Approaches to Assessing the Evidence for the Resurrection

When it comes to assessing the resurrection of Jesus as a historical event, it is often claimed by atheists that the text of what is now referred to as the New Testament is practically useless is determining what actually happened since it reflects the "biases of ancient Christians" rather than actual events. Aside from this, many also labour under the delusion that the Christian seeking to demonstrate the historicity of the resurrection must first demonstrate the reliability and truth of the entire Bible.

It's sort of a catch-22; atheists claim that the Bible is untrustworthy as a source and so cannot be used but also expect Christians to verify the veracity of the Bible as a source before they will accept any argument that the resurrection happened. Unfortunately for atheists and others sceptical of the claims of Christianity, that is not how historical investigation works. 

You can't claim that the Bible is unreliable without actual evidence, and you don't need to 'prove the entire Bible' either just to show that one event reported by the Bible happened. It is not uncommon for atheists who claim to be former Christians (as if this gives some kind of added credibility) to argue that if Christianity is true, the entire Bible needs to be validated since it claims to be the "word of God".

However, this is once again very sloppy methodology. The correct approach from a purely academic point of view is to assume an air of agnosticism and treat it like any other historical text. Treating it to a kind of radical hyper-scepticism based on your personal beliefs and prejudices is just poor epistemology and historiography. 

Now, from a historical perspective, it is perfectly possible for the Bible to be generally unreliable and for the resurrection to have happened, just as it is perfectly possible for the Bible to be generally reliable and for the resurrection to not have happened. What matters, then, is that we apply the criteria of history fairly and construct valid historical arguments for why the resurrection happened. 

As such, we need not be saddled with the laborious and time-consuming task of proving the general reliability of the entire Bible. It is the task of the historian to analyse sources with the rigorous criteria of historical research and to determine what can be determined if anything from those sources. 

Nevertheless, it is no coincidence that the claims of atheists and other sceptics of the Bible are, quite frankly, utterly baloney. From a textual criticism standpoint, the New Testament has the most reliable textual transmission of any ancient document in existence. 

Prior to the advent of the printing press, ancient texts had to be copied by hand, and so small errors could creep in. The field of textual criticism is concerned with analysing ancient texts to find and correct these small errors using a number of different criteria. 

So, first, one general principle is that the more copies there are, the easier it will be to detect errors. Second, the earlier in time a copy is to the original, the better. You do get critics like Bart Ehrman who claim that the New Testament is 'hopelessly corrupt' but is this a fair assessment? The New Testament has over 5,700 Greek manuscripts and over 10,000 in Latin.

There are then more copies in other languages such as Arabic, Coptic, Syriac, and so on. The earliest fragments of the New Testament date to the 2nd century, with complete manuscripts dating to the 5th century. The next best in terms of textual transmission would be the works of Homer, which have about 2,000 copies total. 

However, most ancient works don't even amount to that many. Tacitus' Annals, for instance, only has a handful of manuscripts dating to the 10th century and later. Yet, scholars do not run around like headless chickens worrying that we cannot recover what Tacitus originally wrote. So, why the excessive amounts of hyper-scepticism towards the New Testament?

Simply arguing that it claims to be the "word of God" will not do. You need to present an actual argument devoid of special pleading and question begging. Some instead try to attack the reliability of the New Testament on the basis of its oral traditions instead.

Scholars currently estimate that the Gospels were written roughly 30 years after the crucifixion of Jesus, with the letters of Paul being written in the 50s AD. Critics opine that this is too long after the events to be reliable. Yet, 30 years is roughly the time between the Gulf War and now, yet we would be considered out of our minds for rejecting firsthand accounts written today, 

For most of history, in fact, contemporary writings were rare. It was quite common for accounts to be written decades if not centuries after the events they describe. So, the only way to justify this radical hyper-scepticism against the New Testament is by special pleading and question begging. 

Bear in mind also that the New Testament itself shows that Jesus followed standard teaching practices of the 1st century that would have aided their memorability. Jesus utilised ancient mnemonic devices such as world play, poetic forms, contrasting thesis with antithesis, and so on. It's also worth noting that all four Gospels fall into the category of ancient biography. Moreover, we can be reasonably confident also that the New Testament documents were written by who they said they were. 

Of course, simply relying on general blanket dismissals in lieu of actual investigation is lazy and sloppy methodology. Instead, what we can do is carefully analyse the sources and see what, if anything, can be gleaned from them. That is what actual historians do. Obviously, a report coming to us from a generally reliable source can raise its overall credibility but there's multiple different things that go into assessing whether something is historical or not. 

There are times where knowing a source's bias can assist us in detecting nuggets of truth. Suppose we have a source that is biased in favour of a certain group or person. If that source reports something that reflects negatively on that person or group, we can reasonably take that as evidence that it is more likely to be true. Because why would they want to make something bad up about someone they are biased in favour of?

So, whilst we could spend a serious amount of time defending the general reliability and accuracy of the Bible, it really isn't necessary when it comes to determining whether the resurrection actually happened or not. Rather, we can go through the sources and see what truths we can learn from them, and then construct an argument that appeals to the resurrection as the best explanation, i.e. an abductive argument.