Transcript

There are many important passages in Scripture, but there's one particular passage that is the foundation for the entire Christian faith.

Now, you might be thinking, can there really be a most important passage of Scripture?

Well, there can if this part of Scripture provides the foundation for the entire Christian faith.

Here's how I put it.

One reason we trust Scripture is because it has apostolic authority, and we trust the apostles because they have Christ's authority, and we trust Christ's authority because He demonstrated His divine nature through miracles, in particular, His resurrection from the dead.

If Christ did not rise from the dead, then there's no reason to be a Christian.

Paul says that your faith is in vain.

But if Christ did rise from the dead, then we can trust his teaching about the church that he established, including its declarations about things like the canon of Scripture.

But we can't say Jesus rose from the dead just because the Bible says so, because by that logic, every supposed holy book that claims a miracle would have to be believed.

Instead, we need to make an historical argument for Christ's resurrection.

One common argument goes like this.

If you look at the New Testament and other 1st-century documents merely as human writings and not as Scripture, you can at least know basic facts about Jesus, like that He died on a cross during the reign of Pontius Pilate, and that shortly after His death, His disciples sincerely believed He had risen bodily from the dead.

The founders of other religions, like Muhammad or Buddha, are said to have performed miracles, but those accounts were written long after, in some cases, centuries after they died, and can be explained as legends.

However, the earliest writings about Jesus Christ, written just decades after He died, shows that His followers believed He had risen from the dead.

This was the very catalyst of their faith, and it was not a legend propagated by people who never knew Jesus.

The earliest witness is found in St. Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, in chapter 15, where Paul preserves parts of an ancient creed that he himself received from others.

First Corinthians was written sometime in the '50s, but scholars have dated this creed in verses three through eight to within five years of the crucifixion.

In that passage, it says this.

For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that He was buried, that He was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that He appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.

Then He appeared to more than five hundred brethren at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep.

Then He appeared to James, then to all the apostles.

Last of all, as to one untimely born, He appeared also to me.

In previous episodes I'll link to below, I showed how claims the apostles lied or hallucinated do not explain this early testimony of Christ's resurrection, and the early dating of this creed in this part of Scripture shows that the resurrection was not a legend that developed long after the time of the original eyewitnesses of Jesus.

So how do critics respond to First Corinthians 15?

One wild approach is to say, as Robert Price has argued, that the entire passage is a post-Pauline forgery or interpolation.

In their debate on the resurrection, Price said this to William Lane Craig.

And in fact, no early writer, uh, Ignatius or anybody else, quotes the parts of it that, that deal with this.

I went through that move rather specifically.

Craig then shuts down Price on the idea that First Corinthians 15:3-8 is a forgery added later after Paul.

He says, well, with respect to Ignatius, that Ignatius doesn't quote the right passages.

I beg to differ.

If you look at Ignatius Ad Romanos, chapter nine, he quotes from First Corinthians 15:8-9, exactly the passage that Dr. Price says isn't supposed to be there.

So that's one wild approach.

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The more common approach to this passage is to acknowledge that Paul is transmitting a creed, but to say that Paul and other early Christians were only claiming that Christ spiritually rose from the dead, and that he did not physically rise from the dead.

Skeptics claim that the disciples' encounters with Jesus after His resurrection, where he eats fish or says to touch his wounds, are later legends.

They say that the first Christians only believed that Jesus' spirit rose to heaven, which is compatible with a hallucination or even just wishful thinking, and is much easier to explain than an encounter with the risen glorified body of Jesus and his corresponding empty tomb.

In fact, this was the kind of argument Dan Barker gave in his closing statement during our debate on the existence of the Christian God a few years ago, which was bad form because it didn't give me an opportunity to respond to him.

It was the last statement of the debate.

But he also talks about this argument in his book, Godless: How an Evangelical Preacher Became One of America's Leading Atheists.

So in this episode, I'm going to respond to that argument that the creed in First Corinthians 15 is only talking about Jesus undergoing a spiritual resurrection from the dead.

First, Barker claims that Paul used a Greek word for Jesus' resurrection that only refers to spiritual resurrection, specifically the Greek word egeiro, which means rise or wake up.

Barker thinks Paul does not use the word that means resurrection in Greek, or anastasis.

Barker also wrote the following in Godless.

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.

But in Romans 1:4, St. Paul says that Jesus was, quote, Designated Son of God in power according to the spirit of holiness by His resurrection, anastaseos, from the dead.

Note that Paul uses the Greek word anastasis, not egeiro.

Moreover, in First Corinthians 15, Paul uses egeiro and anastasis interchangeably when speaking about the relationship between our future resurrection from the dead and Christ's resurrection, which shows that Paul thought both words referred to bodily resurrection.

