The Resurrection of Jesus

A New Historiographical Approach

Michael R. Licona

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780830868865
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

The question of the historicity of Jesus' resurrection has been repeatedly probed, investigated and debated. And the results have varied widely. Perhaps some now regard this issue as the burned-over district of New Testament scholarship. Could there be any new and promising approach to this problem? Yes, answers Michael Licona. And he convincingly points us to a significant deficiency in approaching this question: our historiographical orientation and practice. So he opens this study with an extensive consideration of historiography and the particular problem of investigating claims of miracles. This alone is a valuable contribution. But then Licona carefully applies his principles and methods to the question of Jesus' resurrection. In addition to determining and working from the most reliable sources and bedrock historical evidence, Licona critically weighs other prominent hypotheses. His own argument is a challenging and closely argued case for the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus, the Christ. Any future approaches to dealing with this "prize puzzle" of New Testament study will need to be routed through The Resurrection of Jesus.

1

Important Considerations on
Historical Inquiry Pertaining to
the Truth in Ancient Texts

Excessive epistemology becomes cognitive cannibalism. But a little bit of it is important as a hedge against easy assumptions and arrogant certainties in any branch of knowledge.[1]

Luke Timothy Johnson

1.1. Introductory Comments

In The History Primer, J. H. Hexter asked his readers to consider the difference between grading an examination in mathematics and one in history. In the former, students either get it or they do not. “Really bad mathematics, therefore, is the consequence of an utter failure of comprehension and results in answers that are simply and wholly false. This sort of total disaster is far less likely in a history examination.” When writing about the past, “even an ill-informed stupid student is not likely to get everything all wrong. A slightly informed, intelligent student will do better. . . . [While n]obody bluffs his way through a written mathematics examination,” the same cannot be said of students of history. “Partly because writing bad history is pretty easy, writing very good history is rare.”[2]

And so our journey begins. What is history? One might think this question would be easy to answer and that professional historians would all agree that history is a synonym for the past. Indeed, a number of historians and philosophers define history in this manner. Philosopher of history Aviezer Tucker defines history as “past events.”[3] Philosopher Stephen Davis asserts that “history is understood as the events that occurred in the real past and that historians attempt to discover.”[4] However, it turns out that many others have provided differing definitions. Indeed, the term history may be referred to as an essentially contested concept, a word for which no consensus exists as to its meaning.[5] What are some other definitions of history? Historical Jesus scholar John Dominic Crossan offers the following: “History is the past reconstructed interactively by the present through argued evidence in public discourse.”[6] New Testament scholar Samuel Byrskog defines history as “an account of what people have done and said in the past, which means that various kinds of biased, pragmatic and didactic features can be part of the writing of history.”[7] Historian Michael Oakeshott offers this definition: “ ‘What really happened [is] what the evidence obliges us to believe.’ The historical past, itself a construction based on reasoning from evidence, is ultimately a construction within the historian’s ‘world of ideas.’ ”[8] New Testament scholar Luke Timothy Johnson offers the following: “History is, rather, a product of human intelligence and imagination. It is one of the ways in which human beings negotiate their present experience and understanding with reference to group and individual memory.”[9] Philosopher of history Hayden White offers this definition: “the term history refers both to an object of study and to an account of this object” and “can be conceived only on the basis of an equivocation . . . in the notion of a general human past that is split into two parts one of which is supposed to be ‘historical,’ the other ‘unhistorical.’”[10] More definitions can be found in abundance.[11] Although much discussion is to follow, throughout this volume I will use Tucker’s definition and refer to history as past events that are the object of study.

