On minimalism, the resurrection, and more: Response to Dr. Craig's podcast
(Originally published at What's Wrong With the World. Link to original post at 'permalink' below.)
Yesterday a podcast came out in which Dr. William Lane Craig answers some of my comments elsewhere (most recently here) about various of his views.
I think this is a very useful discussion, and I think that in responding to Dr. Craig, I can continue and encourage some very fruitful discussion.
The most important thing that I want to say at the outset is that I appreciate greatly Dr. Craig's and Kevin Harris's statements at the beginning of his podcast to the effect that it's possible to disagree and be friends. This is what academics do, and Christian academics in particular should be able to disagree without being disagreeable. That is incredibly important, and I want to maintain that spirit here. This is also one of the many reasons why I respect Dr. Craig so much as a Christian apologist and as a scholar.
I'm responding here chiefly because I think this is a fruitful thing to do. I want to emphasize that in no way, shape, or form am I challenging or pressing Dr. Craig to a never-ending back-and-forth, as it has been implied that I do with those I disagree with. On the contrary, it seems to me that perhaps the most useful thing that could happen here would be for people to read this response and the material in links that I provide from it to other places (that's important), listen to Dr. Craig's podcast, and ponder various issues and spin-off thoughts, perhaps having a discussion in the comments thread here.
My response will not be terribly smooth or organized. I think it's most useful for it to be to-the-point and timely rather than smoothly written. Very roughly, my responses here will follow the order of Dr. Craig's presentation itself.
--The first thing I want to respond to is Dr. Craig's impression that I have made a mistake about whether or not to call his approach a minimal facts approach because I have not read his written work and have listened only to his debates. On the contrary, I actually don't enjoy very much watching debate videos (that's just a glitch in my psychological makeup) and made this terminological error concerning the way that he characterizes his position by way of reading his written material, specifically the introduction to the 3rd edition of Reasonable Faith, his recommendation in Chapter 8 of that book that we abandon what he calls Paley's method of arguing for the resurrection and use a different method instead, and statements made elsewhere in written work that I consider to advocate what I would call "minimalism," which he also advocates in this most recent podcast. Also, I had not previously run across a place (which was subsequently called to my attention by a correspondent on April 21 of this year) where he states that he prefers not to have his argument for the resurrection considered a "minimal facts argument," in part because he includes the empty tomb as a core fact, whereas in Dr. Habermas's minimal facts argument, the empty tomb is not included.
I'm quite happy to change my terminology and not to refer to Dr. Craig's approach as a "minimal facts argument for the resurrection." On the other hand, I do consider his approach to be one of minimalism, and hence a minimalist argument, because of what he reiterates in this very podcast--namely, that in his view it isn't important to the argument for mere Christianity to be able to support the strong reliability of the Gospels. That's a crucial point of disagreement between us, and it is what he has affirmed in multiple places in his writing and transcribed podcasts. I was, in fact, a little bit surprised that he thought that I was merely responding to his debates, because in both of the places where I have disagreed with him concerning minimalism, here and here, I've referred to material other than debates.
Here are some of those statements by Dr. Craig:
So I almost never argue with an unbeliever about biblical inerrancy. I’ll concede for the sake of argument virtually all the errors and inconsistencies in the Old and New Testaments that he wants to bring up, while insisting that the documents collected into what was later called the New Testament are fundamentally reliable when it comes to the central facts undergirding the claims and fate of Jesus of Nazareth.
From "Scriptural Inerrancy and the Apologetic Task" here. I discuss this at length here.
The Christian apologist seeking to establish, for example, the historicity of Jesus’ empty tomb need not and should not be saddled with the task of first showing that the Gospels are, in general, historically reliable documents. You may be wondering how it can be shown that the Gospel accounts of the discovery of Jesus empty tomb can be shown to be, in their core, historically reliable without first showing that the Gospels are, in general, historically trustworthy. Read chapter 8 to find out. Reasonable Faith, Preface to the Third Edition, pp. 11-12.
