accurate simply because they appear in the Bible. After all, it will not greatly upset Craig any more than it upset Warfield to deny the historical accuracy of medieval reports of miracles wrought by the Virgin Mary or by the sacramental wafer, much less stories of miracles wrought by Gautama Buddha or Apollonius of Tyana.
"Supernaturalism" is not at all the issue here. The issue is whether the historian is to abdicate his role as a sifter of evidence by accepting the dogma of inerrancy. Does fire become better fire when doused with water? That is what Craig wants, because he is trying to win souls for Bill Bright.
Nor is "naturalism" the issue when the historian employs the principle of analogy. As F.H. Bradley showed in The Presuppositions of Critical History, no historical inference is possible unless the historian assumes a basic analogy of past experience with present.[6] If we do not grant this, nothing will seem amiss in believing reports that A turned into a werewolf or that B changed lead into gold. "Hey, just because we don't see it happening today doesn't prove it never did!" One could as easily accept the historicity of Jack and the Beanstalk on the same basis, as long as one's sole criterion of historical probability is "anything goes!"
If there are Buddhist legends or Pythagorean tales about people walking on water but there is no present-day instance, is the historian to be maligned as a narrow dogmatist and, worse, a moral coward refusing to repent, if he or she judges the report of Jesus walking on the water to be an edifying legend, too?
The historical axiom of analogy does not dogmatize; critical historians are not engaging in metaphysical epistemology as if they could hop into a time machine and pontificate "A didn't happen! B did!" Again, Craig and his brethren are just projecting. It is they, and not critical historians, who want to be able to point to sure results. Imagine the creed: "If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in thy heart that God hath probably raised him from the dead, thou shalt most likely be saved." But who is the joke on here? Historians don't have creeds. They frame hypotheses. Sure, you can find some hidebound prof, some small-minded, insecure windbag who will not budge from a pet theory because he has too much personally invested in it. But you have no trouble recognizing such a person as a hack, a fake, a bad historian who ought to know better. The last thing you do is to emulate such behavior and make it into an operating principle. But apologists do. Again, it's projection.
It reduces to this: at the end of Bill Bright's Four Spiritual Laws booklet, there is a cartoon diagram showing a toy locomotive engine labeled "fact," pulling a freight car labeled "faith," followed in turn by a superfluous caboose tagged "feeling." The new convert is admonished to let faith rest on fact, not to allow faith to waver with feelings. But the outsider (not to mention the ex-insider) must suspect that it is the caboose that is pulling the train, and pulling it backwards. Faith is based "firmly" upon feeling, and certain notions are postulated as "fact" because of the security they afford to the sick soul who seeks a port in the existential storm. Craig's own essay in the humbly titled online Truth Journal, "Contemporary Scholarship and the Historical Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ" opens with the supposed predicament of "modern man," feeling all alone in a big bad universe.[7] "Against this background of the modern predicament, the traditional Christian hope of the resurrection takes on an even greater brightness and significance. It tells man he is no orphan after all...." Can anyone imagine a genuine work of scholarly research opening with soap-operatic organ music of this kind? No, we find ourselves in a tent revival, even if it is on the mountainside of L'Abri.
Lest His Disciples Say, 'He Has Risen'
Craig has occasion, in his defense of the empty tomb story, to cross swords with John Dominic Crossan, as I have already noted. One need hardly subscribe to every thesis put forth by Crossan to appreciate that he is an innovative and creative New Testament scholar who marshals his vast learning in an attempt to find out new things from the gospels. Crossan is concerned to advance the state of knowledge. Contrast him with Craig, who uses his own formidable erudition in one vast damage control operation. Every effort of Craig's is to squelch new theories that threaten to cast doubt on the traditional picture of the storybook Jesus and Christian origins. One feels that Craig would sooner put his efforts elsewhere than putting out fires lit by Bultmann, Strauss, and Crossan. If he had his way, he'd be occupied with something more edifying.
Evangelicals think they've got the truth in their back pocket, so they can't be trying to find what they think they've already got. They're just trying to attack everybody else. Novelty is the devil. They expend great time and effort mastering the skills of Greek and Hebrew exegesis (witness the unparalleled excellence of Dallas Theological Seminary in these areas)--for what? You know how the story's going to end already! All their efforts at exegesis are the laborings of a mountain to bring forth a mouse. New ways to sling the same old hash. If one of them really comes up with something new theologically, it will result in immediate charges of heresy. The effort is solely to hold the fort against the advance of intellectual history. Evangelical biblical scholarship, like evangelical theology, is just a massive effort to arrest modernity. In precisely the same way, there simply is no Creation Science. It is all just an effort to poke as many holes in evolutionary biology as they can, as if fundamentalism will emerge the victor by default.
