In the comments on my post on worship and atheism, FVThinker is trying to argue (among other things) that “all the conflicting stories re: his resurrection” constitute sufficient reason to deny the Resurrection of Christ. Now, in the first place, I deny the assertion, which is just one more tired leftover from liberal German scholarship of a century and more ago; but let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, that we grant the point. Does this in fact constitute a compelling argument against the historicity of the Resurrection?No, it doesn’t. To understand why, consider a more recent historical incident, the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. If you’ve read Simon Winchester’s excellent book A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906, then you probably remember that in the Prologue, Winchester quotes from five eyewitness accounts of the quake. Consider the following.
At the precise moment when the members of this quintet—three of them very distinguished men of science and two others of relatively modest social standing—were undertaking their very mundane activities . . . it was twelve minutes after five o’clock in the morning.However, this was a matter of provable fact only for the Englishman, so far as the record relates. His name was George Davidson, and he, like his fellow scientists, wrote about the event that was to follow with a certain icy detachment. He took care to mark the time that he first noticed something happening: Suddenly and without warning his room, his house, and the very land all was standing upon began to shake, with a great, ever-increasing, and uncontrollable violence.It was, he knew full well, an earthquake.It came, he later reported,
from north to south, and the only description I am able to give of its effect is that it seemed like a terrier shaking a rat. I was in bed, but was awakened by the first shock. I began to count the seconds as I went towards the table where my watch was, being able through much practice closely to approximate the time in that manner. The shock came at 5.12 o’clock. The first sixty seconds were the most severe. From that time on it decreased gradually for about thirty seconds. There was then the slightest perceptible lull. Then the shock continued for sixty seconds longer, being slighter in degree in this minute than in any part of the preceding minute and a half. There were two slight shocks afterwards which I did not time.
Professor Davidson must have been as terrified as anyone, but he was a man trained to observe, and he knew in an instant what was taking place. . . . the first full series of hard shocks, say his notes, lasted until 5h 13m 00s. The shocks were slightly less from that point until 5h 13m 30s, then there was a slight lull, and by 5h 14m 30s all was quiet again. . . . The official report on the earthquake said, in a tone that brooked no dispute, “We shall accept Professor Davidson’s time as the most accurate obtainable for San Francisco.
The second eyewitness account Winchester considers is that of the meteorologist Alexander George McAdie.
Professor McAdie was an ambitious and a punctilious man, and at the very moment that he was awakened . . . both his ambition and his scrupulous regard for factual observation . . . came promptly to the fore. As had been his custom ever since he went through the Great Charleston Earthquake of 1886 (“for twenty years I have timed every earthquake I have felt,” he was later to write”), the instant he awoke and felt movement he clicked on his flashlight, noted the time on his fob watch, and recorded in his notebook everything that transpired.
I have lookt up the record in my note-book made on April 18, 1906, while the earthquake was still perceptible. I find the entry “5h 12m” and after that “Severe lasted nearly 40 seconds.” As I now remember it the portion “severe, etc.” was entered immediately after the shaking.
The only snag was that poor Professor McAdie somehow managed to misread his watch during all the confusion, and he wreathed himself in a magnificent maze of complications as he tried to explain the mistake. He wrote that the day before the earthquake,
my error was “1 minute slow” at noon by time-ball, or time signals received in Weather Bureau and which my watch has been compared for a number of years. The rate of my watch is 5 seconds loss per day; therefore the corrected time of my entry is 5h 13m 05s AM. This is not of course the beginning of the quake. I would say perhaps 6 or more seconds may have elapsed between the act of waking, realizing, and looking at the watch and making my entry. I remember distinctly getting the minute-hand’s position, previous to the most violent portion of the shock. The end of the shock I did not get exactly, as I was watching the second-hand, and the end came several seconds before I fully took in that the motion had ceased. The second-hand was somewhere between 40 and 50 when I realized this. I lost the position of the second-hand because of difficulty in keeping my feet, somewhere around the 20-second mark.However, there is one uncertainty. I may have read my watch wrong. I have no reason to think I did; but I know from experience such things are possible. I have the original entries untouched since the time they were made.
