But these people have no way of knowing whether their beliefs are true or false. If you claim that someone has been raised from the dead and that you have seen him, you know whether you are saying the truth or not.
So the suicide bomber example (which is an example often brought by the materialists) is absolutely different (and also quite stupid but I’m confident you already know this as I have a very high opinion of your intellect).
Then one would need a very strong explanation for why they would fabricate the story of the empty tomb and make women its principal witnesses, given that women were widely regarded at the time as unreliable witnesses. If the account was invented in order to convince others (and there would be no other reason to fabricate the story of the empty tomb), that choice would be very difficult to explain, to say the least.
They would have been undermining their own case. Who would scripturalize an account while retaining an element (the women) that, in that cultural context, would have made it seem less credible?
Well, one would first have to ask why they believed that. What happened that led them to believe it? They were not preaching second-hand testimony; they were preaching what they said they themselves had seen and touched.
But if they were lying, then they were also choosing to live lives of hardship and to risk death for something they knew to be false, with nothing to gain in merely human terms.
And if they were sincere, then another question arises: is what they claimed to have seen actually compatible with what we know about hallucinations? Do hallucinations really work that way? It certainly does not seem so. *
What we do know is that the Pauline creed in 1 Corinthians 15 is extremely early. Many scholars date it to within just a few years of the crucifixion, and they accept that it was a tradition Paul received rather than something he himself invented (so the “legendary development” when it comes to Jesus’ resurrection can be safely discarded).
*And this brings us back to the problem I raised in the other thread: the massive blow that spiritual epistemology would suffer if consciousness were shown to be entirely material. For that would mean that billions of people—sane people, with no mental illness and no substance abuse—were simply experiencing delusions or mental fabrications whenever they believed they had encountered the spirit of a deceased relative or friend. And that would inevitably cast doubt on the apostolic witness as well. If billions of human beings can be deceived so deeply by their own brains, then it would become entirely plausible to claim that the apostles too were deluded, even if their delusion, on this view, would have been more radical still, since they claimed not merely to have seen a spirit, but to have witnessed a resurrection: a man raised in a glorified body
That’s exactly my point.
By all means, show me when I’ve overstated, understated, begged the question and resorted to special pleading. It would be greatly appreciated as those would be errors and I’m ready to stand corrected. :))
His point would be correct if I were claiming that we possess bulletproof evidence that Peter was martyred specifically for refusing to renounce his faith. But I have never claimed that. I have only argued that it is REASONABLE to say he was martyred for his faith, since modern historians accept the historicity of his death, along with that of Paul and James, and since the sources we possess indicate that Christians were often given the opportunity to recant.
That does not mean it is absolutely proven that Peter himself was offered that choice. It means, rather, that it is REASONABLE to think he was, because we DO have evidence of persecuted Christians in that era being given that option. Even historians such as G. E. M. de Ste. Croix have argued that Pliny was likely referring to earlier practices .
In short, we have evidence that Christians were allowed to recant; we do not have equivalent evidence that they were routinely executed at once even if they did recant. That is why it is reasonable to say that the apostles were most likely given the same chance. The contrary view is still possible, but it does not stand on equal evidential footing.
Again: REASONABLE. Citing from here REASONABLE Definition & Meaning | Dictionary.com
“reasonable
AMERICAN
[ree-zuh-nuh-buhl, reez-nuh-]/ ˈri zə nə bəl, ˈriz nə- /
agreeable to reason or sound judgment; logical.
a reasonable choice for chairman.
Synonyms:
not exceeding the limit prescribed by reason; not excessive.”
Besides which if they were killed for supporting a movement it would be more useful to have recantations than just their deaths.
Yes. Which adds to the “reasonable” claim I was making.
This does not rule out Peter confusing mythical experiences or visions for a physical resurrection. We can’t actually question Peter. This is projecting. We only offer a historical opinion based on the reports of others that Peter was given a resurrection appearance and was a pillar in the early Church. We have no first-hand reports of what he or any of the 11 apostles actually saw or experienced (unless you first successfully argue for traditional authorship of which the critical consensus sides against). Whatever happened was enough to convince him Jesus rose. Exactly what happened, whether the gospel narratives involving him and John running to tomb on the “third day” and Jesus showing up later in a locked room or letting Thomas touch his holes represent factual history is a debatable point and it’s not all or nothing. It may be that the appearance to Peter was just like Paul or it may have occurred as the gospels narrate. My point here is when you make this argument, I think you are also assuming that what the gospels narrate is factual.