That vented, let's turn to the empty tomb story. As elsewhere, the apologist's task is one of harmonization of "apparent contradictions," this time between the empty tomb stories of the gospels on the one hand and the list of resurrection appearances in 1 Corinthians 15 on the other. What's the problem? By the reckoning of most New Testament scholars 1 Corinthians 15:3-11 preserves a list of appearances decades earlier than the writing of Mark's gospel. And it has nothing to say of the discovery of the empty tomb on Easter morning by Mary Magdalene and her sisters. From this some draw the inference that the story of the empty tomb is a later addition and thus an unhistorical embellishment. Naturally Craig cannot have this, so he tries to coax from the text of 1 Corinthians what is not there: a Pauline citation of the empty tomb tradition. Before he is done he will be telling us how Paul must have gotten his information about the empty tomb from a visit he himself made there on a visit to Jerusalem! Presumably Craig derived this privileged information the same way Matthew got his "tradition" that the risen Jesus appeared to the women at the tomb, simply by reading it between the lines (in Matthew's case, the lines of Mark). In the end we actually find Craig saying, "Thus Paul's acceptance of the empty tomb is strong evidence in favor of its historicity"![8]
All Craig can actually show, and this much is certainly a point well taken, is that, since 1 Corinthians 15:4 does mention Jesus' burial as the darkness before the dawn of his resurrection, the notion of a vacant tomb would hardly have been alien to the writer's conception. It would be no surprise to find a mention of an empty tomb in this list, and its lack may simply be because the formulator of the list thought it too obvious to mention. True enough. Where I perceive Craig to be fudging the issue is in his assumption that the only alternative is to envision the formulator of the list believing, as modern liberal theologians do, in a resurrection of a type compatible with an occupied tomb. And if this be ruled out as anachronistic (I agree, it seems far-fetched), then, according to Craig, we are back to the gospel's empty tomb scenario. But are we?
Craig realizes that he needs to circumscribe the alternatives if he is to make it appear a simple either/or proposition. So he says there are no competing burial traditions. But there is at least one, namely the statement in Acts 13:28-29 that Jesus was buried by the same people who crucified him. In a case like this, one can easily imagine Jesus' disciples knowing (or surmising) that he had been buried, but not knowing where, or knowing it to be a common grave, e.g., the Valley of Hinnom where Jesus himself had warned habitual adulterers and thieves not to end up, since only those not deemed fit for a decent burial were disposed of there (Mark 9:43-48). If the disciples then beheld him resurrected (or thought they did), there would have been no question of finding "his" tomb, whether empty or occupied. The same would be true if, as implied in John 19:42; 20:15 and the anti-resurrection polemic mentioned by Tertullian (De Spectaculis 30), some held that Jesus had been but temporarily interred in Joseph's mausoleum for reburial elsewhere after the sabbath was past. "They have taken away my lord, and I know not where they have laid him." So it's not as if to assume an empty tomb is to presuppose the empty tomb story of the gospels, i.e., that of a known and vacated tomb one could point to, as Craig wants to do, as an item of evidence.
Here we reach two related issues of interest to Craig. First, trading on the idea of a known tomb that should have been occupied but wasn't, Craig hauls out the old argument that if the tomb had not been demonstrably empty the authorities could have silenced the apostles' preaching by the simple expedient of producing the body. "Here's your resurrected savior! Take a whiff!" But this is absurd: the only estimate the New Testament gives as to how long after Jesus' death the disciples went public with their preaching is a full fifty days later on Pentecost! After seven weeks, I submit, it would have been moot to produce the remains of Jesus. Does Craig picture the Sanhedrin using modern forensics? Identifying the rotting carcass of Jesus by dental records? In fact, one might even take the seven-week gap to denote that the disciples were shrewd enough to wait till such disconfirmation had become impossible.
