75% of Scholars and the Empty Tomb

[Jon Curry]

Christian apologists claim that 75% of scholars, including critical scholars, accept the fact of the empty tomb. And by "empty tomb" I assume Christians mean that Jesus was buried in aparticular tomb and on the Sunday following the burial that tomb was found empty.

Apparently this claim is based upon research done by Gary Habermas from papers and works published from 1975 to the present time. I find this claim to be highly dubious. Does anybody have any insights on the validity of this claim? I haven't read a lot of skeptical literature and I'm curious if this is the impression well read people have of the beliefs of critical scholars. I assume the Jesus Seminar fellows would for the most part disagree, but perhaps someone here can tell me otherwise.

[Alethias]

I don't know if it's valid or not. To Quote from Gary Habermas (http://www.garyhabermas.com/articles/J_Study_Historical_Jesus_3-2_2005/J_Study_Historical_Jesus_3-2_2005.htm),Of these scholars, approximately 75% favor one or more of these arguments for the empty tomb, while approximately 25% think that one or more arguments oppose it. Thus, while far from being unanimously held by critical scholars, it may surprise some that those who embrace the empty tomb as a historical fact still comprise a fairly strong majority.I think The Abrahamic Scripture: Criticism & History forum would be a better place for this, since the topic has to do with the Historicity of Jesus and the Historicity of the Bible, so I'm shipping it there.

Alethias,
GRD Moderator

[moonwatcher]

From footnote 1 in Peter Kirby's The Historicity of The Empty Tomb Evaluated:

A list of 20th century writers on the NT, with references to relevant works, who do not believe that the empty tomb story is historically reliable: Gunther Bornkamm (Jesus of Nazareth), Rudolf Bultmann (History of the Synoptic Tradition), Peter Carnley (The Structure of Resurrection Belief), John Dominic Crossan (The Birth of Christianity), Michael Goulder (Resurrection Reconsidered), Hans Grass (Ostergeschehen and Osterberichte), Charles Guignebert (The Christ), Uta Ranke-Heinemann (Putting Away Childish Things), Randel Helms (Gospel Fictions), Herman Hendrickx (Resurrection Narratives), Roy Hoover (Jesus' Resurrection: Fact or Figment?), Hans Kung (On being a Christian), Alfred Loisy (The Birth of the Christian Religion), Burton Mack (A Myth of Innocence), Willi Marxsen (Jesus and Easter), Gerd Ludemann (What Really Happened to Jesus? A Historical Approach to the Resurrection), Norman Perrin (The Resurrection according to Matthew, Mark, and Luke), John Shelby Spong (Resurrection: Myth or Reality?), and Rev. John T. Theodore (Who Was Jesus?). A list of other people who doubt that the empty tomb story is historical: Marcus Borg, Gerald Boldock Bostock, Stevan Davies, Maurice Goguel, Helmut Koester, Robert Price, Marianne Sawicki, and Howard M. Teeple. The majority of these twenty-seven writers are professing Christians. While I am not approving the use of an appeal to authority, this incomplete list is provided in order to offset the commonly advanced appeal to authority in favor of the historicity of the empty tomb. Even then, it is superfluous, for the appeal to authority is fallacious from the start.

The whole introduction can be found here. (http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/peter_kirby/tomb/introduction.html#N1)

There certainly seem to be quite a few scholars who question its historicity. Whether they make up more or less that 25% I don't know.

[motorhead]

Christian apologists claim that 75% of scholars, including critical scholars, accept the fact of the empty tomb. And by "empty tomb" I assume Christians mean that Jesus was buried in aparticular tomb and on the Sunday following the burial that tomb was found empty.

Apparently this claim is based upon research done by Gary Habermas from papers and works published from 1975 to the present time. I find this claim to be highly dubious. Does anybody have any insights on the validity of this claim? I haven't read a lot of skeptical literature and I'm curious if this is the impression well read people have of the beliefs of critical scholars. I assume the Jesus Seminar fellows would for the most part disagree, but perhaps someone here can tell me otherwise.

Who are these scholars where 75% believe this and how many are in this pool? I guess it might in the article Alethias linked to. Let's say it's 100 atheist historians and 75% believe in an empty tomb and 25% don't, big deal. What does that prove? I think you'd have to ask, "okay, if you believe in an empty tomb, then what do you think happened to the body of Jesus?" Are we supposed to say "well, if the tomb was empty, then he must have been resurrected from the dead?"

Another way to look at this is what's the evidence for Jesus being buried in a tomb? Because the canonical Gospels claim it? Why should we take their word for it?

[Malachi151]

The case against the empty tomb is pretty darn solid.

1) Paul never mentioned it.
2) Its not in any pre-gospel Christian writings
3) Early Church fathers didn't mention it.
4) There is no indication that any group of Christians ever venerated any tomb or burial site (this is a big one to me)
5) And most of all, Mark, the origin of the claim, is completely unbelievable, showing that his work is an allegory composed of Old Testament clippings, not any kind of eyewitness accounts.

