Reviewing POWERFUL New Evidence for a Zombie Jesus
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- Опубліковано 16 січ 2023
- Here I review a video from Sean McDowell, discussing 7 'new' pieces of evidence for the resurreciotn of Jesus. I show how all these evidences really come down to appealing to the Bible, arguments from personal incredulity, and wishful thinking. In the process I discuss biblical interpretation, how to assess ancient texts, psychological and sociological effects leading to belief formation, formation of new religious movements, and how to assess the resurrection as an explanation.
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• New Evidence for the R... - Розваги
Just starting to listen, but already the point you make about genuinely NEW resurrection arguments being unlikely is super important. I’ve long been frustrated by people branding the same old arguments as “novel” just because they’ve been arranged differently (cf. Habermas and Loke for two recent examples) and honestly I’m a bit cynical about their motivations.
James, this was epic! There are very few people to whom I would give almost three hours of my time. But you, Nathan, and Joe are always worth the watch. You’ve earned a thousand likes. And I’m giving you all my PineCreek points as well.
Love the analysis, thank you!
Great video. Thank you for explaining your own view. It was very interesting.
4:44 - Is the resurrection really that important? Jesus was supposed to be a sacrifice for sins, so isn't his DEATH the most important part of the narrative? Why does it matter if he didn't come back to life? It would mean that the disciples were mistaken, okay, but Christianity would still make sense theologically and narratively. Why all the hand-wringing about the resurrection specifically?
I think that the resurrection is meant to be speaking more to the veracity of Jesus being divine as opposed to it being necessary for the process of redemption. "How do we know Jesus was really god if he didn't resurrect bodily? He might just as well have been some random false prophet"
@@sphogliadelle - I can definitely appreciate the need for some kind of proof like that, but isn't that the purpose of Jesus's earlier miracles in the gospels? Don't those achieve basically the same thing? Like, the transfiguration for instance? Seems pretty divine to me.
Oh I agree with you, I don't see the point either, but that is what I have heard Christians reply to the question you raised. Let's just throw it on the pile of inconsistencies
@@sphogliadelle - I suppose the argument could just be, "Well, God knew the best way to convince people would be some parlor tricks and THEN a resurrection"... although I think we can both think of more convincing things, like, IDK, maybe if Jesus stayed alive for the next 2,000 years.
I’d really love to see you and Nathan cover the argument from psychophysical harmony being put forward by dustin crummett and Brian cutter. It seems to be making some buzz, and I personally don’t find it compelling. May make for a good bad apologetics episode.
My thoughts exactly. How 'bout an argument from psychophysical disharmony?
P1: If Christianity was true there wouldn't be a disharmony between what people find pleasurable doing and what they ought to do in order to be saved.
P2: There is such a disharmony.
C: Christianity is not true.
I second thatt
@@kamilgregor they say that’s just part of the problem of evil and rely on theodicy and such to deal with that.
the whole argument is contingent on the view of epiphenomenal dualism, and the existence of “psychophysical laws” none of which I find compelling.
@@kamilgregor It seems like if they reject P1 then they are rejecting heaven as well.
@@goldenalt3166 Yes, also the free will defense isn't going to work in this case because if there was a harmony, people would still (presumably) be free to sin, it would just be less enticing. It gets better when one goes into why some people find certain sinful behavior more pleasurable than others. Like, isn't that super unfair?
There actually is a platform 9 and 3/4 at Kings Cross station . When I worked at the station I used to have to point it out to kids all the time.
Yikes! At multiple points in the video, Johnston makes it sound like he went to Oxford (you even took him to be saying this at 2:33:37). But he actually went to Middlesex University for his PhD, participating in a joint program with the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies, which is located in Oxford and provides access to Oxford libraries, but does not award degrees under Oxford's name. I think he's counting on his largely american audience not understanding the UK university system to exaggerate his credentials.
From the acknowledgements in his book:
"The present monograph represents a complete revision of my doctoral dissertation written and defended under the supervision of Professor Craig A. Evans (Acadia University) and Professor Paul Foster (University of Edinburgh) in concert with extremely helpful recommendations offered from my external examiner, Professor William Telford (Durham University)."
And Telford (mentioned at 2:33:30) was at Durham, so Johnston can't even claim to be talking about Telford's affiliation when he describes him by saying "he was my examiner, in Oxford." I think he's genuinely trying to make people think he did his PhD at Oxford, when that's manifestly not true.
Also, note that in the comments of the original video Kipp Davis points out another point where Johnston launders his reputation. When Johnston talks about his SBL appearance, he was actually talking about a talk he gave at an Evangelical-run event that is held concurrently with SBL, not SBL proper.
Common with apologetics. Same with Cambridge and its theology programs
@@DigitalGnosis You'd think these folks would be more careful after the Ravi Zacharias credential fiasco.
Just like the late charlatan Ravi Zacharias did.
