Part 1

u/CoreysAngelsRecruit has done a good job of explaining what the early beliefs and debates over the nature of the resurrection were about. I'd like to tackle the question (and the author you linked) head on, just because I think the construction of early Christian beliefs to be really interesting. I've read the post, and I'll do my best to be nice to this guy. I'm going to assume that he's being earnest in his beliefs, and it's not the job of the historian to tell people what their religious beliefs should be. That being said, there are a number of things about the linked piece of work that makes me think they've done very little research and know almost nothing about the wider context of resurrection stories and myths in the classical world. In explaining what I think he's got wrong, I'm also going to be explaining what I think to be the case, which may not necessarily be correct because we know far, far less than we'd like about the early days of Christianity. But I think it's a plausible explanation to 'it really happened'.

The question is this: Which theory about what really happened in Jerusalem on that first Easter Sunday can account for the data?

So I've got some methodological issues with this guy. He's trying to demonstrate that the resurrection really happened by eliminating the other possibilities that he raises. On the face of it, it's the 'Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.' style of reasoning - some classic Sherlock Holmes detective stuff. But these possibilities aren't the only ones, they're just the ones he's put forward, and we'll get to the other possibilities in a moment.

The other gripe I have is more a presentational thing but it's important: he's phrasing this stuff as "data", which is reinforced by using tables and numbering his theories etc. It presents a scientific appearance, when actually the information we have about Jesus and the early days of Christianity is almost purely qualitative and its provenance makes it difficult to trust. We may call history a "social science", but I would never in a million years pretend that the stuff we do, at least for ancient and medieval history, is even slightly scientific and seeing it presented in this way makes me wary. The beginning of the piece is setting up a very neat and tidy arrangement of arguments and information, but any historian can tell you that historical events, especially ones that get mythologies attached, are the antithesis of neat and tidy. Basically, he's framing the piece to appear more logical than it actually is.

Something else I want to flag up right now is that he takes the Bible as a historical account at face value. Take, for example, this paragraph:

There were too many witnesses. Hallucinations are private, individual, subjective. Christ appeared to Mary Magdalene, to the disciples minus Thomas, to the disciples including Thomas, to the two disciples at Emmaus, to the fisherman on the shore, to James (his "brother" or cousin), and even to five hundred people at once (1 Cor 15:3-8). Even three different witnesses are enough for a kind of psychological trigonometry; over five hundred is about as public as you can wish. And Paul says in this passage (v. 6) that most of the five hundred are still alive, inviting any reader to check the truth of the story by questioning the eyewitnesses—he could never have done this and gotten away with it, given the power, resources and numbers of his enemies, if it were not true.

"Even three different witnesses are enough for a kind of psychological trigonometry" - again with the presentation of qualitative information as some kind of hard data..., anyway. So the problem is that he's assuming Christ really did appear to 500 people just because Paul says he did. But do we really trust Paul? As I'll explain below, Paul pretty much has to believe every rumour he hears about a resurrected Christ, otherwise his mission falls apart. And Paul was the only person to claim this sighting by 500 people, nobody else mentions it at all. He isn't reading the sources critically, so I'm instantly cautious about anything at all he has to say.

Why couldn't the disciples have made up the whole story?... If the resurrection was a concocted, conspired lie, it violates all known historical and psychological laws of lying.

Here is where the problems really get going. Kreeft suggests that for the disciples to tell stories about a resurrection and be wrong means that either they were deceiving people or had been deceived. This is a false dichotomy. It is also a dichotomy that lacks empathy, and I'll get onto why that matters in the next section. People can earnestly believe things and be wrong without deception taking place. A good example of this would be the miasmic theory of disease; people were wrong to think that 'bad air' causes disease and that stuffing spices up the nose can keep plague away (which we have eyewitness accounts of people doing), but that doesn't mean they were deceived into doing it. They did not have the technological means to understand the root cause of disease, and a fowl miasma was the best they could do within the medical tradition they were a part of; one which existed due to the dissemination of ancient medical treatises by the likes of Galen and Hippocrates. Another example is how people in the Middle Ages understood hearing voices. Today, we understand that there are psychological and neurological conditions which can cause someone to hear voices in their head, but medieval people did not. In their cultural tradition, a strongly Christian one, the go-to explanation for why someone might hear voices in their head was that they were interacting with a spiritual entity, as the Bible taught them that angels and demons could indeed interact with people in this way. This was the sensible conclusion within the limits of their cultural and religious traditions. When people see things they don't quite understand, they apply the frameworks that their world view gives them to improve their understanding. Kreeft seems to be unaware that this is a thing that people do - people can be mistaken without the slightest bit of deception or malice by anybody.

If they made up the story, they were the most creative, clever, intelligent fantasists in history, far surpassing Shakespeare, or Dante or Tolkien.

This is nonsense. The resurrection stories contained in the gospels built on a long tradition of Greco-Roman and Semitic tradition, both of which featured the idea of resurrection. It would have taken very little imagination to combine and iterate on these traditions to form a new variation of a resurrection story, which brings me onto where I have the biggest problem.

Answering this question is difficult from a historical perspective, as it deals with supernatural claims that are outside the ability of historians to answer. From the view of historians, claims of supernatural events themselves do not meet historical criteria, as they are theological rather than historical claims. However, I can provide some information about the belief of the disciples of Jesus that he had been resurrected from the dead. The first thing to point out is that the details of Jesus' death and the events thereafter are rather murky, although they are consistent with the broad points found in the later gospel passion narratives (though these are not considered eyewitness accounts by the overwhelming majority of historians). Our best early evidence as to what proto-Christians believed (that is, Christians before the Jesus movement had become distinct from Judaism) is probably the Pre-Pauline creed found in 1 Corinthians 15:3-8.

3 For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, 4a nd that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, 5 and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. 6 Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. 7 Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles.

So based on this early creed, which is generally dated to the early to mid 40's C.E., the followers of Jesus certainly believed that he had been resurrected, and that many claimed to have seen him appear to them. However, the matter of whether the disciples believed Jesus' resurrection was a physical one (meaning his body itself had been restored to life), or a spiritual one (meaning he possessed a heavenly, transformed body as opposed to his earthly body) is very controversial in scholarly circles. Likewise, exactly how Jesus appeared to his disciples is not clear; did he appear in an earthly physical sense, or did he appear to them in visions? The New Testament itself contains traces of disagreement on this point from very early on. Paul, as he is depicted in Acts, encounters Jesus spiritually in a vision, but in the Gospel of John, the physical nature of Jesus' resurrection is emphasized to point that Thomas is depicted putting his fingers in Jesus' side! Most scholars believe that these details in John's resurrection account are there precisely to counter the view of other early Christians that Jesus' resurrection had been a spiritual one, and not a physical one. What I'm hoping to illustrate with these details is that even the nature of Jesus' resurrection is very uncertain and hotly debated in scholarly circles.

I realize that this is not a direct answer to your question, but I have tried to lay out some of what historians can say with regards to the belief of early Christians in Jesus' resurrection. It is not the job of historians to argue whether or not Jesus was in fact resurrected; what historians can look into is why his followers believed him to have been resurrected, the different views they held on the exact nature of this resurrection, and how traditions of this event were passed down through the community's existence.