CON'T...
"Craig the apologist calls on his midrashic skills again, just as Matthew, Luke, and the author of the Markan Appendix (really, Appendices) did when they came to the same dead end, as it seemed to them. All alike simply ignored Mark's statement that the women disobeyed the young man's charge and had them inform the disciples, just as they were bidden. Craig ignores it, too. He is a harmonizer. He cannot bring himself to entertain the thought that Mark might have wanted to say something quite different from his redactors. Before silencing Mark by making his silent women speak, we might ask after the implications of the strange and abrupt ending, and it is not far to seek. Isn't it obvious that the claim that the women "said nothing to anyone for they were afraid" functions to explain to the reader why nothing of this had been heard of before? In other words, it is a late tradition after all, and not just because 1 Corinthians 15 lacks it. No, read in its own right, it just sounds like a rationalization, cut from the same cloth as Mark 9:9, where we read that, what do you know, Elijah did come just as the scribes say he must have if Jesus is to be accepted as the messiah. So why didn't anyone know it? Uh... because he told them to keep quiet about it till later; yeah, that's the ticket.
Before leaving the empty tomb story, I cannot resist a comparison suggested by the story and the apologists' handling of it. In Matthew's highly embroidered version of Mark, he has the enemies of Jesus warn Pilate that, if given the chance, those tricky disciples of Jesus would steal his body and then claim he rose from the dead. Whether or not they did, and it is not impossible, I cannot help seeing an analogy to the self-styled disciples of Jesus like William Lane Craig whose tortuous attempts to establish an empty tomb and a risen Jesus do seem to smack of priestcraft and subterfuge.
No Spirit Has Flesh
Many New Testament scholars have observed that the conception of the resurrection body implied in 1 Corinthians 15 clashes so violently with that presupposed in the gospels that the latter must be dismissed as secondary embellishments, especially as 1 Corinthians predates the gospels. Craig takes exception. The whole trend of his argument seems to me to belie the point he is ostensibly trying to make, namely that any differences between the two traditions do not imply that 1 Corinthians allows only sightings, subjective visions, while the gospels depict more fulsome encounters replete with dialogue, gestures, touching, and eating. Nothing in 1 Corinthians 15 rules out such scenes, he says. But surely the very urgency of the matter shows that Craig would feel himself at a great loss if he had to cut loose all those juicy gospel resurrection stories to be left with the skimpy list of terse notes in 1 Corinthians 15. By itself, 1 Corinthians 15 just wouldn't mean much. He wants the appearances of 1 Corinthians 15:3-11 to be read as if they had in parentheses after them "See Luke 24; Matthew 28; John 21."
Of course Craig is muchly mistaken in thinking that this clash between 1 Corinthians and the gospels is the main reason New Testament critics dismiss the gospel Easter narratives as unhistorical. There are many reasons, including the gross contradictions of detail between them (scarcely less serious than those between the nativity stories of Matthew and Luke), the clear evidence of redactional creation and embellishment, etc. Suffice it to say Craig once again tries to oversimplify the problem, so that by solving the part of it he treats (if he does solve it), he can afford to ignore the rest of the problem.
Craig spends a lot of time in his essay "The Bodily Resurrection of Jesus" addressing details of 1 Corinthians 15 and the history of its interpretation in a reasonable and credible way.[12] I have no quarrel with his rejection of Bultmann's existentializing reading of swma as "selfhood," when it must mean body in a substantial sense. (But, ironically, we will see below that Craig is unwilling to let sarx mean simply "flesh"!) My problem comes when Craig starts trying to harmonize the flesh-versus-spirit contradiction between Luke 24:39 and 1 Corinthians 15:50. Put simply, both Luke and 1 Corinthians pose the alternative of "spirit versus flesh" as possible modes of the risen Jesus, but whereas Luke has Jesus say, "No spirit has flesh and bones as you see me having," 1 Corinthians says "Flesh and blood shall not inherit the kingdom of God" (15:50) and "the last Adam became a life-giving spirit" (15:45).
There are two major steps in his argument. First Craig must try to empty the term "spiritual body" (predicated of the risen Jesus) of any connotation suggesting a body composed of a luminous angelic substance, i.e., something wholly different from flesh. If this is what 1 Corinthians meant, it would indeed imply a rather different picture than that, e.g., of John 20:27, where Jesus, like LBJ, shows off livid scars. He focuses on the contrast between "psychical body" and "spiritual body," showing, quite properly, that the former ought to be taken as "natural body," not "physical body." Thus the contrast between "natural" and "spiritual" body would not in and of itself have to mean the latter is immaterial. True, I guess, but then what else would it mean? Craig sounds like an old-time rationalist when he appeals to the "natural"/"spiritual" opposition back in 1 Corinthians 2:14-15, which seems to intend a moral comparison, to define the contrast in 1 Corinthians 15. He winds up with "spiritual body" meaning on the one hand "a body dominated, directed by the Holy Spirit," and on the other, tautologically equivalent to "a supernatural, i.e., a resurrected, body." But in either case, please, a physical body.
But can Paul have imagined that Jesus's body during his earthly life was not already dominated and directed by the Holy Spirit? Ours, maybe, but his? One cannot ignore the parallel being drawn between Jesus and the resurrected believer throughout the chapter. And to say that "it is raised a spiritual body" means only "it is raised" is a piece of harmonizing sleight-of-hand like that which would understand Mark 13:30 to mean "Whichever generation is alive at the time these things happen will see these things happen."
