No historian doubts Julius Caesar was assassinated on the ides of March of 44 BC, and rarely do they question Jesus of Nazareth’s crucifixion a little less than a century later. It is, as one skeptic put it, the one thing about Jesus that is “as sure as anything historical can be.” [1] When it comes to Jesus’s resurrection, though, there is little consensus. Few doubt he was buried and that the tomb was empty three days later. But for many, the general presumption is that historical approaches to the life of Jesus cannot explain the empty tomb by appealing to the resurrection.
Why? The evidence is the same for it as for the crucifixion. (It is even stronger than the evidence for Julius Caesar’s assassination.) Yet while the death of Jesus on a cross is believable, the resurrection is not. This chapter explores the reasons a historian might make such a claim by exposing the philosophical assumptions behind what is often called the “historical problem of miracles.” It then describes the assumptions of historical research and the impli- cations they have on the empty tomb. The result will be a basic yet essential introduction to historical thinking and the resurrection. [2]
The origin of the discussion about historical research and what it is capable of describing relative to the case of miracles can be traced back to the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher and historian named David Hume (1711–1776) and his celebrated work titled An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Hume wrote the book to advance a robust empiricist epistemology and applied it to a variety of fields of research, including history and religion. He was no friend of the latter. “[O]ne of his most basic philosophical objectives,” writes Paul Russell, was “to unmask and discredit the doctrines and dog- mas of orthodox religious belief.” [3] So, recognizing that the veracity of Christianity rested on the resurrection of Jesus, Hume went after it by attacking the legitimacy of claims that miracles of whatever sort have occurred and can be demonstrated by the historical method.
There are two parts to his argument. First, he reasoned philosophically: “A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature; and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined.” [4] That is, the normal everyday experience of human beings suggests that miracles are not part of the natural or normal order of things. The order that humans observe in nature is, he presumed, static and determined by natural, physical laws. These laws are fixed. They do not change, nor can they be suspended. Therefore the very concept of a miracle— defined by Hume as a “violation” of these laws—makes their occurrence unbelievable, if not virtually impossible.
Hume then applied his philosophy to claims that a miraculous event had actually occurred. He wrote, “The plain consequence is (and it is a general maxim worthy of our attention) that no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish.” [5] Because of the high (and almost certain) unlikelihood of a miracle ever occurring, no testimony—directly from eyewitnesses or from reports based on eyewitness testimony— can be sufficient enough to merit belief unless the reports become more incredible if the events they purport to describe were untrue. Or, in other words, the less incredible (or miraculous) explanation of an event is always to be preferred even if it contradicts good eyewitness testimony.
It was, in his mind, always more likely that eyewitnesses reporting miracles had lied or been mistaken. So in the case of a claim that a resurrection occurred, he suggested:
I immediately consider with myself whether it be more probable that this person would either deceive or be deceived, or that the fact which he relates should really have happened. I weigh the one miracle against the other, and according to the superiority which I discover I pronounce my decision, and always reject the greater miracle. If the falsehood of his testimony would be more miraculous than the event which he relates, then, and not till then, can he pretend to command my belief or opinion. [6]
Hume’s argument provoked a variety of responses from philosophers and Christian apologists alike almost immediately after its publication. [7] One of the most well known was the satirical Historic Doubts Relative to Napoleon Buonaparte, where Richard Whately (1787–1863) took Hume’s principles, applied them to the extraordinary life of the then exiled emperor of the French, and found that the same line of reasoning forced one to doubt his existence. [8] The irony was that Napoleon was still living at the time. The same approach was also applied to the extraordinary life of Abraham Lincoln and incredible events at the Battle of Bunker Hill. [9] They all served to illustrate the philosophical and methodological weakness of Hume’s maxim that no testimony—contemporary or historical—was sufficient enough to warrant acceptance of an incredible or miraculous event like a resurrection as a historical fact.
Despite the wide array of historical and contemporary criticism in works like C. S. Lewis’s Miracles (1947/1960) and John Earman’s Hume’s Abject Failure (2000), the eighteenth-century skeptic’s influence persists—even in the realm of theology. John Warwick Montgomery notes, “Hume’s Enquiry can be said without exaggeration to mark the end of the era of classical Christian apologetics.” [10] Jesus’s miracles were a mainstay in the apologetic tradition until the eighteenth century, where especially the resurrection was marshaled as undeniable evidence for the deity of Jesus and therefore the compelling nature of his teachings. But after Hume, that ceased to be the case. His influence is still pervasive and remains especially strong in biblical scholarship, “endorsed, explicitly or implicitly, in many contemporary studies of the historical Jesus …and the New Testament.” [11] A contemporary version of it is on display in what has been described as the standard text for introductory New Testament courses—Bart Ehrman’s New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings.
This is an excerpt from chapter 2, “Can a Historian Explain the Empty Tomb of with the Resurrection of Jesus” in Resurrection Fact, edited by John Bombaro and Adam Francisco (1517 Publishing 2016), pgs. 43-46.
[2]For a book-length treatment, see Michael Licona, The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2010).
[3]Paul Russell, “Hume on Religion,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2014 edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford .edu/archives/win2014/entries/hume-religion/.
[4]David Hume, An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding (New York: The Liberal Arts Press, 1955), 122.
[5] Ibid., 123.
[6] Ibid., 123–24.
[7] See James Fieser, ed., Early Responses to Hume’s Writings on Religion (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2005).
[8] See Craig Parton, Richard Whately: A Man for All Seasons (Edmonton, AB: Canadian Institute for Law, Theology, and Public Policy), 1997.