I was just looking at this again for a video I'm working on, and it occurred to me that Dr. J. (the lesser) says there would have been no reason for the disciples to make up the resurrection story... AFTER he's just told us that Jesus repeatedly (and one might suspect, very publicly) predicted his death and resurrection. If they didn't want Jesus to be seen as a false prophet, then he had best be risen! And I don't think that even had to be part of any conscious, deceptive thought process. Such predictions could have inspired the genuine grief hallucination of one of the disciples.
4:15 Exactly. Apologetics is an evolutionary process of duplication with random modification.
I love your content and agree with you so much . Not just this guy but Christians love to claim that it’s impossible/implausible for the disciples to believe Jesus was resurrected and they never provide any defense of it, other than just an appeal to culture but as you pointed out we have explames of that happening in other reglions , such as Mormonism or the Ba Hai, which the challenged the Islamic orthodoxy in Iran, and both those reglions were heavily presucted as well
1:38:52 "Craig Keener... he's a classicist... he's a true classicist!"
Craig Keener received his PhD from a department of religious studies. He teaches at a seminary, and not in a classics department. To my knowledge, Keener has only ever held faculty positions at seminaries, never in secular universities and never in classics departments (I don't even know if Keener has ever taught at an institution that contains a classics department). To my knowledge, he has never published a book in classics. To my knowledge, he has never published an article in a classics journal (here I am going off an old version of his website where he arranged his publications by journal and most are in theology journals or biblical studies journals).
So WHY ON EARTH would you call Keener "a true classicist"? Looks like reputation laundering to me.
And just think: If someone in the modern world with a PhD exaggerates their heroes like this while they’re still alive and can fact check it, how might that work with ancient authors writing about their heroes forty years after their death?
Also, Classicists technically operate under methological naturalism. Or at least I've never met any Greek or Roman neo-pagan Classicists.
@@kamilgregor Are you saying classics has anti-zeus bias?
@@mf_hume They are denying Zeus in their own unrighteousness
You asked to be corrected about there not being any distinction between resuscitation (or revivification) and resurrection in the Gospels or early Christian sources. Ok then.
Even though there isn't a distinction in terms of vocabulary used, there is a conceptual distinction. In Luke and John, resurrected Jesus is depicted as having supernatural powers, e.g. the ability to appear and disappear or the ability to switch between becoming unrecognizable and recognizable. But none of the people Jesus revivies demonstrate anything like that. This is in line with a difference between revivification and divine translation in Greco-Roman culture. There were ordinary people who were brought back from the dead by a god (e.g. in temples of Asclepius) and they too continued to be normal people. But then there were figures who were believed to be or become divine beings and who relocate to a divine realm after their death (so their body often turns missing). Some of them then appear to people. Many of the supernatural powers which resurrected Jesus manifests are also found in stories about appearances of Greco-Roman divine beings.
That being said, Mark (who of course doesn't have resurrection appearances) says in 6:14: "King Herod heard about this, for Jesus’ name had become well known. Some were saying, “John the Baptist has been raised from the dead, and that is why miraculous powers are at work in him.”
Think about it. The Gospel depicts Jews who learn there's a figure with miraculous powers. And how do they explain this? One of their explanations is that he is John the Baptist raised from the dead and that's why he has miraculous powers. So apparently the rationale is that once you are raised, you get miraculous powers. Of course, it's not explicitly stated which of the two senses of a resurrection is meant here.
Jesus already had powers before dying though, so I'm not sure how him powers after resurrection shows that the process itself is different. Anyway my point is just that there is no differentiation made in the text itself, not that no distinction can be drawn. You seen to have agreed with this point.
@@JamesFodor That's a good point. Another difference is what happens with Jesus after his resurrection. He doesn't go on to live on Earth, settle down and have kids.
On the note about motivated reasoning at the end, I actually find Christian theology pretty horrific. On a personal level if you believe you're saved that probably makes you feel pretty special. But on a systemic level it's pretty awful. Let's just throw out eternal conscious torment right off the bat because that's pretty indefensible and assume a kinder annihilationist view. Annihilation must be worse than heaven or the whole theology would be nonsensical. So God created the universe and us knowing that some fraction of us will just be annihilated and not reach the paradise He apparently wants for us? That's already pretty pathetic from a supposed omnipotent being. But it gets worse because every version of Christianity I'm familiar with seems completely incompatible with a meaningful version of free will. A compatibilist version of free will doesn't cut it when you're being judged for your choices by the being who created you and also created the entire environment that influences you. And true libertarian free will would make it impossible for God to predict the future making it incompatible with Christian notions of prophecy. Libertarian free will has a bunch of other problems that make it pretty incoherent anyway.
So, you could be a universalist. But then the whole thing kind of seems pointless. There's a ton of suffering in this life and then everyone is saved anyway including the worst people who were the cause of enormous amounts of suffering. What was the point in creating all this suffering? Again, pretty nonsensical for an omnipotent being.
When understood in a broad context, it seems almost sociopathic to think this is a good system because it means you'll be saved without considering what it means for everyone.
It is, by far, more likely that Mark is a complete work of fiction. Even allowing for the style of "actual historical event" writing of the day wouldn't get you to something written as Mark is. It is written as a typical fictional piece about a man who might become elevated to the status of a god, as was popular in the region, at the time.