From a critical standpoint, the earliest material we have --the author and date of which is not contested-- is from Paul and all he tells us Jesus appeared to Peter–a person we know that he met. We don’t know much else form that. Unless we can establish traditional authorship we can’t say the same for the Gospel authors. We wouldn’t know who wrote them and where for sure. Not to mention some think the appearance stories contradict (Jerusalem or Galilee after Jesus died?) or even compete such as Jerusalem/Galilee and John 21 possibly indicate appearance stories circulating where enough time had passed the disciples had returned to their previous way of life before Jesus appeared to them?
So when apologists make this claim that Peter could know for certain they also seem to be claiming the appearances stories in the Gospels are fully history, harmonious —which may be true— but this needs to be established. I think they underestimate the difficulty in doing this.
You have not established Peter could know this for certain. You have assumed it. We don’t know for certain all the details surrounding Peter’s own experience because we have to reconstruct it from other sources and do so using probability based arguments that requires making numerous other arguments about the dating, authorship and historical accuracy of certain gospel details. Father Brown didn’t write a 1600 page, two-volume Death of the Messiah (which I have) because reconstructing the passion narratives in the gospels are simple or lend themselves to easy apologetics for most critical scholars. So it really boils down to the prior question of how we treat the gopels: traditional authors or works from a generation later by anonymous Christians?
I have already mentioned that women could have gone looking for Jesus and not found him. This could have happened 3 days later or a few weeks after. This needs not be invented from whole cloth. The tomb itself could exist and not necessarily be a kingly one with a rolling stone, it might have been a common one for burying criminals around a festival. But I do not approach any story from history with an all or nothing cartesian dualism. I also cannot just assume the gospel chronology must be accurate.
Many historians have looked at the women at the tomb and concluded the evidence just isn’t as strong as some historians make it. Women were extremely influential in the early church (one is even called a prominent apostle!) which means in the circles this was potentially created in, it wouldn’t have been that much of a problem. Not every work has to be considered some grand masterpiece intent on fooling the world. For example, if the empty tomb story was created whole cloth by Mark ca 75, Christianity existed for 40 or so years without it. Why there would be such a dire need to avoid using women, who were just a historical force in the early church, is not as strong as sometimes thought. It may be that the role of women in the Christian ministry was just a historical reality and that could naturally carry over to any fiction because the authors were not worried about offending or aligning with our modern sensibilities.
But I don’t adopt this posture. I think the women is an argument in favor of historicity but it is only one piece of data. It doesn’t show that the entire story is accurate, or that there were guards, earthquakes, “zombies” entering Jerusalem or that Jesus was buried in a brand new, kingly tomb. The disciples not looking great is another but that opens up other cans of worms.
That wasn’t intended for you. It’s the generic claim witnessed online in conservative circles.
Vinnie: Do we even know that Peter had the option to recant and be saved on the day he died? He may have been executed merely by virtue of being a Christian on that fateful day.
@1Cor15.54 He may have been, but since other Christians were in fact given the opportunity to recant, claiming that Peter specifically was not, or that we have absolutely nothing to say that he was granted the option to recant, is merely an ad hoc hypothesis.
A lack of evidence is a lack of evidence. We cannot say Peter was issued a chance to retract and live nor can we say that he was not. If you have no evidence this is true of Peter’s specific situation then you have no evidence either way. This is the problem with historical studies in general and it applies to the highly credentialed ones as well. We know that the vast majority of the population couldn’t read, therefore Jesus most likely couldn’t read. We could all say, many Christians were allowed the chance to recant and be spared, thus Peter was allowed the same option. Neither one of these is good history to me. If you want to reconstruct a historical individual you need specific evidence. If you want to reconstruct life in general that is fine. But we shouldn’t mix the two.
A complete absence of relevant evidence to the specific historical situations of the specific historical apostles who lived at a specific historical time and died in specific historical ways has nothing to do with later Christians generically being told to recant or die. It may. But this connection should not be assumed by good history. For example, Nero used Christians in Rome as scapegoats over the great fire. This does not easily lend itself to “repents and I’ll spare you.” It’s a “You are one of these despised people that started the fire and I’m putting the blame on you to save myself. Off to the lions.”
