Dr. Carrier’s post is here.

I was asked to respond to Dr. Carrier’s post on “Why Did Mark Invent An Empty Tomb?” Before I comment on his post, I must take exception to his claim on his “about” page for his “ethical worldview of secular naturalism” (emphasis is mine.) Ethical naturalism is an oxymoron; ethics mixes as well with naturalism as well as oil mixes with water.

As with the vast majority of secular naturalists, Carrier is not consistent within his own worldview (which is understandable because following naturalism to its logical end leads to destructive nihilism.) Secular naturalism affirms only material reality; it does not believe anything immaterial exists. There is no supernatural. There is no explanation for example, for the conscious mind. Love is nothing more than neurons firing amidst a chemical reaction in the brain that evolved through random, mindless processes over eons of time (tell that to your sweetheart on Valentines day.) Transcendent values which exist eternally beyond space and time, do not exist.

There is no objective moral good. Good is whatever suits you. Traditional ethics, that is the ethics of Christian theism, affirms the transcendent origin of morality and locates in the infinite-personal God who is the final and ultimate measure of good. Good is what God is and this has been revealed in many and diverse ways, most fully in the life, teachings, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. By contrast, Naturalism subjectively grounds morality in humans. The upshot of this is a definition of morality as group-approved, survival-promoting action. (By this definition, the Nazis were “good” in their execution of the holocaust.)

There is no Fall, no curse on creation. Creation is seen in its normal state. For Christian theists, God is the foundation of values. For a naturalist, values are constructed by human beings. If there was no consciousness prior to the existence of humans, then there was no prior sense of right and wrong. And if there were no ability to do other than what one does, any sense of right and wrong would have no practical value. No natural law is inscribed in the cosmos. There is no transcendent morality. But in affirming “ethical naturalism”, Carrier is illegitimately borrowing the concept of morality from Christian theism. His ethics have no objective ground.

The Humanist Manifesto II states the locus of naturalistic ethics in no uncertain terms: “We affirm that moral values derive their source from human experience. Ethics is autonomous and situational, needing no theological or ideological sanction. Ethics stems from human need and interest. To deny this distorts the whole basis of life. Human life has meaning because we create and develop our futures.”

Carrier is obviously deeply committed to atheism. In fact, naturalism is ultimately a strong form of atheism. His commitment to atheism determines the features of his worldview.

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Here is the upside-down philosophy Carrier is espousing in his post: theory determines and validates the data, rather than data determining and validating the theory.

Carrier is quite lengthy in his post and uses what I characterize as a “shotgun” argument with his theory validating the voluminous data that he brings to the table. But in a provocative counter-editorial, Yanai and Lercher claim that “a hypothesis is a liability” (see here). They contend that having a hypothesis is costly because it causes scientists to miss hidden data and interesting phenomena. They advocate “hypothesis-free” data exploration, which they argue can yield significant scientific discoveries. In fact, this is the approach I use in my 5-part series on the Resurrection – I offer no theory at the outset and simply follow the evidence where it leads.

Instead of focusing on proven facts, Carrier seems to throw in everything under the sun he can think of including the kitchen sink of the “Orphic Mystic Cult.” He reasons contrary to Occam’s Razor and arrives at an unlikely conclusion that requires the greatest number of assumptions. It is clear that instead of presenting evidence and subsequently following it to the most likely logical conclusion, he starts with a conclusion (Mark made it all up) and then tries backing into it. While Carrier has impressive credentials, his approach to Scripture is found in Mark 4:12: “they may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand, lest they should turn and be forgiven.”

He begins his post at the outset by stating, “we must expect the Gospel writers to make up stories just as Jews and pagans did. Historically speaking it is extremely unlikely that the Christians behind the Gospel traditions were immune to this standard practice.” Yes, there were indeed “made-up” stories in early heterodox and heretical Christianity – specifically the gnostic gospels which were universally rejected by the early church as false. (These so-called gospels are faithfully trotted out every Easter by skeptics and acclaimed as “hidden” gospels; however they are not hidden but well known and rejected for the very reason that they were “made up.”)

Some of Carrier’s argument is borderline delusional. Even the respected atheist Bart Erhman is critical of Carrier writing, “Richard Carrier is one of the new breeds of mythicists.” The peer-reviewed journal “Journal for the Study of the Historial Jesus” destroys Carrier’s mythicism. As one of the editors notes, “It (the journal) also has people of many different religious affiliations, there are members who identify as Jewish, evangelical Christian, mainline Christian, agnostic, and atheist. We disagree on just about everything when it comes to Jesus and the sources pertaining to him. However, what we all agree on is that (1) Jesus existed and (2) people who deny his existence are cranks or bad-historians.”

