A Preliminary Review of the Introduction
and Chapter 2 of The Empty Tomb

By Jeff G

After receiving the book The Empty Tomb: Jesus Beyond the Grave and reading the endorsements on the back cover from luminaries such as Gerd Ludemann and Anthony Flew describing how this book is full of fresh insights and how this is "one non-Christian book every Christian should have," I was looking forward to some new powerful arguments showing why the Christian doctrine of the empty tomb and resurrection are incorrect. Much to my dismay after reading two of the initial chapters, "Introduction: The Second Life of Christ" by Robert Price and "The Resurrection as Initially Improbable" by Michael Martin, I find that there is nothing new. It seems to be the same old tired arguments, sometimes couched in new words, which have been around for sometimes hundreds of years and already adequately answered many times. Once again for a new generation of readers unfamiliar with this field these positions are brought up again as new and insightful with barely (if any) mention of answers already given by many of the great conservative scholars of the past.

In the Introduction chapter, Robert Price begins by introducing us to a new invective with the term "Pietist." Though he does not define the term he seems to be using it to denote someone who accepts something purely through emotion and having nothing to do with reason. This term is used throughout the chapter and seems to be taking the place of the time worn "fundamentalist" term. Well, if one term starts to get old and worn out bring out a new one to enliven the discussion. On page 16 Price starts by saying that a living resurrected Jesus is a hold over from some "Pietist" teaching and on page 18 explains that this did not exist before the 17th century. You wonder if he has ever read the New Testament including Luke and especially the writings of Paul. Then as you read further you find out the reasoning for many of these types of statements. On page 14 the Bible is assigned to the same class of writings as those about Hercules, Romulus, Adonis, Osiris, etc. He assigns these "gods" and "saviors" to the same types as Jesus. He totally fails to mention the writings of Ronald Nash's The Gospel and the Greeks or J. Grechen Machem's The Virgin Birth of Christ. These two books combined show that none of the "savior" gods died for our sins nor do any of the so called virgin births relate in any way to the Jesus story.

On page 18 Mr. Price unequivocally states that continuing growth of the New Testament "quickly obscured any genuine memory of what the historical Jesus might actually have said" and "we can no longer tell what the real Jesus (if any) really said." If this is the case and there is no accurate history of Jesus then it is possible to come up with just about any theory on the life of Jesus that you want to. This is demonstrated by the very "liberal" scholars that he uses as examples (Albrecht, Marxsen, Schleiermacher, Derret and Thiering). What is the main reason for the Bible not being acceptable? It is the anti-supernatural presupposition philosophy held by him and others as stated on pages 10, 15 and 16. You would hope that this being such an important diverging point that there would be a discussion about why they do not hold to the miraculous instead of just stating that it is just a ridiculous idea. Even Kai Niesem (a prominent atheistic philosopher) says: "To show that an argument is invalid or unsound is not to show that the conclusion of the argument is false. . . . All the proofs of God's existence may fail, but it still may be the case that God exists. In short, to show that the proofs do not work is not enough by itself. It may still be the case that God exists." Kai Nielsen, Reason and Practice, pages 143-44. Unfortunately I have thus far found no such discussion.

Another disturbing tendency of Mr. Price is the setting up of straw-man arguments and then tearing them down. For example on page 12 he talks of the resurrected Jesus being a grizzled 2000 year old man sitting around pondering life's mysteries. No orthodox teaches such a ridiculous idea. But this is just another way of making fun of someone's beliefs instead of seriously debating him. Many other examples include stating that many doctrines originate from the modern Pietistic movement and ignore the fact that they derive from a simple reading of the New Testament documents.

So what in general is the purpose of this book? On page 15 Mr. Price states that they are "the true champions and friends of the Bible" and they are the "champions and zealots for a straightforward and accurate understanding of the Bible as an ancient text, and of the resurrection accounts as natural accoutrements of such literature." So now the teachings of the historic Christian Church declaring the Bible as accurate historical documents are the aberrations and theirs is the only true understanding. On page 15 Mr. Price promotes this idea when he says "it is the fundamentalists, the apologist for Christian supernaturalism, who is propagating false and misleading views of the Bible among the general populace." They are out to save everyone from the "foolishness of the untutored masses" (page 15). It was the "misguided proponents" (page 16) of an earlier generation that promoted these supernatural doctrines that were so "naively" taken for granted by many. The Bible is not a "supernatural oracle book" but merely an "ancient text of mythology," as Mr. Price states on page 17, "If there was a historical Jesus, he is long lost in the shuffle."