It is a valid possibility for which we cannot give an answer. Most historical questions end with a verdict of non liquet.
I point out errors on all sides. I just go for what seems true and criticize everything else. I think critical scholarship gets a lot wrong.
Vinnie
That’s one meaty reply. I’ll get back to you. :))
Actually I’m thinking more about 1 Cor 15,3-11, which far predates the Gospels.
“For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sinsaccording to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third dayaccording to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve.After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born. For I am the least of the apostles and do not even deserve to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them—yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me. Whether, then, it is I or they,this is what we preach, and this is what you believed.”
Paul explicitly presents the material in 1 Corinthians 15 as something handed down to him, not something created by him. Wright calls paredoka and parelabon ‘technical terms for the receiving and handing on of tradition’ (The Resurrection of the Son of God, 319), and Fitzmyer likewise says that Paul “again makes use of the technical Greek terms for tradition” (First Corinthians, 545). In other words, the burden of proof is on anyone who claims Paul invented the creed, not on those who take his words seriously.
And the content of that creed is not a vague claim about Jesus’ spirit living on. Ware notes the “almost universal scholarly consensus” that 1 Corinthians 15:3–5 preserves pre-Pauline tradition, and he concludes that its meaning is the resurrection of Jesus’ “crucified body from the tomb” (New Testament Studies 60.4 [2014]: 475, 497). So this is not Paul inventing a late spiritualized myth. It is Paul passing on an earlier resurrection tradition, and that tradition is about resurrection in the proper Jewish sense, not mere post-mortem spiritual survival.
And I’m saying this because the language Paul uses is not the language of a merely inward or disembodied survival. John Granger Cook argues that the resurrection verbs ἀνίστημι and ἐγείρω, when used for resurrection, “imply a physical movement upward,” and he explicitly adds that “physical resurrection” is “consistent with a transformation of the earthly body” into a σῶμα πνευματικόν. In other words, for Paul, a “spiritual body” is not a spirit; it is a transformed body (John Granger Cook, “Resurrection in Paganism and the Question of an Empty Tomb in 1 Corinthians 15,” New Testament Studies 63 [2017]: 57, 57).
Ware’s conclusion is even more direct. He argues that “the semantics” of ἐγείρω in this context entail bodily restoration, and that it is “not a possible inference from the Greek wording of this ancient formula” that Paul meant a non-bodily exaltation. On the contrary, in Ware’s words, the pre-Pauline confession affirms “the resurrection of Jesus’ crucified body from the tomb” (Ware, New Testament Studies 60 [2014]: 497).
This is also why Wolfhart Pannenberg could say that those who deny the empty tomb must show that Jewish resurrection belief could exclude the body in the tomb, and he therefore calls the empty tomb “a self-evident implication of what was said about the resurrection of Jesus” (Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, vol. 2 [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994], 358–59, quoted in Ware, NTS 60 [2014]: 489).
So this is not Paul speaking of a vague spiritual afterlife. It is Paul transmitting an earlier formula and using resurrection language that, in its Jewish and linguistic context, points to bodily resurrection ( transformed and glorified, not merely resuscitated).
So the point is this: Paul was not inventing something new, but passing on a creed that predated him. As James D. G. Dunn writes: “This tradition, we can be entirely confident, was formulated as tradition within months of Jesus’ death” (Jesus Remembered [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003], 854–55).
And this creed speaks of bodily resurrection, not merely of a spiritual appearance; Peter is explicitly named in it. So on what basis should we suppose that Peter reasonably believed something different from what this tradition already affirms, a tradition that arose within months of Jesus’ death?
Paul was a Pharisee per his own words. I take it that means he believed in the bodily resurrection of the dead. I find little to disagree with but I just have to repeat:
This does not rule out Peter confusing mythical experiences or visions for a physical resurrection. We would expect Paul to be handing on the traditions the way he does in either case. Whether Jesus physically rose or they thought he physically rose.
Vinnie
Of course women could be important figures in the early church; nobody needs to deny that. But that is not the real historical question. The question is whether, in the first-century Jewish and wider Mediterranean world, making women the primary witnesses to the empty tomb strengthened the public credibility of the claim. It plainly did not. Josephus states, “let not the testimony of women be admitted” (Antiquities 4.219). And even a later pagan critic like Celsus mocked the resurrection claim as resting on “a hysterical female” (Contra Celsum 2.55). So the issue is not whether women mattered in Christian communities; it is whether female testimony carried the same evidential force in that culture. It did not.