I think Dr. Craig's comments today are quite consistent with these statements, and that does highlight a disagreement that we have: Dr. Craig believes that we should not (strategically) and need not (epistemologically) defend the strong, literal, reliability of the Gospels nor harmonize the resurrection accounts in order to have a strong argument for the resurrection and Christianity when addressing a skeptic. In fact, he thinks that it is making it too hard for the skeptic to believe if we do so, and he thinks that the case is quite robust even if we concede to the skeptic (for the sake of the argument) virtually all the alleged contradictions he brings up. I will return to these points below.
--Dr. Craig mentions in the podcast that he does argue for the physicality of the resurrection using, inter alia, two arguments from the Gospel narratives. I own a copy of Assessing the New Testament Evidence for the Historicity of the Resurrection of Jesus and believe that I may have located the portion to which he's referring. If it is the segment I think that it is (pp. 236ff and particularly pp. 247-248), his emphasis is upon the unanimity of the gospel narratives in representing a physical resurrection of Jesus. (I don't think that it can be his lengthy section on harmonizing the resurrection appearances, since he expressly states that he doesn't think that is necessary in arguing with a skeptic.) I have two points to make in response to that.
First, if Dr. Craig agrees that it is important, as a premise of our argument for the resurrection, to defend the historicity and authenticity of the physical nature of the narratives, I think it would be useful if he would change his manner of speaking concerning those who strongly doubt the authenticity of the resurrection narratives (Gerd Lüdemann and Wolfhart Pannenberg come to mind as examples here), so as not to state that they acknowledge the appearances, as Dr. Craig has said in the past. Why? Because if one says that these people acknowledge the "core fact" of the appearances to the disciples, when it can be shown that they deny or are very skeptical about the physical details of those appearance accounts, then it looks like the sense in which the apologist himself (Dr. Craig in this case) is using the term "appearances" in the premise of his argument is some more boiled-down sense that does not include apparently physical details such as what are found in the Gospel narratives. This can create confusion concerning how robust of a case the apologist is building, using those premises.
Second, I think it is going to be quite difficult epistemologically to defend the robust physicality of the resurrection to a high degree of probability if one does not defend the reliability of the Gospels. If one does not do so, then one's interlocutor can theorize (as indeed Dale Allison does repeatedly) that such details are later "apologetic additions" and that the accounts themselves are so dubious in their provenance (that is to say, we don't have good reason to believe that they came from eyewitnesses) that we can't rely on them to argue that the disciples claimed these highly physical experiences. One needs an answer to that as part of the apologetic task, as part of the evangelistic task, not just later on. And I believe that that answer needs, in no small measure, to take the form of arguing for the eyewitness nature of the Gospels in general and their provenance in disciples and/or those acquainted with the disciples who were truthful and literal reporters.
In the book Assessing the New Testament Evidence for the Historicity of the Resurrection of Jesus, Dr. Craig actually does harmonize the resurrection accounts, but he has stated in this podcast that he doesn't think doing so is an important or necessary part of creating a robust argument for the resurrection. The mere fact that an argument occurs in that older book therefore does not in itself mean (by Dr. Craig's own account) that Dr. Craig considers it an important, much less an epistemically crucial, part of the argument to be made to a skeptic. So it's unclear precisely what part of that book he does think is important for that purpose. Would it, perhaps, be the argument from the Pauline concept of the physical resurrection? This is fine, but indirect and not as strong as using the gospel narratives, especially since Paul himself wasn't a putative witness while Jesus was on earth after the resurrection. And perhaps also the argument from the unanimity of the gospels in asserting the bodily resurrection? But if that unanimity is a result of a variety of fictional accounts or dubious accounts (as Allison seems to think plausible, for example), rather than reflecting what the disciples actually claimed, then once again it has become difficult for us to get back to their original evidence. We cannot then find out, "What did you see? What was it like?" If all we are saying is that they are unanimous in holding that Jesus' resurrection was physical, and that this presumably means that the disciples believed that his resurrection was physical, but that the actual narratives themselves might (for all we are arguing to the contrary) be made-up rather than giving us the disciples' real testimony about what happened, we are unable to evaluate their evidence to decide whether or not they were rational in believing that Jesus was physically raised.