Historiography is another essentially contested concept. White writes that historiography concerns quests about history and questions of history. It is both philosophy and method.[12] Tucker refers to it as “representations of past events, usually texts, but other media such as movies or sound recordings.”[13] According to this definition, Josephus’s Jewish Antiquities, Tacitus’s Annals and Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List are all examples of historiography. Thus, historiography can be defined as the history of the philosophy of history and as writings about the past. Historiography is not historical method but includes it, since method enables one to write about the past. Throughout this volume I will use the term historiography to refer to matters in the philosophy of history and historical method. Philosophy of history concerns epistemological approaches to gaining a knowledge of the past. It attempts to answer questions such as, What does it mean to know something? How do we come to know something? Can we know the past and, if so, to what extent? What does it mean when historians say that a particular event occurred?[14]

1.2. Theory

1.2.1. Considerations in the Philosophy of History

There are numerous challenges to knowing the past. Since the past is forever gone, it can neither be viewed directly nor reconstructed precisely or exhaustively. Accordingly historians cannot verify the truth of a hypothesis in an absolute sense.[15] Our knowledge of the past comes exclusively through sources. This means that, to an extent, our only link to the past is through the eyes of someone else, a person who had his or her own opinions and agendas.[16] Therefore, just as two newspapers offering reports of the same event can differ significantly due, for example, to the political biases of the journalists,[17] reports coming to us from ancient historians have likewise been influenced to varying degrees by the biases of the ancient historian. Moreover, many ancient historians lacked interest in their past. Instead, they were more concerned with having their present remembered.[18]

Historians ancient and modern alike are selective in the material they report. Data the reporting historian deems uninteresting, unimportant or irrelevant to his or her purpose in writing are usually omitted.[19] For example, Lucian complained when he heard a man tell of the Battle of Europus in less than seven lines but afforded much more time to the experiences of a Moorish horseman.[20] Amazingly neither Philo nor Josephus, the most prominent non-Christian Jewish writers of the first century, mentioned Emperor Claudius’s expulsion of all Jews from Rome in ca. A.D. 49-50. Only Suetonius and Luke mention the event, and each give it only one line in passing.[21] A contemporary example is found in Ronald Reagan’s autobiography, in which he comments on his first marriage. Readers desiring to learn about this relationship will be disappointed, since Reagan offers a total of two sentences: “The same year I made the Knute Rockne movie, I married Jane Wyman, another contract player at Warners. Our marriage produced two wonderful children, Maureen and Michael, but it didn’t work out, and in 1948 we were divorced.”[22]

My wife’s grandfather Albert Weible kept a daily diary for years. His entry for April 2, 1917, the day the U.S. entered WWI, against Germany, was as follows: “The weather was cloudy and windy today. {Born to Herman and Edyth to-day a son.} Pa and I cultivated in oats again to-day.” The following Sunday (Easter, April 8, 1917), he wrote the following: “The weather is very nice and warmer. The ground is very much [?]. Pa {ect.} [sic] didn’t go to church to-day. I went alone on Pearl [a horse]. There were quite a few there in spite of the mud. In the afternoon we all went up to Fred’s.” Albert Weible kept diary entries every day. Yet he never mentioned the war. If we think of history as an exhaustive description of the past, then history is certainly unknowable. However, if we regard history as an adequate description of a subject during a specific period, we are in a position to think that history is knowable to a degree. Although incomplete, adequate descriptions provide enough data for answering the questions being asked. “George W. Bush was the President of the United States in 2006” is an accurate statement. It is incomplete, since it fails to mention that he was also a husband and father during the same time. Whether the statement is adequate or fair depends on the purpose of writing and the questions being asked. The Evangelists never actually described the physical features of Jesus because it was not relevant to their purpose in writing. This omission can hardly be said to hinder us regarding many questions of historicity. Thus, an incomplete description does not necessitate the conclusion that it is an inaccurate description.