We have the omniscient, omnipresent narrator, we have our hero, a guy who _might_ have become a demi-god at the climax of the story; the original ending with the women running away from the tomb _telling no one_ is a deliberately ambiguous ending.
There are elements that don't make any sense except to further a plot, for example, why are the women going to the tomb again? Is it so that they can discuss that they're kinda too weak to open the tomb themselves, it's petty big and heavy, It sure does seem like it.
Well, what are the odds of that?! The tomb is already open - it's a good job we have made a point to make the tomb being open seem like it would be a surprising thing to happen upon. This point would not have the same "mystery" about it, if two men were to have discovered it open; the unremarkable nature of it being open would cause the ambiguity at the end to lose a bit of it's mystery if 'couple of guys came over, ran off with the body' was an obvious option.
The original ending is the most obvious clue that this was not meant to be believed as an actual event. His characters run away, scared and tell no one. Bam, done.
The inclusion of that bit, alone should be enough to dismiss the idea of this ever being a claim to historical event.
Johnston's is misleading and/or, lying to his audience when he claims that there is a conflict between the scholars he is referencing and Bart Ehrman. When the Bible gets the little details it mentions regarding a Tomb Burial correct with regard to Jewish Burial customs, this does not mean that him being buried in a mass grave or individual criminal grave would have not been more likely and more fitting both to the Roman and Jewish practices.
Tomb burials did happen, and the Jews had certain customs regarding this. Duh. Getting the details correct regarding this does not make it true that Jesus was buried in a Tomb. It would not mean that it would not have been more probable according to Roman and Jewish customs to bury the criminal Jesus like a criminal and not in the family tomb of an aristocrat. It just means the Authors got those details correct. Fictional works getting the details of mundane customs and events correct even if the events they are describing did not actually happen is common.
1:59:15 the names Matthew, Luke, Mark, and John were added later. Are those made up?
Not only are the seven arguments "old news," but they cherry pick to come up with seven (kind of like Stephen Covey, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Persons); just why aren't there 6 or 8? Another number they aim to arrive at is twelve, since both 7 and 12 are frequent numbers in the Bible.
Where do I go for some strong arguments in favour of God?
I usually see weak ones.
They make Christianity SOUND so intellectual that’s why the content doesn’t matter to them.
29:42 onwards - the guy mentions the Dead Sea Scrolls and makes it seem like Jewish Messianic beliefs were uniform and all agreed on the same thing in regards to what type of Messiah Jews expected. This is not the case as Jewish beliefs were diverse. In John J. Collins The Scepter and the Star, he shows some Jews expected a "prophetic Messiah." This figure _is mentioned_ in the Dead Sea Scrolls document 4Q521 where the he's connected with "wondrous deeds," one of which was "reviving of the dead." While it doesn't say the Messiah was expected to die, the tradition is actually quoted in Matthew 11:2-5 and Luke 7:22, showing that the composers of these stories were trying to associate Jesus with this "prophetic Messiah" expectation.
So what we have here is a pre-existing tradition associating a Messiah figure with "reviving of the dead" in some form or another and the exact same tradition being quoted in the gospels. There is also the story about a resurrected John the Baptist - Mk. 6:14-16 which shows Jesus evidently wasn't the only individual prophet type figure to gain a resurrection claim about him after his unjust execution.
Seven is the number of YHWH.
1:30:00 Maybe I am missing something here, but surely the early followers of Jesus were not really Jews in the traditional religious sense any more. Jesus taught a lot of things that went against traditional Judaism, so why should we assume that this other claim, that someone could rise from the dead, that also went against traditional Judaism would be too much for them? Assuming the stories are true for a moment they had already seen several people come back from the dead, this would have clearly been something they believed could have happened.
How does McDowell not see apologetics for what it is at this point 🤦♂️
I find it very irritating when someone mixes "X is true" with "believing X is true can result in good things". But that's the core thing in Christianity, right: You can believe things into reality? The total absence of psychology in Christianity is astounding. But the study of psychological phenomena only goes back to the 19th century, so...
Good and bad are RELATIVE. 😉
Incidentally, Slave, are you VEGAN? 🌱
@@SpiritualPsychotherapyServices
The person stating the obvious again? I am not sure about the "spiritual" aspect, but you could consider psychotherapy. It may be worth a try!
@@NN-wc7dl, kindly repeat that in ENGLISH, Miss.☝️
Incidentally, Slave, are you VEGAN? 🌱
@@SpiritualPsychotherapyServices
TRY PSYCHOTHERAPY!
Western Christianity, Evangelicalism in particular, rots the intellect.
The fact that they start by stating that Christianity is a fairy tale without a physical resurrection tells us that they have a major motivation to prove it and the Christian audience is incentivized to believe whatever so-called evidence the apologists provide.
So what exactly is laughable about God using the cross to speak to his people again? I mean he is God, he can do anything he want and communicate anyway he wants, right? It also would not habe been the first time he would have used objects to communicate through. The burning bush would have been another instance of him doing so. So there would be reason to think he could do it again. Under their wordview there is nothing to say this wouldnt have happened.