Carrier claims “the fact that the earliest Christian history shows no knowledge of there having been any empty tomb story at any point in the religion’s first three decades”. This is patently false. If Bart Ehrman is right that Mark was the earliest gospel and was written in 70 AD, then Carrier is offering an argument from silence. I must point out that some scholars date Mark to the early 50s AD. The earliest epistle of Paul is believed to be 1 Thessalonians, which was written around A.D. 50–51, some 20 years after the crucifixion. It’s noteworthy that Paul explcitly states therein that Jesus rose from the dead (1 Thess 1:10; 4:14).

In fact, we have historical evidence from secular sources that early Christians were proclaiming that Jesus had risen from the dead (see here and here.) As Robinson argues, “One of the most compelling pieces of evidence from secular history that serves to validate the presence of Jesus on earth, dying on a cross and resurrected from the dead, is the persecution of the early followers of Jesus by the Roman government. The Romans were very tolerant of every religion, except Christianity. The Roman Emperors determined that Christianity was a terrible superstition, in which its followers believed in the impossible: their leader had risen from the dead.”

Josephus (37-100) records that early Christians were proclaiming a risen Jesus. In 106 AD, well before legends could develop, Pliny the Younger in his letter to the emperor Trajan, affirms that Christians were worshipping Jesus as God.

The New Testament book of Acts records the first 30 years of the early church after the resurrection and makes specific mention of resurrection some 25 times: Acts 1:3, 21-22; 2:24, 29-32; 3:15, 26; 4:2; 4:10; 4:33; 5:30; 9:40-41; 10:39-40; 13:30-37; 14:19-20; 17:2-3; 17:18; 17:31-32; 20:9-10; 23:6; 24:14-15; 24:20-21; 25:19; 26:7-8; 26:22-23. In addition to these specific explicit occurrences, there are also a considerable number of implicit references (i.e., Acts 8:37 where Jesus “is” [instead of “was”] the Son of God; Acts 9:5-6, 9:27; 22:6-8; etc.) We must ask why the early church placed such overwhelming importance on the message of resurrection.

Carrier is in the small minority, even among hardcore atheists, with his wild claims. See here for various scholarly claims by others.

• Rudolph Bultmann one of the most liberal theologians in the 19th century wrote “I am sure that the disciples saw Jesus after his death.”
• The former self-proclaimed evangelical and now-affirmed atheist, Bart Ehrman (with impressive scholarly credentials) admits ““That Jesus’ followers (and later Paul) had resurrection experiences is, in my judgment, a fact. What the reality was that gave rise to the experiences I do not know.”
• Pinchas Lapide (1922-1997) (a Jewish theologian) acknowledges “The conviction that Jesus had risen from the dead had already taken root by the time Paul was converted about 33 C.E. On the assumption that Jesus died about 30 C.E., the time for development was thus two or three years at most.”

I posted a five-part series on the Resurrection here. Perhaps the most powerful evidence that refutes Carrier was the willing martyrdom of 11 of the apostles who all died in the first century proclaiming a risen Jesus. While John lived the longest until the reign of Trajan, his writings (the gospel of John, Revelation, 1 John) clearly present a risen Jesus. (For more in-depth data, consult the work of Gary Habermas who is probably the foremost current expert on the Resurrection.)

Carrier concludes that “These things never happened. No one witnessed them. They were not stories people passed on orally about Jesus. Mark made all these things up. Just as he did the empty tomb.” While almost all skeptics agree that the tomb was empty and then argue for why the tomb was empty, Carrier neatly circumvents it all – without proof – by simply claiming the tomb was never empty and that Mark made it all up. In fact, the early church made the resurrection the repeated and continual focal point of its message to a hostile, pagan culture. Around 59 AD, almost 30 years after the resurrection, the apostle Paul was on trial before the Roman procurator Porcius Festus in the port city of Caesarea Maritima. When Paul asserted that Jesus Christ was alive and had risen from the dead, Festus shouted that Paul was out of his mind (Acts 26:24).

The fatal flaw in Carrier’s argument is his own admission that “the very disciples are the ones who abandon Christ”. Indeed. But what explains their sudden overnight reversal and that 11 of them would ultimately die for what they believed to be true . . . that Jesus had risen from the dead? What explains why the early Jerusalem church, comprised entirely of Jews, suddenly changed their day of worship from Saturday (meticulously observed for over a thousand years) to Sunday? What explains the transformation of the brother of Jesus (James the Just) who originally thought Jesus was insane (Mark 3:21) and then became a leader of the Jerusalem church? The answer is obvious – the tomb really was empty and Jesus actually did rise from the dead.

As I concluded my 5-part posts on the Resurrection, “Like Thomas and James the Just from millennia ago, I was confronted some 50 years ago with irrefutable evidence that I could not reasonably deny. And like them, I was impelled to exclaim “My Lord and my God.” The resurrection of Jesus Christ in space-time history is the definitive sign that God entered creation to reverse the Fall and offer us the free gift of eternal life. It ruptured time itself bringing the future into the present and creating an overlap of two ages. But it also portends a fearful coming day of judgment for those who reject its message of unspeakable grace.”