Paul writes, Now if Christ is preached as raised, egeirgetai, 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, egergetai.

If Christ has not been raised, egergetai, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain.

Paul's argument is simple.

If we don't rise from the dead, then Christ didn't rise from the dead.

But Christ did rise from the dead, so we can be confident that we too will rise from the dead.

What about Barker's citation of First Corinthians 15:50?

Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God.

As well as Paul's use of the term spiritual body.

Did Paul just mean that only ghosts go to heaven?

Well, we have to remember what Paul was up against in the city of Corinth.

Pauline scholar John Zeisler believes that Paul was trying to convince people that the resurrection of the dead is not a mere re-animation of one's corpse.

For Paul, the spiritual body and the resurrection, quote, 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.

So, we have to make a distinction between glorified embodiment in the spirit and mere physical embodiment like a re-animated corpse.

So, when Paul writes, Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, he is using a Semitism, a Jewish way of speaking about the natural state of humanity apart from the grace of God.

We cannot inherit the kingdom of God without being moved by God's spirit, but that doesn't mean that in God's kingdom we will only be spirits.

Spiritual in this context refers to a thing's orientation, not its substance.

It's like when we say that the Bible is a spiritual book or when Paul writes in First Corinthians 2:15 that, quote, The spiritual man judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one.

The subjects in these statements are not non-physical ghostly apparitions.

They are physical books and people ordered toward the will of God.

As St. Augustine said, 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.

Barker also claims Paul cannot be talking about a bodily resurrection because Paul describes Jesus appearing to the disciples in First Corinthians 15.

He says that, quote, The word appeared in this passage is also ambiguous and does not require a physical presence.

The word opthe from the verb oraó is used for both physical sight as well as spiritual visions.

End quote.

Barker then cites the appearances of Moses and Elijah on the Mount of Transfiguration and asks his reader, Did Moses and Elijah appear physically to Peter?

Shall we start looking for their empty tombs?

This is obviously some kind of visionary appearance.

But Barker's use of Moses and Elijah appearing on the Mount of Transfiguration backfires because the text does not describe this as an internal vision.

Second Kings 2:11 tells us that Elijah went up body and soul into heaven while he was alive, and Jude 9 alludes to a Jewish tradition about Moses' body being taken up to heaven.

It would be entirely appropriate that these men appeared to Peter with their bodies and God protected them from death and decay.

Peter even declares that he will build a tent for Moses and Elijah, and no one corrects Peter's suggestion by saying that it is only the spirits of Moses and Elijah that are present, and so tents are unnecessary.

Now, here's Barker sharing the essence of this argument in our debate.

That word appeared is a curious word.

If I went to your house and you opened the door and I said, Oh, I went to Trent's house and Trent appeared unto me, you would think I was talking about a haunted house, right?

Or a ghost or something.

That's- In- in all of the gospels before that point, people met people, they saw people, they were with people, they traveled, but after the resurrection, it switches to that Greek participle opthe, which is where we get the word vision from, basically.

It was an appearance.

But a person can appear to someone without being a ghost or a spirit.

I might ask my wife, Are you gonna make an appearance at our company party tonight?

without expecting her to materialize out of thin air.

Scripture makes it clear when people have internal visions.

Matthew 1:20 says, An angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream, or Greek onar.

Likewise, Luke describes a vision that appeared to Paul in the night in Acts 16:9 of a man from Macedonia or a dream.

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 a dream.

For example, Luke 24:34 records the disciples saying, The Lord has risen indeed and has appeared to Simon.

Luke uses the Greek word opthe to describe this appearance, but in the preceding verses, he records Jesus appearing in an explicitly embodied form.

Jesus tells the apostles, See my hands and my feet; that is I myself.

Handle me and see, for a spirit has not flesh and bones as you see that I have.

Mike Licona points out in his dissertation on the resurrection that Paul uses the Greek oraó, which is the root of opthe, 29 times, and only once does it refer to a heavenly vision.

The majority of the time, it refers to physical sight.

In fact, Paul bluntly says in First Corinthians 9:1, Have I not seen Jesus our Lord?

Which contradicts Barker who says no one after the resurrection claims to have seen Jesus.

Finally, Paul was a Pharisee, so he believed in a future bodily resurrection, but unlike the unconverted Pharisees, Paul taught that our bodies will be transformed so that they resemble Jesus' glorified resurrection body.

He told the Philippians, We await a savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will change our lowly body to be like his glorious body.

To the church at Rome, Paul wrote, If the spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies, and also through his spirit who dwells in you.This expectation would not make sense unless the first Christians believed that Jesus' body was gloriously reigning in heaven rather than rotting away in a tomb outside of Jerusalem while only his spirit was in heaven.

