The End of Christianity (29 page)

Wright then repeats the (fallacious) argument that Jesus himself could not have been the source of the idea since there is no record of him mentioning that particular type of resurrection in the surviving writings we have. Wright then devotes some cursory discussion to considering and rejecting the rival non-supernatural hypotheses and concludes

[t]he origins of Christianity, the reason why this new movement came into being and took the unexpected form it did, and particularly the strange mutations it produced within the Jewish hope for resurrection and the Jewish hope for a Messiah, are best explained by saying that something happened, two or three days after Jesus’ death, for which the accounts in the four Gospels are the least inadequate expression we have.
¹⁵

That is, the possibility of people's hallucinating, or imagining, fabricating, or being mistaken about it is so low, given the provenance of the idea, that the only place they could have gotten it is from a real supernatural event. The idea's coming from another source would have been more miraculous than the idea's coming from an actual resurrection, to borrow Hume's locution.

It should be clear how utterly untenable this idea is despite the considerable scholarly credentials and vigor that Wright brings to it. Do we really want to adopt the general view that people are incapable of coming up with a novel idea unless that idea is already embedded in their religious, cultural, and philosophical tradition? Such a view has no plausibility. Even worse, Wright seems to believe that since the idea does not have a clear presence in the works of the now-famous philosophers and theologians of the period, then
no one
in the entire era could have thought of it. I don't see why we should give any credence to the suggestion that the contents of imaginings, hallucinations, ecstatic religious delusions and visions, gossip, hearsay, bereavements, altered states of consciousness, mythological drift, and so on must
all
be narrowly confined to only those concepts that have a clear presence in the tiny portion of philosophical and religious doctrines of the prior era that have survived to us. To the contrary, the diversity of views about resurrection that even Wright documents demonstrates people were routinely innovating different ideas of resurrection, so to see the Christians doing so is not improbable
at all.
And when the whole range of ideas then circulating is taken into account, there actually is nothing all that novel in what the Christians came up with.
¹⁶

The omissions, biases, and lack of incredulity in Wright and Habermas are typical of many of the apologetic works that support the historical resurrection, which alone tells us there is really no sound historical argument here, just attempts to paint one up.
¹⁷
But rather than address all the points in arguments like Habermas's and Wright's, let us turn to the more general question: Under what circumstances in a historical case should we conclude that a miraculous, supernatural, or magical event has occurred? The problem with the historical arguments for the resurrection is that there are so many other analogous cases where we reject comparable supernatural claims, even
when the evidence is of a better quantity and quality than what we havefor Jesus.

THE SALEM WITCH TRIALS

Between 1692 and 1693, dozens of people were accused, arrested, tried, and were tortured or hanged for “Sundry acts of Witchcraft,” possession by devils, and other supernatural ill deeds in Salem, Massachusetts. The events began with the strange behavior of some little girls, which fed suspicions. The girls ran about and froze in grotesque postures, complained about biting and pinching sensations, and had violent seizures.

Ultimately over 150 people were accused. In the end, nineteen people including Sarah Goode and Rebecca Nurse had been sentenced and executed. William Phips, the governor of Massachusetts, got involved. A court was established with judges, prosecutors, defenders, and a large number of respected members of the community. Thorough investigations were conducted. Witnesses were carefully cross-examined. A large body of evidence was meticulously gathered. Many people confessed. The entire proceedings were carefully documented with thousands of sworn affidavits, court documents, interviews, and related papers, a scale of surviving evidence vastly greater and more reliable than anything we have for the resurrection of Jesus.

Evidence for Witchcraft?

Suppose we were to treat the historical evidence and the possibility of magic at Salem the way the evidence for the resurrection has been treated. That is, suppose the women at Salem really possessed some supernatural powers or the ability to harness forces beyond the natural realm to make magical events happen. The interesting and crucial question for us is, what is the state of our evidence supporting this hypothesis? Is the evidence we have adequate to justify concluding there was real magic at Salem?