Craig makes an interesting observation once he gets to 1 Corinthians 15:47, "The first man is from the earth, of dust; the second man is from heaven." He notes: "There is something conspicuously missing in this parallel... the first Adam is from the earth, made of dust; the second Adam is from heaven, but made of--? Clearly Paul recoils from saying the second Adam is made of heavenly substance."[13] Is that so clear? When the point at issue is explicitly, "How are the dead raised? With what sort of body do they come?" I am not sure Paul means to recoil from the seemingly inevitable implication of what, after all, is his own parallel!
It seemingly does not occur to Craig to take seriously history-of-religions parallels (since, I'm sure, he would tell us that everyone in his circles finds them passe) such as Richard Reitzenstein adduced to paint a very plausible backdrop of Mystery Religion mysticism according to which initiation/baptism begins the formation of an inner dwxa body or pneuma body which will finally supplant the outworn physical/natural body in the hour of eschatological salvation. It's not like this is the only place where the conceptuality or the terminology occurs, and elsewhere it does seem to imply some kind of angelic body (reminiscent of the adamantine vajra body of Buddhist mysticism).
If he doesn't quite manage to evacuate "spiritual body" of its implied connotation of "body of spirit," Craig's attempt to deny that the word "flesh" (sarx) really means flesh is downright comical. Just as Bultmann wanted swma to mean something other than "body" for the sake of his theology, Craig desperately wants sarx in 1 Corinthians 15:50 ("Flesh and blood shall not inherit the kingdom of God") to mean something other than "flesh" for the sake of his apologetics. He wants Paul to have been talking about a resurrected Jesus with a body of flesh, just one no longer subject to death, like Superman, so he does not want 1 Corinthians 15:50 to mean that the risen Jesus lacked a body of flesh. So having turned spirit to flesh in the case of the spiritual body, he will now turn flesh into spirit.
How does Craig accomplish this exegetical alchemy? He cites various Old Testament passages which show how the phrase "flesh and blood" was often used as synecdoche (part for the whole) for "mortality." So when Paul says "flesh and blood shall not inherit the kingdom of God," he need mean no more than "mortality shall not inherit immortality," which, come to think of it, is exactly what he does say in the second half of the parallel: "neither shall the corruptible inherit the incorruptible." He need not mean, Craig wants us to believe, that a man with a body of flesh could not inherit the eternal kingdom.
Was Craig absent on the day they explained what synecdoche is? If you use a part to stand for the whole, then what's true of the whole must be true of the part. That's the whole point. If you cry, "All hands on deck!" You expect all crew members to be present in their entirety. Just because you don't mean they are to place only their hands on the deck, a la Kilroy, doesn't mean you exempt them from bringing their hands along with the rest of their anatomy! In other words, why would anyone ever use "flesh and blood" to stand for "mortality" in the first place unless he had in mind the obvious connection that flesh is always corruptible? We die because we are flesh, and flesh wears out, gets sick and dies, as Prince Siddhartha learned the hard way! "All flesh is grass," says Isaiah 40:6. Craig seems to think that since a metonym means more than the literal referent, it can as easily mean the very opposite of the literal referent. Or that the literal referent can be exempt from the very implication being drawn from it and for the sake of which it was invoked! It is simply absurd for Craig to suggest that one might say "flesh and blood shall not inherit the kingdom of God" meanwhile supposing that someone who had in fact inherited that kingdom did so while wearing a body of flesh!
Such great emphasis does he place on this harmonization that in an evangelical-sponsored conference called "Christianity Challenges the University" (Dallas, 1985), while all other presenters, myself included, were told, once we arrived, to cut our prepared papers in half, to fifteen minutes, Craig was given the keynote slot to expound at length on this apologetical "breakthrough." But, alas, the contradiction stands, despite Craig's efforts.
Admittedly, the notion of a "spiritual body" is a tough nut to crack. I judge it a member of the same species of theological equivocation that includes the trinity and the hypostatic union of natures. It is an oxymoron, oil and water held together by fiat, a pair of cheeks so that the enterprising theologian may turn the other whenever the one is smitten. It is Paul's all-purpose answer both to the Gnostics who scoff at a fleshly resurrection and to the literalists who dislike equally the prospect of disembodied "nakedness" (2 Corinthians 5:4) and that of entering into life maimed (Mark 9:43). But that is ever the way with apologetics. It is the art and science of covering one's butt, or one's doctrine's butt. For one does not want to be found naked (2 Corinthians 5:4).
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes
We have reached the point where Craig asks us unconvinced unbelievers to blame him, not the unassailable truth of his position. One certainly cannot call Craig a poor workman who blames his tools. No, he says the tools are fine; it must be the workman that is to blame. But this, too, is a dodge. The problem is with the tools. Craig cannot do the job because they cannot do the job. The job, in fact, cannot be done. How can we, and how does he, "know" Christianity is true if he cannot "show" it is true? For Craig to ask us to accept such a faith would be like a vacuum salesman demonstrating his product in your living room; when the machine fails to suck up any dust, he asks you not to think ill of the vacuum; it's just that he, the salesman, can't get straight how to operate it properly. But he tells you that you ought to buy it anyway! You would be a fool to buy it, and the salesman would have shown that, whatever reason he has for selling the useless vacuum, it cannot be because he has any reason to think it a superior product. Maybe somebody's just paying him to sell it. Or maybe his dad sold the same vacuums, and he's inherited the brand loyalty." |