The selectivity of historians goes beyond the events or narratives they choose to report. Historians select data because of their relevancy to the particular historian, and these become evidence for building the historian’s case for a particular hypothesis. Detectives at the scene of a crime survey all of the data and select specific data, which become evidence as they are interpreted within the framework of a hypothesis. Data that are irrelevant to that hypothesis are archived or ignored. Historians work in the same manner. Suppose an ancient historian selected specific data while discarding other data deemed irrelevant. If the ancient historian was mistaken in his understanding of what occurred, modern historians may find themselves handicapped, since what may be data relevant to the questions they are asking may now be lost, unless it is reported or alluded to in a different source. Therefore, historians may inquire whether there is a high probability that data no longer extant would serve as evidence. Of course, this speculation would produce an argument from silence and an ad hoc component to any hypothesis. But this is sometimes necessary when historians suffer from a paucity of data.

Memories are selective and are augmented by interpretive details. In time, they may become uncertain, faded or distorted. Authorial intent often eludes us, and the motives behind the reports are often difficult to determine.[23] This is a challenge when we consider the four earliest extant biographies of Jesus, known as the canonical Gospels. There is somewhat of a consensus among contemporary scholars that the Gospels belong to the genre of Greco-Roman biography (bios). Bioi offered the ancient biographer great flexibility for rearranging material and inventing speeches in order to communicate the teachings, philosophy, and political beliefs of the subject, and they often included legend. Because bios was a flexible genre, it is often difficult to determine where history ends and legend begins.[24]

Another factor that contributes to the difficulty of knowing the past is the occasional unreliability of eyewitness testimony. Lucian writes of those who lie about being eyewitnesses, when in fact they were not.[25] But even reports by eyewitnesses attempting to be truthful have challenges. Zabell notes that the eyewitness must “(1) accurately perceive it; (2) remember it with precision; (3) truthfully state it; and (4) succesfully [sic] communicate it to others.”[26] Moreover, even bona fide eyewitnesses who were both sober and sincere often provide conflicting testimonies. Did the Titanic break in half, as many eyewitnesses claimed, or did it go down intact, as reported by other eyewitnesses? What really happened in the exchange between Wittgenstein and Popper at Cambridge the evening of October 25, 1946? Did Wittgenstein throw down a hot poker, storm out of the room and slam the door behind him, or was this a “gross exaggeration” of the event? There are numerous conflicting reports from eyewitnesses.[27]

The past has come to us fragmented. Ancient historians were selective in what they reported, and much of what was written has been lost. Approximately half of the writings of the Roman historian Tacitus have survived. All but a fragment of Thallus’s Mediterranean history written in the first century has been lost. Suetonius was aware of the writings of Asclepiades of Mendes, but they are no longer extant. Nicholas of Damascus was the secretary of Herod the Great and wrote his Universal History in 144 books, none of which has survived. Only the early books of Livy and excerpts from his other writings have survived. Although Papias was an influential leader in the early second-century Christian church, only a few citations and slight summary information remain from his five books titled Expositions of the Sayings of the Lord. Around the same time, another church leader named Quadratus wrote a defense of the Christian faith for the Roman emperor Hadrian. Had Eusebius of Caesarea not mentioned his work and quoted a paragraph from it in the fourth century, all traces of it would probably have been forever lost. Hegesippus’s Recollections, contained in five books written in the second century, likewise survive only in fragments preserved mostly by Eusebius.[28]

A watchword with some revisionist historians is that history is written by the winners.[29] When attempting to understand the past, we look primarily at sources that tell a narrative of a battle, an era, a person, and so on. Usually the narrative is written by someone from an advantaged position. Therefore, we are getting our story from the perspective of the party in power rather than from those who are not. For example, our knowledge of ancient Rome comes primarily from ancient historians such as Suetonius, Tacitus, Cicero, Caesar, Livy, Priscus, Sallust, Plutarch and Josephus. Nearly all of these were Romans. Thus, the history of Rome to which we are privy is largely from a Roman perspective. Even Josephus, a Jew, had been conquered and was writing from a perspective in support of Rome. Thus, it might be argued that what we read is biased and slanted from a pro-Roman position. However, it is not always true that history is written by the winners. Thucydides and Xenophon are two of our most important ancient historians, and they both wrote from the losing side. Moreover, as Perez Zagorin notes...