I would note here that in Tim's and my argument for the resurrection in the Blackwell volume edited by Dr. Craig (from ten years ago), when we took the evidence to be the testimony of the disciples, we took it to be testimony to the experiences found in the Gospels. And this was no small part of what accounted for the strength of the Bayes factors (representing the power of the evidence for the case) we estimated for the resurrection from the evidence of the disciples' testimony. E.g., we argued from what we took the disciples to be testifying, in its detail, that it was very unlikely that they were hallucinating or having a vision.
--I was interested and in a sense pleasantly surprised that Dr. Craig got into discussing the Temple cleansing and the resurrection appearances in Luke 24, and I'd like to respond to that. I want to say right now that, thus far, these are the only two fictionalizing literary devices (a phrase I will stick to) that I've seen Dr. Craig accept. I don't think anyone should assume that Dr. Craig's acceptance of these two incidents indicates an acceptance of all or even most of the ideas (especially the more eyebrow-raising ideas) promulgated in, say, Licona's Why Are There Differences in the Gospels? That would need to be discovered on a case-by-case basis. I could give specifics from that book that I suspect (though I'm just guessing) are places where Dr. Craig would not accept the claim of a fictionalizing literary device or would not think that a fictionalization theory is as plausible a possibility as Licona treats it as being. Indeed, I'm not actually sure whether Dr. Craig even knows about all of these theories that Licona has put forward. But it would take me afield to engage in such speculation, and in the end it would only be speculation, either way.
A couple of preliminary points. At one point Dr. Craig objects to the term "fictionalization" because, he says, changing the year or day when things happened, or deliberately writing as if they happened over a much shorter time than they really took, was accepted in the ancient world. But that is not the point of the term by itself. "Fictionalization" is a descriptive term. We have fictionalizations that are accepted in our own culture--writing an historical novel, for example. So to say that something would be (if it occurred) a fictionalization is not to deny that it was accepted in a culture. One then goes on to discuss whether there is an argument that such a fictionalization was widely accepted in the culture and was engaged in by the evangelists. I have argued that there is no such good evidence. But that's a separate matter from merely describing what we're talking about. We need a term for describing what we're talking about, and it merely confuses matters when every term one comes up with is said to be off-limits because "This was accepted at the time." I can understand if every time I referred to such devices I insisted that we call them "lying." Then their advocates would rightly consider such an insistence invidious. But I don't do that. "Fictionalization" is just meant to describe what these devices allegedly involved. Then we discuss separately if this was a problem epistemically or morally and whether or not there's reason to think it was accepted at the time.
Fictionalization, as a descriptive term, involves
--knowingly altering or fabricating a fact or facts in one's narrative
--doing so in a way that deliberately makes it look, in the narrative, like things happened differently from the way that they really happened
--doing so in a seamless way that does not provide a "tag" in the text that indicates that a fictional segment is about to come up or that a given item is non-factual.
By this definition, the two incidents concerning the Temple cleansing and Luke 24, which Dr. Craig discusses, are fictionalizing literary devices if John and Luke did carry them out.
Another preliminary is that Dr. Craig seems to think that I've accused him of the "Bad Habit of New Testament Scholars" of failing to make crucial distinctions. He then discusses my distinction between narrating achronologically and narrating dyschronologically. To be clear, not everyone with whom I disagree on a given passage about such a thing is ipso facto failing to make crucial distinctions. The person may (as in Dr. Craig's case) make the distinction, state his own position clearly, and say that the Gospel authors deliberately narrated dyschronologically (as Dr. Craig does do). This isn't committing that bad habit, because the scholar is being clear. A writer or speaker commits that bad habit when he is unclear as to which of these he is talking about, as I have seen happen repeatedly (very frustratingly), or when he leaps (and encourages his readers to leap) from a statement like, "The ancients didn't always narrate chronologically" (which is ambiguous and could simply refer to narrating without a chronology) to "The ancients thought it was fine to change chronology." Making the crucial distinction shows that such an inference is a non sequitur. But Dr. Craig doesn't do either of those things here. He just asserts that these authors are, in these cases, narrating dyschronologically and that he believes that this was accepted at the time.