First, hundreds of people were involved in concluding that the accused were witches. They testified in court, signed sworn affidavits, and demonstrated their utter conviction that the accused were witches. Furthermore, the people attesting to the witchcraft charge came from diverse backgrounds and social strata. They included magistrates, judges, the governor of Massachusetts, respected members of the community, husbands of the accused, and so on. These people had a great deal to lose by being correct-men would lose their wives, children would lose their mothers, community members would lose friends they cared about. It seems very unlikely that they could have had ulterior motives. Accusing a friend or wife of being a witch would very likely have the horrible outcome of getting them executed.

How good was the evidence-gathering process at the time? The trials were a part of thorough, careful, exhaustive investigations. They deliberately gathered evidence and made a substantial attempt to objectively sort out truth from falsity. In the court trials, they attempted to carefully discern the facts. That there were witch trials in Salem and that many people were put to death has been thoroughly corroborated by a range of other historical sources (whereas no such trials, investigations, or efforts are recorded concerning the resurrection of Jesus). It also seems abundantly clear that the accusers, or at least a significant number of them, were utterly convinced that the women were witches.
Why else would so many people agree and act so decisively and with such conviction? It strains credibility to suggest that there was a conspiracy or a mass hallucination shared by all of the hundreds of people involved. The same hallucination cannot be had by large groups of people.

What about the state of the evidence as it was passed to us, centuries later? The Salem Witch Trials were historically recent, so we have hundreds of the actual documents that were part of the evidence. We have the signed, sworn testimonies of the very eyewitnesses claiming to have seen the magic performed-again, not as it was repeated and relayed for decades to unknown others, but from the witnesses themselves immediately after it occurred.
¹⁸
We even have whole volumes written by witnesses to the trials such as Cotton Mather and John Hale. How much evidence do we have? Enough to fill a truck. Modern archives at the University of Virginia and elsewhere have thousands of documents, books, records, transcripts, affidavits, testimonials, and other works detailing the events. That there were witch trials that convicted the women is beyond a shadow of historical doubt. We have nothing like any of this for the resurrection of Jesus.

In short, if we approach Salem the way it has been argued we must approach Jerusalem, the resounding conclusion is that the accused in Salem
really were witches.

But They Weren't Witches

Of course, I am not making a serious case for real witchcraft at Salem. I do not think you should conclude that the accused were really witches. Real witch-craft is
one
of the possible hypotheses that could explain the events in Salem, but it is not the best or most probable one. The point is that they were not really witches, and you (hopefully) do not believe that they were on the basis of this substantial body of historical evidence. If you do, then there is another discussion we must have. For now, I will assume that you do not.

If we take the attempts to prove the resurrection of Jesus on historical grounds seriously, then in order to be consistent we must also accept that the Salem witches actually performed acts of black magic. In fact, the Salem comparison (and there are many others) has an ironic result. When it is put up against the case for the resurrection, in every important respect, the historical evidence for witchcraft at Salem is
better
than the historical argument for the resurrection. In the Salem case, we have thousands of the actual documents. The events were actively investigated by thoughtful, educated, relatively modern people. The trials were a mere three hundred years ago, not two thousand. We have the actual documents (whereas we do not have any of the original Gospels, only copies from centuries later). We have the actual sworn testimony of people claiming to have seen the magic in Salem performed. The girls were repeatedly examined and interviewed. A large number of people devoted a great deal of time and energy to carefully analyzing their states and concluded that whatever was wrong with them must be of a supernatural origin. The Gospel stories are only a few anecdotal, hearsay stories from passionate and committed religious adherents that were passed by word of mouth through an unknown number of people for decades before being written down. The resurrection story was repeated an unknown number of times by an unknown number of people until it was written down by the (unknown) author of Mark. The ending of Mark, with the details of Jesus’ return, was
added
to Mark
by someone else
over a century later. Matthew and Luke, it is widely acknowledged, got their stories from Mark and possibly one other source that is now lost. John was written later still. All that remains of those stories are copies of copies from decades or even centuries later that were actively culled from a wider range of more varied writings.

