Sit and smile—that was all I could do, even though I wanted to rebut my debate opponent Dan Barker during his closing speech. Dan was once a Protestant pastor, but ever since his “de-conversion” in the 1980s he has become a kind of preacher for atheism (he currently serves as the co-president of the Freedom from Religion Foundation). In 2015 we debated whether or not God existed, and three years later, on September 24, 2018, we were on stage at Minnesota State University to debate a more specific question: “Does the Christian God exist?”
I thought the debate went well. I was able to neutralize Dan’s attempt to make the God of the Bible look like a moral monster by rattling off dozens of difficult Bible passages. By the time we got to cross examination, I was prepared to dive into one part of my argument Dan had not addressed yet: my evidence for the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
But instead of addressing the evidence I presented for the Resurrection, Dan just went right back to the alleged atrocities of the Old Testament. It was only during his closing statement, which was the last speech of the night, that Dan addressed my arguments. He claimed that what really happened is that the apostles believed Jesus’ spirit rose from the dead while his body still lay in the tomb.
But how can that be true if . . . ?
St. Paul believed in a bodily resurrection
I held my tongue and glanced down at my notes. I was frustrated, because veteran debaters such as myself know it is bad form to bring up new arguments or objections in your closing statement, because your opponent has no
opportunity to respond to them. But rather than let it take my peace, I accepted that my refutations would go unheard in this debate, but there would certainly be an opportunity for people to hear them in another context. And here we are!
With that being said, here’s what’s wrong with Dan’s “spiritual resurrection” hypothesis.
First, the earliest testimony we have about the Resurrection comes from St. Paul’s letters, and they describe Jesus undergoing a bodily resurrection from the dead. Dan tries to get around this fact by claiming Paul used a Greek word for Jesus’ resurrection that refers only to the resurrection of the spirit rather than the resurrection of the body. Specifically, he claims Paul used the word egeiro, which means simply “rise” or “wake up” and that “Paul did not use the word ‘resurrection’ (anastasis, anistemi) here, though he certainly knew it.” Barker also claims:
It is perfectly consistent with Christian theology to think that the spirit of Jesus, not his body, was awakened from the grave, as Christians today believe that the spirit of Grandpa has gone to heaven while his body rots in the ground. In fact, just a few verses later Paul confirms this: “Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God.” The physical body is not important to Christian theology (Godless, 294-295).
However, St. Paul says Jesus was “designated Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection [Greek, anastaseos] from the dead” (Rom. 1:4). So, contra Barker, Paul does describe Jesus rising from the dead with a form of the Greek word anastasis.
Moreover, Paul uses egeiro and anastasis interchangeably when speaking about the relationship between our future resurrection from the dead and the reality of Christ’s resurrection:
Now, if Christ is preached as raised [egegertai] from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection [anastasis] of the dead? But if there is no resurrection [anastasis] of the dead, then Christ has not been raised [egegertai]. If Christ has not been raised [egegertai], then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain (1 Cor. 15:12-14).
Paul’s argument is simple: if we do not rise from the dead, then Christ didn’t rise from the dead. But Christ did rise from the dead, so we can have confidence that we too will rise from the dead.
Spiritual and physical bodies
When it comes to Barker’s citation of 1 Corinthians 15:50 (“Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God”) and Paul’s general use of the term “spiritual body,” we have to remember that what Paul was up against in Corinth. Pauline scholar John Zeisler believes that Paul was trying to convince people that the resurrection of the dead was not a mere reanimation of one’s corpse. For Paul, the “spiritual body” in the Resurrection “seems to mean something like ‘outward form,’ or ‘embodiment’ or perhaps better the way in which the person is conveyed and expressed . . . a resurrection of the whole person, involving embodiment but not physical embodiment” (Pauline Christianity, 98).
When Paul says, “Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God,” he is using a Semitism, or a Jewish way of speaking about the natural state of humanity apart from the grace of God. We can’t inherit the kingdom without being moved by God’s spirit, but that doesn’t mean we will only be spirits. Spiritual in this context refers to a thing’s orientation as opposed to its substance. It’s like when we say the Bible is a “spiritual book” or when Paul says, “He who is spiritual appraises all things, yet he himself is appraised by no one” (1 Cor. 2:15).
The subjects in these statements are not ghostly apparitions but books and people that are ordered toward the will of God. St. Augustine says, “As the Spirit, when it serves the flesh, is not improperly said to be carnal, so the flesh, when it serves the spirit, will rightly be called spiritual—not because it is changed into spirit, as some suppose who misinterpret the text” (City of God, 13.20).
The New Testament records Jesus’ bodily appearances
Barker also claims Paul cannot be talking about a bodily resurrection because he describes Jesus “appearing” to the disciples in 1 Corinthians 15. Barker asserts, “the word ‘appeared’ in this passage is also ambiguous and does not require a physical presence. The word ophthe, from the verb horao, is used for both physical sight as well as spiritual visions” (Godless, 295). Barker gives two examples to prove that Paul is talking about the disciples having a purely spiritual vision of Jesus.
The first involves Luke’s description of how a man from Macedonia appeared (opthe) to Paul in a vision (Acts 16:9-10). The second involves the “appearances” of Moses and Elijah on the Mount of Transfiguration (Matt. 17:3). Barker asks, “Did Moses and Elijah appear physically to Peter? Shall we start looking for their empty tombs? This is obviously some kind of visionary appearance” (Godless, 295).
But Barker’s argument doesn’t work, because a person can “appear” to some-one without being a ghost or spirit. For example, I might ask my wife, “Are you going to make an appearance at our party tonight?” without expecting her to materialize out of thin air.