[Asha'man]

I'm confident that the Tomb was indeed empty.

Why? Because there never was a Jesus to bury in the tomb in the first place.

[Doug Shaver]

Apparently this claim is based upon research done by Gary Habermas from papers and works published from 1975 to the present time.
It doesn't mean a thing until we know where Habermas went looking for those papers and works.

We know what the sample consisted of. We don't know what population he sampled, though.

[Jon Curry]

Thanks, moonwatcher. That's probably as good a response as can be gotten without personally going through every piece of literature from every NT scholar.

This argument may be technically fallacious, but I think it still might be reasonable to in some cases accept opinions based upon nothing more than expert testimony. Suppose you're just a lay person that isn't sophisticated enough to study all of the arguments, but you're considering Christianty. You might conclude that it is reasonable to accept that the empty tomb is a historical reality based upon the opinions of the majority of experts.

Of course this doesn't prove that the resurrection occurred, and the Christian apologist doesn't claim otherwise. He establishes this as one fact that we can know and uses that to make a cumulative case argument. What makes the best sense of the facts that we know? The facts that he says the experts agree on is 1-the fact that Jesus did exist and was crucified, 2-the fact that he was buried in the tomb of a person by the name of Joseph of Arimethea, 3-the fact that on the Sunday following the death that tomb was found to be empty, and 4-the fact that following the finding of the empty tomb the disciples and others had experiences where they thought they had seen the resurrected Jesus. The Christian will say that an actual resurrection makes the most sense of these 4 facts.

I just find this 75% figure to be very suspicious, and I think it would be great to see some names or something like that. When I was a Christian I often debated with Roman Catholics, and they would make a similar numerical claim that sounded dubious to me. They'd claim that Protestantism doesn't work because the result of it has been the creation of 28,000 different denominations, as opposed to the unity of the Catholic church. This claim sounded very suspicious to me, but I had no idea how to evaluate the claim, and they didn't even seem to know where it came from. Ultimately a Protestant apologist by the name of Eric Svendsen found their source for this claim and showed that the way this guy was defining a denomination was different from the way it is commonly understood, and per his definition in fact there were 8000 Roman Catholic denominations, so this argument didn't really work for the Catholic.

[Draconis]

How does it follow that if the tomb was empty, therefore something magic happened?

[Jon Curry]

That doesn't follow and nobody claims that it does. It's simply one of several facts that an apologist will try to establish, then once granted the apologist will attempt to show that a resurrection besed accounts for all of the facts.

[Doug Shaver]

How does it follow that if the tomb was empty, therefore something magic happened?
According to the apologists, every alternative is less probable than magic.

If you really, really must know how they think about it, check this out: http://www.leaderu.com/offices/billcraig/menus/historical.html

[SkepticBoyLee]

Why is the empty tomb even taken seriously at all? Its a gargantuantly moronic argument. Some guys wrote legendary accounts about a man decades after the supposed events which include him leaving his tomb therefore, "the tomb is empty"! Walaa! Jesus exists!

Ummm, yeah. How is there any strength at all in this steaming horseshit pile of an argument?

Is this a formula for inventing true historical accounts? Simply pen a claim that something existed, that it was stored somewhere and that its no longer there and sudddenly "it must be true".

Hey the Death Star was blowed up and you know what? We havent found it yet! The Death Star existed! Brilliant!

Am I really just a hardened, close minded atheist or are so many of these Christian arguments really actually astonishingly stupid?

[Toto]

...
Am I really just a hardened, close minded atheist or are so many of these Christian arguments really actually astonishingly stupid?

I would say the latter. The arguments are astonishingly stupid. However, some of the people who make them are quite intelligent and accomplished, and can present the arguments as if they were valid, and it takes a great deal of patience and logic to untangle the arguments, and a great deal of tact to avoid calling them stupid because they believe this stupid argument.

Just remember that the Christians are not stupid, and they do have their pride. That's the problem.

[Julian]

I would say the latter. The arguments are astonishingly stupid. However, some of the people who make them are quite intelligent and accomplished, and can present the arguments as if they were valid, and it takes a great deal of patience and logic to untangle the arguments, and a great deal of tact to avoid calling them stupid because they believe this stupid argument.

Just remember that the Christians are not stupid, and they do have their pride. That's the problem.
Or to paraphrase Michael Shermer, "Smart people are good at defending claims they arrived at for non-smart reasons."

It is true that many christians are not stupid, yet many of their claims are. The only explanation that I can see is that they started to believe those claims well before they acquired the knowledge and experience they subsequently use to defend them. It has always seemed strange to me that some personal beliefs are sacrosanct to those that hold them, like we are somehow defined by our beliefs and not our actions. :rolleyes: To make matters worse, we are somehow expected to respect those beliefs, forced to participate in the absurd idea that the attack on relious beliefs is taboo, that the religious somehow have special knowledge in the areas of morals and ethics when factual evidence leads us to the opposite conclusion.

Julian