The official report accepts that the unfortunate man did effect an error in making what was probably the most critical observation of his career—but, out of courtesy, adds that such a mistake would have been very easy to make. The one-minute error is, then, officially compensated for, and Alexander McAdie enters the lists as having, essentially, timed the Great San Francisco Earthquake as beginning at 5h 12m 05s, recorded that it became extremely severe at 5h 12m 25s, and noted that it tailed off into bearable oblivion at 5h 12m 50s. The whole event, in McAdie’s eyes, extended over little more than forty seconds—about half the time that Davidson had computed, from his observations that were made a little bit closer to town.
One of the other eyewitnesses Winchester cites is Fred Hewitt, a reporter for the San Francisco Examiner.
It was some minutes after five o’clock when he and his two friends crossed Golden Gate Avenue, spent five minutes talking to a pair of policemen—”blue-coated guardians” as he later wrote for his paper—and said their farewells. Hewitt had turned north, the policemen back south down Larkin, when suddenly:
The ground rose and fell like an ocean at ebb tide. Then came the crash . . . I saw those policement enveloped by a shower of falling stone.It is impossible to judge the length of that shock. To me it seemed like an eternity. I was thrown prone on my back and the pavement pulsated like a living thing. Around me the huge buildings, looking more terrible becasue of the queer dance they were performing, wobbled and veered. Crash followed crash and resounded on all sides. . . .The first portion of the shock was just a mild forerunning of what was to follow. The pause in the action of the earth’s surface couldn’t have been more than a fraction of a second. . . . Then came the second and more terrific crash.
Now, in this collection of testimony from three different observers—including two professional scientists, people trained to observe, measure, and record things with uncommon precision—we see discrepancies in the details. Indeed, between the two scientists we see discrepancies in their accounts of the start time and length of the quake which, given the level of precision to which they were trained and which they were attempting, can only be described as significant; and we have another witness who declares, “It is impossible to judge the length of that shock,” and offers another differing account of the quake’s progress. We have here, at the least, “conflicting stories re: the earthquake.”The question is, what can we conclude from these discrepancies? Specifically, can we conclude that the earthquake didn’t happen? Clearly, we can’t; the inference is logically unjustifiable—a point which is made helpfully obvious in this case by the fact that the earthquake is recent enough that we still have lots of other evidence as well which bears witness to it. Even if several hundred or thousand years in the future, it somehow happened that the only record of that earthquake was these three statements, scholars of that future time would in no way be justified in concluding that because of these discrepancies, they could dismiss the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 as ahistorical—and if they insisted on doing so anyway, they would be arguing illogically to reach a false conclusion.What needs to be understood here is that whatever differences there may be in the details of these three reports, they agree on the core facts: some little time past 5am in the cold morning of April 18, 1906, a major earthquake hit San Francisco, California, and their world was shaken, and their lives were never the same again. Whatever they disagree on, they testify to that much with firm unanimity, and so their collective statements in fact provide strong support for the existence and significance of that event.The same may be said of the accounts of Jesus’ resurrection. Even if we grant, for the sake of argument, actual discrepancies and contradictions in the details of the accounts, they agree on the core facts: Jesus died on a Roman cross; his body was sealed in a rock tomb behind a heavy stone door; the following Sunday, the stone was found moved away from the tomb, and the tomb was empty; no one ever produced his body; and in fact, he appeared again alive on various occasions to various of his followers. Whatever they might be said to disagree on, the reports agree that some time that Sunday morning, Jesus was raised from the dead, and their world was shaken, and their lives were never the same again; they testify to that much with firm unanimity, and so their collective statements in fact provide strong support for the existence and significance of that event. To seize on alleged discrepancies as an excuse to conclude otherwise is every bit as logically unjustifiable as it would be to conclude from the eyewitness statements quoted above that there was no earthquake in San Francisco in 1906.The fact is, eyewitness testimony always varies—always. People see different things, perceive things differently, assign different levels of importance to various details, and yes, make mistakes and misremember things, even if they’re doing their best to be accurate. Variance in eyewitness testimony is therefore to be expected. Indeed, if you have a group of eyewitnesses who all tell the exact same story with no variation, that’s a pretty good sign that they’ve gotten together to get their stories straight, and thus that their testimony is probably unreliable in some way. What the differences in the scriptural accounts primarily demonstrate is that there was no collusion between the witnesses—which is, on the whole, a good thing, and speaks more to their basic reliability than the reverse.