More importantly, even critical scholars who are far from simplistic apologetics recognize that the presence of women here is historically awkward, not convenient. Dale Allison writes: “Surely adherents of Jesus were not helping themselves when they admitted that women were the only firsthand human witnesses to some of the events of Easter morning” (Resurrecting Jesus: The Earliest Christian Tradition and Its Interpreters [London/New York: T&T Clark, 2005], p. 329). He then immediately notes that “Later tradition shows a clear tendency to have the disciples at least confirm the women’s discovery afterwards” (same book, p. 330, quoting Wilckens). That is exactly the point: later retellings tend to bring male disciples in alongside the women, which is what one would expect if the older tradition was too well established to erase, but still needed apologetic reinforcement.
And Allison goes further. He explicitly rejects the common skeptical reply that the women are there simply because, once the male disciples had fled, they were the only available characters. His words are blunt: “This response is inadequate” (Resurrecting Jesus, p. 330). Why? Because if the story were freely invented, the tradition could easily have brought Peter back onstage, or Joseph of Arimathea, or other male figures. Allison even asks, in substance, why Christian legend would create a story with Mary Magdalene at the tomb rather than one in which the disciples return and discover it themselves (pp. 330–31). In other words, the “women were influential in the church, so this would not matter” reply simply does not explain why a fabricated story would choose the more vulnerable form when easier and more persuasive alternatives were available.
Richard Bauckham makes the same problem even sharper from another angle. He argues that in the Synoptics “the role of the women as eyewitnesses is crucial” because “they see Jesus die, they see his body being laid in the tomb, they find the tomb empty” (Jesus and the Eyewitnesses [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006], p. 48). He adds that “none of the male disciples witnessed the burial or the empty tomb” (p. 49). That is not how one normally writes edifying fiction. It is how one preserves an inconvenient memory because those were the people who were actually there.
So the issue is not whether women were significant in early Christianity, because they were. The issue is whether that fact neutralizes the historical awkwardness of making them the first and primary witnesses to the empty tomb and I argue that if does not. The ancient evidence cuts the other way, and even careful modern historians such as Allison and Bauckham do not treat this feature as trivial or easily explained away.
But I’m not claiming “many Christians were allowed the chance to recant and be spared, thus Peter was allowed the same option. ”
I’m claiming “many Christians were allowed the chance to recant and be spared, thus it’s REASONABLE to believe that Peter was allowed the same option. “
This is entirely different.
If we possessed evidences that Christians were NOT allowed to recant their faith in order to be saved would you disagree with someone claiming “most Christians weren’t given any chance to recant and be spared, thus it’s REASONABLE to believe that Peter didn’t have any chance to survive”? No, you wouldn’t. But, since you grew up in a post-enlightenment age just like me, you have been conditioned to give anti-apologetic views an edge that sometimes they simply don’t have. :))
But he was included in the ancient creed of 1 Cor 15 that ruled out merely spiritual apparitions. So why should we assume that Peter may have had experiences that contradicted that creed that originated within months of Jesus’ death? I mean, I’m not saying that it’s intrinsically impossible but it just seems a very unnecessary hypothesis.
As I have already shown, some historians consider the practice mentioned by Pliny (giving Christians the opportunity to recant) not to have been a mere novelty. But there is a further problem: why would it have made sense simply to kill Peter and Paul instead of trying to compel them to apostasize, thereby strangling Christianity in its cradle?
Surely Nero was not concerned that, by eliminating Christianity too effectively, he might deprive himself of future scapegoats. :)))))
I would say you are overstating the importance of the women which varies in each gospel. Even if the women were first in finding the tomb, as they should be-- given it was a woman’s job to prepare the body, the male disciples still see Jesus (e.g. in John). He appears the them, speaks to them, eats with them, etc. The story of the women could just be good story (the first will be last), historical reality or something more. That men substantiate the resurrection of Jesus is not in doubt in most of the Gospels. Mark can be an oddball.
Not could be. Were. It is objective fact. And it is a real historical question. The women being first to the tomb could have come about for a plethora of reasons.