Concerning the Temple cleansing: I very much agree with Dr. Craig that John does indicate a chronology and does place the Temple cleansing that he narrates early in Jesus' ministry. I have actually known some to suggest that perhaps John is narrating achronologically here, or at least bring up that hypothesis for consideration--that John doesn't mean to indicate in John 2 when this Temple cleansing took place at all, not even within his narrative. My recollection is that Vern Poythress brings up that possibility, though he doesn't ultimately opt for it. But I agree with Dr. Craig that that is not what John is doing.
However, I just think Dr. Craig is wrong when he has said that he thinks it is artificial to say that Jesus cleansed the Temple twice. If readers want to ask me more about this in comments, go right ahead. Trying to be brief, I will just say here that to my mind this isn't even all that difficult a matter and has been made difficult by a kind of sociological phenomenon in which scholars talk as if there is a problem with two cleansings. The money changers and dove sellers probably would have gone back to business as usual after Jesus' initial disturbance in the Temple. There was no "screening point" where people had to come through a security checkpoint and show ID to get into the Temple. The synoptic Gospels themselves show that Jesus came back to teach the very next day after cleansing the Temple, so even just reading the synoptics shows that it is false to say that they wouldn't have let Jesus back into the Temple if he had created such a disturbance three years earlier. Jesus' Temple cleansing was an act of protest. Even in our own day people engage in symbolic protests, even rather dramatic ones, in the same location on more than one occasion. Though I'm not a dramatic protester, I've certainly held the same sign outside of the same abortion clinic on more than one occasion, and I seem to recall that I've even had the same insults yelled at me by people driving past. Generally similar events do happen in real life all the time. There is no reason at all to think that Jesus would not have "bracketed" his ministry with two such protests. John gives a consistent and believable picture in which there is lots of tension between Jesus and the religious leaders in Jerusalem from that point on (the early cleansing), but in which Jesus is not killed until several years later. There is no reason to think that this is ahistorical, and it combines various explanatory elements such as Jesus' going away repeatedly to other geographical locations and then returning briefly to Jerusalem, Jesus' popularity with the crowds (also emphasized in the synoptics), and Jesus' powerful personality, causing the Temple guards (in John 7) not to arrest him. I do not see any reason to consider this picture of tension mingled with Jesus' immunity from death and freedom of movement until his hour has come to be unbelievable, and it is therefore quite consistent with his cleansing the Temple a second time during Passion Week.
--Concerning Luke 24. Dr. Craig says quite definitely that the narrative is written in such a way that it is not a-chronological and that it really does look as if Jesus gave the command to stay in the city on Easter evening and even looks as if the ascension takes place at night.
I think that Dr. Craig is right concerning several of the specific places where he says that Luke indicates chronology in this passage (what day it was when Jesus was talking to the men on the road to Emmaus, what day it was when he appeared to the disciples in the upper room, etc.), but I think he is wrong to draw the conclusion that therefore the ascension is made to look like it takes place at night. After all, that's very implausible in itself. How would they have seen Jesus going up into heaven? Therefore, why would Luke have thought that it would appear to his readers that he was writing as if that was happening?
The very indicators that Dr. Craig points to are part of the solution to the apparent problem, since they show right in the text that there isn't time for everything to be taking place on the same evening. Craig points, for example, to the fact that it is already evening by the time that Jesus is with the two disciples at their home at Emmaus. He points to the fact that they then had to return to Jerusalem, a walk of about six miles. Yes, exactly! So time is getting on. He then points to the fact that Jesus appears to them that very evening, while they are discussing matters with the disciples back in Jerusalem. Yep, no problem.
Given all of these temporal indicators, there then is not time for a long sermon and the ascension to be taking place thereafter on the same day. Where things become more vague in Luke is just after that point. I discuss all of this at more length in this post, under the heading, "Does Luke put all of the events after Jesus' resurrection on one day?" Please read that section for more detail. Here is some of what I say there concerning Luke 24:44ff, which is where the narrative becomes much less clearly chronological.