Second, Craig appeals to the fact that there is no known tradition of Jesus' (occupied) grave being venerated as a site of holy pilgrimage. We might expect that there would be if the empty tomb tradition were later. Good point. But on the other hand, a moment's thought will reveal that once the empty tomb story eventually gained acceptance, the visitation of an occupied tomb would have been suppressed by Christian authorities, much as King Josiah shut down local shrines that functioned as rivals to Solomon's Temple. (Here and everywhere Craig simply presupposes a naive picture of the gospels as straightforward records of reporting, without tendential bias.)
The imagination of the apologist is essentially midrashic. It attempts to harmonize contradictions between texts by embellishing those texts, rewriting them by rereading them. In this manner, for instance, the discrepant accounts of Peter's denials are "reconciled" by redrawing the scene as one in which Peter denies his lord not merely three but six, eight or nine times, each evangelist "selecting" three of these for God knows what possible reason. Similarly, the Synoptics have Simon carry Jesus' cross, while John has Jesus himself carry it. No gospel has Jesus carry it for a while, then drop it, and Simon pick it up for him. Mark has both thieves mock Jesus; Luke has one mock him, the other defend him. No gospel has one thief stop mocking and start defending. These composite scenarios, which we see replayed every Easter in all the Jesus movies on TV, are the products of harmonizing midrash.
This midrashic imagination follows closely in the footsteps of ancient scribal midrash which, e.g., postulated Adam's first wife, the feminist hussy Lilith who left Adam to be replaced by the Stepford Wife Eve, all in order to harmonize Genesis One (simultaneous creation of woman and man) with Genesis Two (woman created after man). And from Deuteronomy's statement that no one knew Moses' burial place, something scarcely conceivable to the Moses-worshipping Torah reader, ancient scribes inferred that no tomb was known and visited because none existed! Moses must have been assumed bodily into heaven without dying like Elijah and Enoch! Craig is drawing the same midrashic inference in the case of Jesus: no known tomb veneration --> no corpse!
Craig tries to make the Markan empty tomb tale a piece of sober, contemporary history. It is harder to say which part of his attempt is the farther fetched. We are told that the story is unvarnished history since it betrays no signs of theological Tendenz. No theological coloring? In a story told to attest the resurrection of the Son of God from the dead? What else is it? Isn't it all varnish? Formica, instead of wood? Charles Talbert has no trouble adducing abundant parallels from Hellenistic hero biographies in which the assumptions into heaven of Romulus, Hercules, Empedocles, Apollonius (and let's not forget Elijah and Enoch) are inferred from the utter failure of searchers to find any vestige of their bones, bodies, or clothing.[9] Talbert concludes that a resurrection appearance, though not incompatible with such an "empty tomb" type episode, would by no means be needful. The ancient reader would know what Mark was driving at: God had raised the vanished Jesus from the dead. This is a prime bit of form-criticism on the part of Talbert (no God-hating atheist, by the way, but a Southern Baptist, if it makes any difference): it shows precisely that the form of the story is dictated by the theological function of the story. Contra Craig, it is theological through and through. Can anyone miss the irony that Craig, who values the story as nothing but a piece of apologetical fodder, can profess to see it as a bit of neutral history?
Craig thinks the story not only objective reporting but even headline news. He borrows from Rudolf Pesch the absurd notion that the very vagueness of the story lends it specificity! The pre-Markan passion story (assuming, as apologists like to do, that there was one) does not mention the name of "the high priest" as Caiaphas, and "This implies (nearly necessitates, according to Pesch) that Caiaphas was still the high priest when the pre-Markan passion story was being told, since then there would have been no need to mention his name." [10] The idea is that a historical reference to the past would have named the priest, just as a historian will refer to "King Henry VIII," not just to "the king." A check of any history book will make it clear what any reader knows already. Sometimes it's one way, sometimes another. It means nothing. Besides, Caiaphas' name may just as well be missing because the story-teller had only the vaguest idea of the circumstances and didn't know who was the high priest at the time. Craig's fondness for the empty tomb is of a piece with his predilection for empty arguments, such as Paul's mute witness to the empty tomb and the evidential value of a vague story.
The most astonishing assertion Craig makes regarding the empty tomb story of Mark is that concerning the silence of the women in Mark 16:8. "The silence of the women was surely meant to be just temporary, otherwise the account itself could not be part of the pre-Markan passion story."[11] Up to this point Craig has argued that the empty tomb story must have been a continuation of the pre-Markan passion, not a separate pericope, because it has so much thematic continuity with the preceding. And yet here a gross discontinuity is smoothed over in the name of the assumption that the tomb tale formed part of the pre-Markan passion."
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