And yet a woman’s testimony could be valuable:
John 4:39: >39 Many Samaritans from that city believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me everything I have ever done.” 40 So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them, and he stayed there two days. 41 And many more believed because of his word. 42 They said to the woman, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Savior of the world.”
I am as far from a fan of Richard Carrier as they come but he did temper my view on women in antiquity. I think it’s a mixed bag.
Also, the gospels were not written for a court of law or even necessarily being used to convince the outside world of Christian claims. That is anachronistic on your part and needs to be argued at the minimum. I suspect oral preaching was the chief mode of that when the gospels were being written. I think the Gospels were primarily written to Christians. Ehrman writes:
I think a major flaw in the argument is the assumption that the stories of the women going to the tomb were told in order to “convince” people that Jesus was raised from the dead (and that since they were intended to convince others, they could not have been “invented,” since no one would invent such a story with women as the main players). But why should we assume that the stories were meant to convince anyone? The entire idea that the Gospels, for example, were evangelistic or missionary treatises written in order to convert outsiders to the faith has fallen, rightly, to the wayside. These books were not written for outsiders to convert them. They were written for insiders, members of Christian communities, in order to instruct, edify, and encourage them. So no one is saying that these stories were invented for the purposes of converting others (making the claim that no one would invent stories like this completely irrelevant).
As I noted, if Mark invented the details of the empty tomb, Christianity was just fine without them for 40+ years. Not to mention given the prominence of women in the early church, maybe they invented the idea of women going to tomb and Mark simply adopted that view in constructing his own passion narrative. Ehrman again:
The first thing to point out is that we are not talking about a Jewish court of law in which witnesses are being called to testify. We’re talking about oral traditions about the man Jesus. But who would invent women as witnesses to the empty tomb? Well, for openers, maybe women would. We have good reasons for thinking that women were particularly well represented in the early Christian communities. We know from the letters of Paul – from passages such as Romans 16 – that women played crucial leadership roles in the churches: ministering as deacons, leading the services in their homes, engaging in missionary activities. Paul speaks of one woman in the Roman church as “foremost among the apostles” (Junia in Rom. 16:8). Women are also reputed to have figured prominently in Jesus’ own ministry, throughout the Gospels. That may well have been the case, historically. But in any event, there is nothing at all implausible in thinking that women who found their newfound Christian communities personally liberating told stories about Jesus in light of their own situations, so that women were portrayed as playing an even greater part in the life and death of Jesus than they actually did, historically. It does not take a great deal of imagination to think that female storytellers indicated that women were the first to believe, after finding that his tomb was empty.
In addition, women going to the tomb makes perfect sense historically: Ehrman again:
Moreover, this claim that it was specifically women who found the empty tomb makes the best sense of the realities of history. Preparing bodies for burial was commonly the work of women, not men. And so why wouldn’t the stories tell of women who went to prepare the body? Moreover, if, in the stories, they’re the ones who went to the tomb to anoint the body, naturally they would be the ones who found the tomb empty.
The other argument is everyone knew the male disciples had fled and gone into hiding So they obviously couldn’t go to the tomb on the third day. For Mark, the only option might have been the women since the apostles were well on there way back to Galilee at the time. Allison’s argument is that if Mark is making up details he could make up whatever he wanted. But I’m not sure why having men who everyone knew abandoned Jesus suddenly show up would be better than him having the women go to the tomb.
Mark is doing a lot of things, and one of them might be roasting the apostles. He seems far more interested in this than proving the details of his tomb story. In fact, them fleeing and the women discovering plays into his apostolic blunders view quite well.
It is reasonable to believe Jesus couldn’t read because 90% of the Jews at the time could not. That is true and it’s not unreasonable to think any Christian was given the chance to recant. Something being reasonable is not the same as saying it is historical. For me, either there is historical evidence Peter was given this chance or there is not. If there is not then we just don’t know. Parsimonious does not equal historical.
But, since you grew up in a post-enlightenment age just like me, you have been conditioned to give anti-apologetic views an edge that sometimes they simply don’t have. :))
There is no apologetic here. There is no evidence about how Peter was arrestied, tried and condemned. Since we possess no information about Peter’s specific circumstances, there is nothing concrete we can say about them. We can only make speculations. Maybe he was given the chance to recant, maybe he was not. I simply refuse to make up and answer and reject every attempt to do so on both sides
Months is a possibility but not one that can be established. And even Ehrman things they accepted a physical resurrection. You just have not parsed between them having visions they think was a physical resurrection and an actual one.