By any reasonable measure of
quantity
and
quality
, the evidence we have that there were real witches in Salem is vastly better than the evidence we have for the magical return from the dead by Jesus. But despite the better evidence, it is simply not reasonable to believe that the women in Salem really were witches or that they really performed magic. No reasonable person with a typical twenty-first-century education believes that since they were tried, convicted, and executed for witchcraft, they really were witches. This example should produce a great deal of cognitive dissonance for the Christian who accepts the historical argument for Jesus; you can't consistently accept Jesus’ returning from the dead while rejecting the real magical powers of the Salem witches. Something has got to give.

There are several responses to the comparison available. The correct answer, the one that I have been arguing for, is that we should reject magic both in Salem and in Jerusalem. The conventional standards of evidence, common sense, and the advancement of our understanding of the natural world all serve us well in concluding that there was no real witchcraft in the 1690s and that a host of other alleged supernatural events never happened; those same standards should be applied without bias to the resurrection.

A more radical attempt to salvage the resurrection entails biting the bullet and accepting magic both at Salem and Jerusalem. This would require dramatically lowering one's threshold of required evidence that an extraordinary supernatural event occurred to the point that you accept both the resurrection of Jesus and the magical powers of the Salem witches and a great deal else besides. Indeed, there will be some who believe that supernatural forces, magic, and spiritual phenomena are quite common, so acknowledging real witchcraft at Salem may not seem that troubling. But there are a number of problems with this “magic in both” response: it doesn't seem reasonable to conclude that the best explanation of what happened at Salem is that they really were witches. First, the real magic view would run contrary to the views of historians, scholars, and the rest of us who endorse some naturalistic explanation. You would also be lowering your evidential standards to a dangerously low threshold. If both cases were real magic, then you must draw a similar conclusion in the thousands or even millions of other comparable cases that meet the same low threshold established by the paltry evidence for the resurrection. In 2007, a Saudi Arabian court convicted a woman of witchcraft. On YouTube there are countless
videos
-a powerful form of evidence not available in the Jesus or Salem cases-of allegedly magical, spiritual, supernatural, and miraculous events occurring. If magic was real in Salem and Jerusalem, then by extension of this liberal threshold, the world is awash in spiritual forces, magic, demons, psychic events, miracles, and other supernatural occurrences. The problem is that in the vast majority of these cases, people are making a mistake, and we can uncover, critique, or figure out what's really going on in many of them. We know that people get confused, they are easily swayed by sleight-of-hand tricks, they make mistakes, their enthusiasm carries them away, they are hopeful, they confabulate and misremember, and they are often just poor critical thinkers. Investigations of these cases show that a principle that concludes that the two magical events were real is misguided; it's too liberal.

It gets worse. If the believer's response is that magic is real in Salem and in Jerusalem, and it is reasonable to believe it on the basis of the historical evidence, then they open the door to thousands of other religious movements that present comparable (and comparably poor) historical proof for
their
magic. Unless we cheat, there's no way to custom-tailor the threshold for acceptable historical supernatural claims so that Christianity is the only movement that ends up being reasonable. You either get Christianity and a whole bunch of other magical and religious marvels or you get none of them. One problem with accepting all the other movements is that so many of them lay claim to exclusivity. Lots of them, on the basis of
their
historical miracles, claim that theirs is the “one true religion” and “one true God,” and that the others must be rejected as false. If we let them all in, then we have a number of conflicting doctrines that the lowered criteria for reasonable historical supernatural claims says we must all accept as true. The truths claimed behind the miracles of Islam are incompatible with the truths that underlie the miracles of Christianity; Mormonism is incompatible with Catholicism; Hinduism is incompatible with Judaism; and so on.