By denying the supernatural, miraculous and God it is easy to dismiss the Bible as a book of myths and legends. Everyone is then left up to their own imaginations to reconstruct a Jesus of their choice. Yet there has yet to be an adequate refutation of the existence of the supernatural, it is only defined out of existence and rejected. As C.S. Lewis states in his book Miracles when refuting David Hume, the only way you can know that there are no such things as miracles is to know that all the reports are false and the only way you can know that they are all false is to know there are no such things as miracles. You end up arguing in circles. Therefore to reject the historicity of the Bible a priori because it reports the miraculous is unfounded and unwarranted. Mr. Price offers only one feeble attempt at refuting miracles on page 13. When discussing the idea that some have tried to show some of the phenomena record in the Bible can be validated scientifically he states "A claim that can be proven by employing a set of criteria cannot in principle transcend those criteria, can it?" Besides not really saying why, he seem unknowledgeable of the idea that God can use purely natural means to accomplish his goals or on the other hand create entirely new phenomena. In the example he uses God could easily use the natural conjunction of several planets to guide the wise men on their journey and then create an entirely new sign to lead them to a specific house. Neither would be a denial of the miraculous. Without this proposition most of their arguments fall. If on the other hand the Bible is indeed a historical document about the life and teachings of Jesus, then Jesus is who he claims to be by virtue of the resurrection and as Thomas says to Jesus "my Lord and my God" we should say also. The lines are clearly drawn. We can follow the modern day prophets and their mythology philosophy or we can follow those who witnessed the power of the risen Lord and forsook all that they had grown up with to preach to those that they had formerly despised, eventually dying for what they taught; the crucified and risen Jesus Christ. Who among these is willing to take this philosophy of mythology to the poor, the sick, and their enemies? Which of these will found a hospital in the remotest hostile area of the world and preach the power of a mythological Jesus still dead and rotting in the grave. When I see this happening I might take their arguments more seriously.

The second chapter that I read was "The Resurrection as Initially Improbable" by Michael Martin. My interest was not peaked by the use of Baye's Theorem, for often such esoteric philosophical arguments tend to make me drowsy and I have to force myself to follow along (which is not always a bad thing). What intrigued me was the title itself. When I read it my immediate reaction was "so what?" What is meant is even in a theistic worldview an event such as a resurrection is not something to be expected. Normally men three days dead do not get up and walk around and in a naturalistic worldview you would never expect this to happen (which of course is Michael Martin's view). But then he goes on even further and tries to refute miracles even if there is a God who could do such things. Why? Because they could not be proven scientifically (the Holy Grail of these people) and would cause too much confusion and mislead many. What he fails to mention is that most things historical cannot be confirmed "scientifically." What it comes down to is do you trust the testimony of the witnesses or not. As briefly stated above there are good reasons to accept their testimonies (One good reference to the reliability of the New Testament documents can be found online). As to the other point the only way for there never to be any confusion or misunderstanding of events, whether miraculous or natural, is for man to have perfect understanding and if we had to wait for that nothing would ever be accomplished. Actions by God are not the only events that confuse and mislead man. Should we reject everything is this category?

So Mr. Martin makes much about the improbability of the resurrection account and as stated above there is no initial disagreement. And it can even be agreed that such accounts are more improbable than others. But he hangs too much on this. After all it is highly improbable that someone will be hit by lightning and even more so that they will be hit more than once, yet we know that it occurs.

In spite of how low the probability that a specific event may occur might be, even if it be well below the 50% threshold that Mr. Martin requires, if there are reliable eyewitness accounts that an event did in fact occur it would be illogical to automatically reject them just because of their low probability. Once again it is seem throughout this chapter that the implication is that if an event is of the supernatural category it is to be rejected a priori. Another point that Mr. Martin fails to discuss is this; if there is indeed a personal God as recorded in the Scriptures and these Scriptures are accurate recordings of his dealings with mankind then it cannot be ignored that God has told us in advance that his Messiah would have to suffer and die and would in turn be raised from the dead. In that case it is neither improbable nor unlikely that the resurrection would take case because God is doing exactly what he said he was going to do. Such a scenario would raise the probability to 100%, well within the standard required by Mr. Martin. As with Mr. Price's arguments from the introduction, Mr. Martin's also relies upon an anti-super naturalistic worldview, which neither has provided a reason to accept. In closing one can wonder if Michael Martin would be willing to apply this test to a naturalistic origin of life scenario?