Pliny writes 60 years later in a different region. People do things that don’t make sense to others all the time. That is not how a good historical methodology works.
Vinnie
P.s
I’m sure you know that one of the most common anti-Christian claims is that Paul was the inventor of Christianity and that he believed in a merely “spiritual” Christ (which then they later link to his visionary experience on the road to Damascus, thereby reducing the birth of Christianity to one merely visionary experience of a single individual), with the Gospel being nothing more than later “embellished” constructions. So showing that Paul affirmed a real and corporeal resurrection of Christ in a glorified body is not irrelevant. And we have no reasons to believe that Peter had merely visionary experiences either, because he has been mentioned in the earliest passage of an extremely ancient creed (born within months of Jesusm death) that certainly was not taking about a “spirit only resurrection”.
It is a stupid and uninformed claim.
Again, the skeptic will claim Christians had visions and mystical experiences. The Christians thought these were physical resurrections of Jesus. They treated them as such. The creed you mentioned looks the same in both of these cases.
Vinnie
I know. But it’s also very much used.
Which is what I was talking about: they treated them as such from the very beginning, so the claim that Christianity rose from merely visionary experiences that were later on embellished with accounts of a bodily resurrection are simply anti-Christian claims, not historical ones.
P.s: I will address your last post soon. :))
Again, I am not presenting my views. Just the idea that the women argument is often overstated. I think it supports some form of historicity all things considered. It is just not the smoking gun in my mind it is made out to be and it requires discussing 43 other issues.
I mostly agree with this, but there are some more things to be said, I’ll be back later. ;))
Vinnie, you are right that the issue is not whether women appear alone in the entire Easter tradition. In several Gospels, male disciples do later see Jesus. But that doesn’t not the historical significance of the women at the tomb, because the relevant question is not who appears later in the narrative, but who is placed at the decisive starting point of the empty tomb tradition.
That women may have had a practical reason to visit the tomb does explain their presence, but it does not explain why a fabricated story would preserve them as the first discoverers of the empty tomb, especially when their report is initially not believed. In fact, the tradition does not merely say that women happened to be nearby, It gives them the crucial narrative role at the point where the tomb is first found empty. That is precisely the point that later apologetic instinct might have wanted to smooth out, not foreground.
And this is where your appeal to later male appearances does not really solve the problem: yes, men later see Jesus in several accounts, but that looks less like the women being unimportant and more like a secondary strengthening of a tradition whose awkward starting point could not simply be erased. In other words, the later male appearances do not cancel the force of the women at the tomb; they may actually show an understandable tendency to reinforce an already inherited tradition.
So the argument is not that the women alone prove the resurrection. The argument is narrower: if the empty tomb story were freely invented, the choice to place women at the head of it remains historically awkward and therefore still carries evidential weight, even if later male appearances are added.
Ok but this still doesn’t entail explanatory adequacy. Of course there are many possible reasons why women are first at the tomb.
Saying “women were important in the early Church” makes the detail possible; it does not make it the most natural literary choice.
Your reply actually contains several different explanations, some of them are yours: that women really were important in early Christianity, that women would naturally be the ones to go to the tomb, and that Mark may be using the scene to underline the failure of the male disciples.
Others come from Ehrman, especially the claim that the women-at-the-tomb tradition need not have been created to persuade outsiders, since the Gospels were primarily written for insiders.
Now, I am happy to grant part of that. If the argument were simply, “No one would ever invent women in such a story because they wanted to convince the outside world,” then yes, that would be too crude. But that is not the strongest form of the argument.
The real question is not whether one can imagine reasons why women appear in the story, imho, the real question is whether those reasons adequately explain why women remain at the head of the empty-tomb tradition, rather than the tradition being reshaped around male apostolic witnesses from the outset.
And here I think your reply falls short. Saying that women prepared bodies explains why women might go to the tomb. It does not yet explain why the tradition preserved them as the first discoverers of the empty tomb. Saying that the Gospels were written for insiders also does not settle the matter, because texts written for insiders are not thereby unconcerned with memory, authority, or plausibility within the community. Nor does appealing to Mark’s interest in criticizing the disciples fully explain why this particular tradition, rather than some other literary arrangement, became the one that was preserved.