Interestingly, various translations begin vs. 44, about further things Jesus said to the disciples, with different English words. The ESV begins with "then," but in fact there is no such temporal indicator. The NASB begins the verse with "now," which is also unfortunate. The connective, in fact, is "de," which is quite indefinite as to time. It is sometimes translated "and," sometimes "moreover," as well as in other words. But the Greek gives no reason to insist that this conversation occurred on the same occasion as the appearance recorded just before that.
In fact, verses 44 to the end of the book are quite rushed. The connective at vs. 50, "And he led them out" is also the non-committal "de." Wenham's comment on the language of the passage is apt:
These 'thens' [in the RSV at verses 44 and 50] give a much sharper suggestion of chronological continuity than the Greek justifies. The paragraphs are linked by a weak connective non-temporal particle (de) which would be better left untranslated. Easter Enigma, p. 107
Luke's narrative in these verses (44ff) is notably brief, and in that minimal sense compressed. Far more than indicating that everything occurred on Easter day, this reads like a summary of events beginning on Easter and for some unspecified time thereafter. Indeed, if the day was already far spent when the disciples sat down to eat with Jesus at Emmaus, followed by a walk back to Jerusalem, followed by the first appearance of Jesus there, one has to think it would have been getting rather dark for a walk back out to Bethany or for the disciples even to see Jesus received up into heaven! And presumably Luke realized that. This, therefore, is not even a case where Luke, taken by himself, sounds quite naturally like he is "placing" all of the events on the same day. Rather, an attentive reader might well wonder what the cause was of Luke's rush and his unclarity from vs. 44 onward about the time frame.
We also should not assume that Luke knew everything when he wrote his Gospel that he knew when he wrote the book of Acts. Acts is the later book. In fact, Acts 1 could very well indicate Luke's desire to clarify what he had (for whatever reason) had to rush past in Luke 24, at a time when he may simply not have known precisely how long Jesus was on earth after his resurrection. Again, I'm not saying that Luke thought when he wrote the Gospel that Jesus was on earth only for one day. But he may have not known it was a full forty days or exactly how long it was, he may have (given his lack of precise information) become vague from 24:44 onward (when he could have been getting short on scroll or had some other cause for haste), and then made sure, scrupulously, to be much clearer in Acts 1. This is a real-world explanation, consonant with our experience of the way things happen in life, that doesn't require us to postulate that Luke engaged in a fictionalizing attempt to write as if all of these events occurred on one day.
Indeed, when one stops to think about it, it's almost impossible to come up with a motive for Luke to try to make it look like that. Why would he have even wanted to do such a thing? The motive of writing briefly simply isn't the same in and of itself as the motive of deliberately writing as if things all occurred on one day. It is possible to do one (writing briefly and without detail), as Luke has done in 24:44ff, without doing the other (deliberately making it look like things all occurred on one day and like the Ascension happened at night).
What is very surprising to me, looking at Assessing the New Testament Evidence for the Historicity of the Resurrection of Jesus, is that at that time Dr. Craig apparently agreed with me that vs. 44ff are not meant to appear chronologically connected to the previous verses--that is, that they are not putting all of these events, including Jesus' teaching and the ascension, on Easter Sunday.
