Michael Horner (suite)

Second Rebuttal, Michael Horner, 8 minutes.

Okay, I was making two basic points tonight. One: there are good reasons to affirm the Resurrection. I said that the writings are too early to be legendary. Dan says that he has claimed that he's caught me in a contradiction that on the one hand I'm claiming legend doesn't happen very quickly, but yet I'm saying it can happen in just a few days. All that I admitted was that an event, it either happened or doesn't happen. That's all I admitted in that little exchange there. And that is true. An event is either true or false. It either happened, or it didn't happen. I don't know if it's legendary or not. The point I'm making is [that] legends can't win out over history in less than two generations. Legendary stories can begin to develop. But as long as the eyewitnesses are still there, legend will not win out. We don't know what the case is with these events over in Yugoslavia yet.

The idea that Elvis, the Elvis analogy. The analogy actually proves the opposite. I mean, people laugh at the idea of Elvis sightings because the evidence is strong that he did not rise from the dead, and there's no evidence that he did. If anybody thought it was serious, they would have exhumed the body. See, with Elvis we do see how legends prevail over truth in such a short time. This provides support for the Resurrection account, since the history did prevail over legend.

I argued that the tomb was empty. He says that the body would not have been exhumed because it would have been unrecognizable after 40 days. Not at all. There still would have been ways to identify that body, clues to whether this really was Jesus or somebody else. That's an extremely weak point.

He commented on my point that the tomb was never venerated as a shrine. Yes, later on, in Catholic Christianity, there has developed shrines around it, and my point is, in the first century there was no shrine, that [if] the body had been there, there would have been a shrine there, and the best explanation is that the tomb was empty.

He said there's no corroboration. Well, there's no corroboration for his hypothesis either. And, in fact, there is corroboration for the existence of Jesus. I can't believe that Dan said at the beginning that he doesn't even believe Jesus existed. That puts him in probably the .001% of the scholars in the world today who would hold a position like that. But, he said he wasn't going to argue for it. But, there's corroboration that Jesus existed. Tacitus said that Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilate, for example. Now, they don't give us new information, but they establish the broad strokes that we already have in the New Testament.

Josephus is from the fourth century? I don't know where you come up with some of the stuff you come up with, Dan. Some of the stuff is pretty wild.

Then I argued that Jesus physically appeared to many witnesses, from five independent historical sources. There's the corroboration. But, you see, what Dan does, is he just lumps them all together and says, "Well, we just can't accept them because they're from these writers who are liars and have propaganda in mind." But, look. Simply because a writer is passionately committed to promoting a cause does not at all mean he or she will falsify the facts. This is a false dichotomy. Often such a person will work all the harder to tell the story straight. So, a personal commitment to and involvement with something does not mean a person cannot present a truthful account of the topic in question. After all, often the truthfulness of something is what produced the personal commitment in the first place. So this is just a false dichotomy.

An excellent modern example. Some of the most detailed, reliable reporters of the Nazi Holocaust were Jews who had been passionately committed to seeing that such atrocities never occur again. If we use Dan's methodology, we should not believe the reports of the Jews, especially the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust.

Paul's account is more likely historical than legendary, I argued, because he had appealed to over 500 witnesses. He did not refer to that.

The Gospel accounts are more likely historical than legendary, that it's still too early for legend to win out, not develop, but win out over the historical core.

The women witnesses, I argued. There's two sayings from early, first-century Jewish culture:

"Sooner let the words of the law be burnt than be delivered to a woman."

"Alas he whose children are female," and, I forget how it goes, "and applaud those whose children are male," something like that.

The status of women was extremely poor in first century Jewish Palestine. They never would have had the women being the witnesses, unless that's the way it happened. It was counterproductive to their story.

The stories lack legendary embellishment. You compare them to the later writings about Jesus that did arise in the second century -- those stories read like Paul Bunyan in style. But Dan rejects the Gospels because they have supernatural elements to them. It's his antisupernatural bias again creeping in, that's why he calls them legends.

The origin of the Christian movement is inexplicable apart from a real Resurrection, I said. And, he still hasn't really answered this point. He has to explain the very early belief in a physical resurrection. He just assumes that there wasn't one, but I've already refuted his points about the Apostle Paul's view that I Corinthians 15 is about a physical resurrection, so he doesn't have anything to go on there anymore. And so, he's got to explain the origin of this belief in a physical resurrection. And words like "cognitive dissonance" or Peter feeling guilty doesn't explain anything. It's showing no connections there at all. He's got to flesh out this supposed hypothesis.

Then I argued that there are no good reasons to deny the Resurrection. Unfortunately, there's just not going to be enough time to go through all these contradictions. But I want to be really clear here. Dan's analysis of this was superficial. It was frivolous, and quite frankly, in a number of places, it was irresponsible scholarship. And I'm very disappointed in what's here. I'm not going to have time to go through hardly any of these at all, but let me just touch. Let's touch on the one that you referred to.

When was the stone rolled away? Mark 16 says that the stone had been rolled away. Matthew 28 usually has the word that the stone was rolled away, implying in the presence of the women. But, as John Wenham has shown, the word that's used there often needs to be, can be rendered in the pluperfect, that is as "had happened," "had rolled away." And so Matthew is liking the coming of the angel with the earthquake, and therefore the rolling back of the stone and the sitting on it all at the same time. It had to have occurred, therefore, before the woman had arrived. Now this is not ad hoc. This is not arbitrary. The Greek language allows this. And when you are arguing that there is contradictions, the burden of proof is on you to prove that it's an actual contradiction. If someone can show that there is another possibility here that is reasonable within the text, then that shows it's not a contradiction. The burden of proof is all on Dan here.

If you've got two angels, you've got one angel. Remember, these accounts were not exhaustive. They're only in a summary fashion. And his point that these Gospels say that, like Matthew says that the first meeting of the disciples was in Matthew [Galilee], that is just plain irresponsible. He's assuming that Matthew was completely exhaustive. The word "then" at the beginning of that paragraph is a loose connective, and it can be implied that "this is the next thing I want to tell you," not "this is the next thing that happened" in the text.

So, frankly, I'm very disappointed in what's done there. I wish I could do a better job of refuting his allegations there, because of the time.

[Dan holds up a copy of his "Leave No Stone Unturned" Easter challenge]

Why sometimes you can be rude. [laughter] I won't hold that against you.

The Resurrection hypothesis still explains the evidence better than the alternative hypothesis that Dan has raised. [applause]