In other words, you have offered several possible explanations, but possibility is not the same thing as explanatory adequacy. The issue is not whether the women-at-the-tomb tradition could have arisen for various literary, social, or theological reasons. The issue is whether those reasons explain it better than the simpler possibility that the tradition preserved an inconvenient feature because that is how the memory was actually handed down.
I agree that “reasonable” is not the same thing as “absolutely proven.” I never claimed otherwise.
But historians very often argue that something is historically credible, not because they possess direct documentation for every detail, but because it is the most reasonable inference from the available evidence.
C. Behan McCullagh makes exactly this point: “it is often reasonable to believe that historical descriptions are true” (The Logic of History: Putting Postmodernism in Perspective [London/New York: Routledge, 2004], p. 53). And he immediately adds that historians “cannot prove the absolute truth of their descriptions,” but they can still give “reasons for believing them to be true” (p. 53).
So my claim is not: “we have direct documentary proof that Peter was explicitly offered the chance to recant.” My claim is: since we know that Christians were in many cases given that option, it is historically reasonable to think Peter may well have been too. That is not certainty and it cannot be affirmed as an historical fact; but it is not totally arbitrary speculation either.
Your analogy about Jesus’ literacy is weaker, because that is little more than a bare population-level guess. Mine is not based merely on a demographic probability, but on an attested persecutory pattern.
And yes, parsimony does matter here. It is not a magic proof, but it is one of the normal criteria historians use when comparing explanations. McCullagh explicitly says that when historians infer to the best explanation, one relevant criterion is that a hypothesis “must not include additional ad hoc components” (The Logic of History, p. 62). Aviezer Tucker likewise writes that, in historiography, “according to inference to the best explanation, explanations are chosen through mutual comparisons” and competing explanations are assessed by “external criteria” (Our Knowledge of the Past: A Philosophy of Historiography [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004], p. 186).
So no, parsimonious does not automatically equal historical. But neither is it historically irrelevant. A less ad hoc explanation is, other things being equal, methodologically preferable to a more ad hoc one. That is not apologetics; that is ordinary historical reasoning.
In short: I am not claiming certainty. I am claiming historical reasonableness. And in historical method, that is a perfectly legitimate claim.
Look Vinnie, we have two different questions here. One question is what Peter believed, the other is whether what Peter believed was objectively true.
My point was the first, not the second.
If the pre-Pauline creed in 1 Corinthians 15 already includes Peter within a very early bodily-resurrection tradition (and I have shown that Paul was talking about a bodily resurrection from the very beginning), then the burden of proof is on anyone who wants to suggest that Peter’s own experiences were originally understood in a merely spiritual sense and only later reinterpreted physically.
Of course, one may still argue that Peter and the others had visions which they interpreted as a bodily resurrection when no actual bodily resurrection occurred. But that is a different claim. It does not show that Peter believed in “mere spiritual apparitions.”
So the issue is not whether a mistaken bodily-resurrection belief is conceivable. Of course it is conceivable (even if i think it’s greatly problematic, especially for the materialists because hallucinations don’t work like this as far as we know), otherwise Christianity would be “proven” and no faith would be required. The issue is whether there is any good historical reason to think Peter originally believed something less than what the early creed already says. And that is what I do not see. Like, at all.
Pliny is indeed writing about a later period and a different province, I have never denied that. My point is not that Pliny gives us direct documentary proof for what happened to Peter and Paul in Rome under Nero. My point is narrower: Pliny provides evidence that offering Christians the chance to recant was an attested Roman practice, and some historians do not regard it as a mere local novelty.
So the issue is not whether we can prove that Peter and Paul were offered that choice, we cannot do that, that’s established. The issue is whether it is historically reasonable to infer that they may well have been, given that we do have evidence of such a practice and no equally strong evidence that high-profile Christians were normally denied it. I’m not making an “hard” historical claim about this, mind you. I’m merely claiming reasonableness. And as I have shown above, parsimony have its value. :)))
And the fact that 75% of historians accept the historicity of the empty tomb says something.
From Here Empty Tomb of Jesus
“In his study of 1,400 scholars (in English, French, and German), Dr. Gary Habermas found that ~75% affirmed the empty tomb. Why do these critical and highly credentialed historians affirm the empty tomb?”
The fact that so many critical historians, not parish priests, affirm the empty tomb is highly relevant.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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