In the incident with the Macedonian, Luke makes it clear that he’s talking about a dream Paul had, because he says, “a vision appeared to Paul in the night” (Acts 16:9). But when Paul and the other New Testament authors talk about Jesus appearing to the disciples, they don’t describe those appearances as being part of a vision or dream.
For example, Luke describes the disciples saying, “The Lord has risen indeed, and has appeared to Simon!” Luke uses the word opthe to describe this appearance, but in the proceeding verses he describes Jesus appearing in an explicitly embodied form. Jesus tells the apostles, “See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself; handle me, and see; for a spirit has not flesh and bones as you see that I have” (Luke 24:39).
Barker’s use of Moses and Elijah appearing on the Mount of Transfiguration backfires, because the text does not describe a purely visionary experience. 2 Kings 2:11 tells us Elijah went up alive into heaven, and Jude 9 alludes to a Jewish legend about Moses’ body being taken up to heaven. Peter even declares that he will build a tent for Moses and Elijah (Matt. 19:4), which would be a strange thing to do if these men did not have physical bodies.
Finally, Paul was a Pharisee, so he believed in a future, bodily resurrection. But unlike the unconverted Pharisees, Paul taught that our bodies would be transformed so that they will resemble Jesus’ glorified resurrection body. For example, he told the Philippians, “We await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will change our lowly body to be like his glorious body” (Phil. 3:21). He told the Church at Rome, “If the Spirit of the one who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, the one who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also, through his Spirit that dwells in you” (Rom. 8:11).
This expectation would not make sense unless the first Christians believed Jesus’ body was gloriously reigning in heaven rather than rotting away in a tomb outside Jerusalem.
The hallucination hypothesis can’t explain everything
In his debates and books, Barker uses a variant of the hallucination hypothesis to explain the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus to his disciples. He claims Peter felt so guilty after denying Jesus in the courtyard of the high priest that he was in the perfect state of mind to imagine he heard the voice of Jesus consoling him. Barker imagines that after hearing such a voice, “Peter triumphantly tells his friends, ‘I talked with Jesus! He is not dead! I am forgiven!’ His friends say, ‘Peter talked with Jesus? Peter met Jesus? He’s alive! It’s a spiritual kingdom!’” (Godless, 295).
First, hallucinations of a risen Jesus do not explain the fact of Jesus’ empty tomb. In my book Why We’re Catholic, I present several pieces of evidence for the historicity of Jesus’ empty tomb, including its verifiable location in Jerusalem and the testimony of the Church’s enemies who indirectly acknowledged it was empty by claiming the disciples stole Jesus’ body. The fact that women discovered the tomb also lends credibility to the account, because even in the second century critics of the Church were using this detail to attack the credibility of the Resurrection accounts.
In his dispute with Origen, the pagan writer Celsus said, “When dead he rose again, and showed the marks of his punishment, and how his hands were pierced with nails: who beheld this? A half-frantic woman, as you state” (Contra Celsum 2.55). Luke tells us that the men even checked the tomb for themselves in order to verify what the women said about it (Luke 24:11-12).
If the discovery of Jesus’ empty tomb had been a fabrication, we would expect the Gospel authors to have used more reliable characters according to the times, such as the male apostles or even the Jewish and Roman officials, to first report it. Since they didn’t, this makes it more likely the account is historical and wasn’t invented to support belief in the Resurrection.
What about the women?
However, Barker dismissed this evidence in our debate by saying this detail wasn’t embarrassing at all. Women were always associated with tombs because they anointed the bodies of the deceased, so we would expect a detail like this in a purely fabricated account of the Resurrection. But my argument is that a fabricated account would not rely on female testimony, not that it would not include it at all.
The Evangelists could have, for example, had the men go with the women to the tomb to in order to roll away the stone. (In Mark 16:3, the women even ask themselves, “Who will roll away the stone for us?”) In the later apocryphal Gospel of Peter, Jesus emerges from the tomb in the presence of both the Jewish elders and the Roman guards (one of whom is named Petronius). But this story still includes the detail about the women visiting the tomb because, as one scholar notes, “it was so much a part of the Easter story that the redactor could not leave it out” (Carolyn Osiek, “The women at the tomb: What are they doing there?” HTS Teologiese Studies (Theological Studies) 53 [1997], 109).
Second, as N.T. Wright points out in his book The Resurrection of the Son of God, there are no examples in the pagan world or in Jewish thought of the belief in a person dying, experiencing the afterlife, and then returning to a glorified, immortal, bodily existence in the present life.
If the apostles had all hallucinated, projecting something that would have been plausible and familiar to them, most likely they would have imagined a Christ who had been spiritually assumed into heaven. Instead, they preached that Jesus had experienced a glorious bodily resurrection from the dead, which Jews of the time did not believe would happen until the end of the world.
A messiah who doesn’t act like one
We should also be skeptical that the apostles would have had grief-induced hallucinations at all. Instead, it would have been more likely for them to imitate the followers of other messianic figures such as Theudas or “the Egyptian,” who were driven into exile or executed. Rather than hallucinate that their leader had risen from the dead (either spiritually or physically), many of these people simply abandoned the idea of the messiah as a whole and returned to their ordinary lives.
Others went on, as Wright puts it, to find a “new messiah,” even including within the deceased’s family. But the followers of Jesus did neither of these things, which leads Wright to ask, “Why did Christianity even begin, let alone continue, as a messianic movement, when its Messiah so obviously not only did not do what a Messiah was supposed to do but suffered a fate which ought to have showed conclusively that he could not possibly have been Israel’s anointed?”
His answer should give us confidence in the historical facts behind the foundation of our Faith: “Their answer, consistently throughout the evidence we possess, was that Jesus, following his execution on a charge of being a would-be Messiah, had been raised from the dead.”