William Lane Craig made a similar point in his 2009 debate with Richard Carrier.

Now, in First Corinthians 15, Paul never says, We shall change bodies.

Rather, he says, The trumpet will sound and we shall be changed.

The passage only makes sense as intrinsic change.

Second, Paul's verbs of sowing and raising have the same implicit subject.

It is sown, it is raised.

Four times Paul repeats this.

To escape the implication of numerical identity, Richard is forced to mistranslate the passage so that the verbs take different subjects.

One is sown, one, that is, another one, is raised.

For more of my response to Barker and similar critics, see my book, Counterfeit Christs.

But I want to close out today's episode with insights from another book that I'm really excited about.

This year, Biblical scholar James Ware published the most comprehensive defense of the traditional understanding of First Corinthians 15 in his book, The Final Triumph of God: Jesus, the Eyewitnesses, and the Resurrection of the Body in First Corinthians 15.

The book is right up there with Mike Licona's The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach, and Andrew Lokes' Investigating the Resurrection of Jesus Christ as must-read resources for anyone who wants to expertly defend the foundational doctrine of the Christian faith.

Here's just a few of the insights from the book that I found helpful regarding this section of First Corinthians.

First, critics often claim that because the creed in First Corinthians 15 does not mention the empty tomb, that means this fact was embellished later.

However, as Ware notes, quote, No formula, credal fragment, or creed known to us from the ancient church contains any reference to the empty tomb.

But Christians from those time periods clearly believed in a physical resurrection and its corresponding empty tomb.

So if an empty tomb is assumed when modern Christians recite the part of the creed which says that Christ suffered and was buried and the third day he rose again, then there's no reason to think it was not assumed when Paul recited this creed.

Moreover, Paul refers to the Jesus that is preached as the crucified one, in Greek estinamenos, using grammar that indicates the effects of crucifixion are ongoing, in a sense, not something consigned to a past physical body that no longer exists.

Ware writes the following.

The perfect participle estinamenos describes a state or condition contemporaneous with Paul's proclamation.

The one whom Paul saw and now proclaims is the crucified one, but if after his resurrection Jesus had assumed some other body or form different from the body that was crucified and laid in the tomb, Paul could not describe the one whom he saw as Christ crucified.

This description assumes that Paul saw Christ in his crucified and now risen body.

End quote.

Second, Dale Allison, a moderate scholar who has offered sophisticated criticisms of the resurrection, claims that the appearance to the 500 recorded in First Corinthians 15:6 must refer to some kind of sketchy group hallucination or mistaken illusion where a group of people thought that they saw Jesus in a cloud or something like that.

Allison says 500 people could not have seen the risen Jesus because, quote, It is very hard to fathom how an assembly of more than 500 could see an earthbound man at one time or all at once.

Or if they did, how the majority of them could, unless there was a receiving line, have identified the figure or seen or heard much of what was going on.

There were no concert projection screens back then.

But Ware points out that the New Testament describes many large crowds seeing Jesus during his ministry.

Ware writes, At the trial of Socrates in 399 BC, the jury of 500 saw Socrates, heard his defense, verbally interacted with him, and each individually rendered their verdict.

Epictetus informs us that it was not unheard of for philosophers to lecture in outdoor settings to audiences numbering 500 or even up to 1,000 persons.

The ancient evidence reveals the utter fallacy of Allison's argument.

End quote.

Finally, Ware points out scholarship which shows that Luke 24:34, which describes the disciples saying, The Lord has risen indeed and has appeared to Simon, is part of an early pre-Lukan confessional that itself may be older than First Corinthians 15:3-8.

He notes that, quote, In this pre-Lukan formula, we find the identical verb and grammatical construction as in First Corinthians 15:5.

The same verb used in the formula is not only explicitly used of ocular observation of Jesus' body of flesh and bones, risen without seeing corruption, but also recalls the disciples' experience of eating and drinking with the risen Lord.

All this means that the earliest proclamation about Jesus was that against all expectations, Jesus rose from the dead in a glorified physical body, leaving behind an empty tomb and disciples who were transformed from cowards into willing martyrs for the faith, something natural explanations fail to fully explain.

If you'd like to learn more about how to defend the resurrection, especially regarding the creed in First Corinthians 15, I recommend the previous books I've already cited, especially Ware's new book.

But if you want a great introductory text that focuses on this part of the resurrection case, I recommend Justin Bass' book, The Bedrock of Christianity: The Unalterable Facts of Jesus' Death and Resurrection.

Thank you so much for watching, and I hope you have a very blessed day.