It is very often asserted that Luke envisions in his gospel that the ascension of Jesus occurred on Easter, a viewpoint which he later changed in Acts. But this seems to be a very wooden reading of the gospel. Luke obviously presents in vs. 44-53 a foreshortened or telescoped account of the post-resurrection events, for by the time Jesus led the disciples out to Bethany it would be the middle of the night, and Luke certainly does not imagine an ascension by moonlight. Rather he summarizes the teaching given by Jesus during the 40 day period of Acts 1:3, ending with the ascension. The continuity and unity of Luke's doubled-work seems to preclude that he has radically altered his chronology in Acts. (pp. 197-198)
He seems to be giving there very much the harmonization that I have just given, postulating (as I would read him) an entirely benign and achronological "telescoping" (mere summarizing or narrating briefly) in vss. 44ff and the unity of the chronology in Luke and in Acts. Though he is not there writing against a "literary device" theory but rather against the theory that Luke changed his mind, the reply to both is the same--namely, that Luke is not making his narrative's chronology different from that of reality (writing dyschronologically) in chapter 24 but rather merely writing achronologically (here in the sense of briefly and without detail) from vs. 44 onward. This is simply puzzling; I don't know quite what to make of it. It appears that Dr. Craig has changed his mind in the meantime, since now he asserts quite robustly that Luke's gospel is not achronological in chapter 24 concerning whether the events all took place on one day.
--Dr. Craig asserts several times that it was accepted in the time of the Gospel authors, and accepted by them, to narrate in a dyschronological fashion--actually to change when things happened, even by several years (as in the case of the Temple cleansing) or to "put" events on one day when they really took six weeks (as he believes Luke did in chapter 24). But he doesn't here give his reasons for thinking so.
As far as I know, the most sustained attempt to argue for such accepted fictionalizing devices concerning time (and many, many other matters) is Michael Licona's book Why Are There Differences in the Gospels? As readers of this blog know, I've spent a great deal of time meticulously going through that entire book and discussing and rebutting its arguments.
The claim that such strange "devices" were simply accepted in a given time and that the evangelists actually used them bears quite a heavy burden of proof. I have argued in great detail that Licona has not met that burden of proof even for the secular author Plutarch, much less for the Gospel authors, and he is the person who has made the biggest effort to satisfy that burden of proof. See here, here, and many other posts in my 2017 series. I have also discussed Craig Evans's attempt to make a similar argument from the use of the term chreia by Papias. Once again, the argument just cannot sustain the strong conclusion.
Of course I don't know precisely why Dr. Craig is so confident that John the evangelist considered it acceptable to move the Temple cleansing to an entirely different time and to place it in a setting in Jesus' ministry where it did not occur, or that Luke thought it was some sort of common, accepted thing to "make" events take one day in his narrative when they took forty days in the real world. But I'm guessing that he thinks that other scholars have established such accepted literary devices and the evangelists' access to them and probable use of them.
I would therefore strongly urge Dr. Craig to have another look at the basis for such claims, since they simply have not been supported well when one looks into the arguments in detail.
--Dr. Craig talks several times about his heart for evangelism and his desire to make it easy for people to conclude that Christianity is true. I applaud that desire, acknowledge it, and strongly share it.
Where we differ is concerning both strategy and epistemology. I think that the best way to make it easy for people to accept Christianity is to make a truly strong case for it, a case that has a lot of force. And I think that the only way to do that is not to set aside the question of whether the Gospels are reliable and not to strip down one's argument so that it does not rely on the reliability of the Gospels even implicitly.
I explained all of this at more length in this webinar. Please note that many of my points there apply to Dr. Craig's minimalist position even if it is not considered or spoken of as a "minimal facts" argument for the resurrection.
The Gospels and Acts (where the disciples are quoted concerning what they are attesting) contain our eyewitness evidence for the resurrection. It is therefore very important to know if they are unreliable. If they are unreliable in terms of literal, factual accuracy in their narration of events and teachings, as many biblical scholars claim, then it becomes extremely difficult to know what the disciples actually attested to. What, in that case, is the witness testimony? And if the disciples didn't actually attest, under conditions of danger, to detailed, physical, polymodal experiences with the risen Jesus, on repeated occasions, involving conversation, and so forth, as represented in the resurrection narratives, then the case is greatly weakened for the resurrection.
Moreover, the case for doctrine, even so-called "mere Christianity," is greatly weakened if the Gospels (yes, including John) are unreliable (in terms of literal, factual accuracy) as records of what Jesus taught while he was here on earth. That point is obviously important when it comes to deciding what the resurrection of Jesus attests. If we say that the resurrection supports his teachings, and some at least of these teachings are very important even for "mere Christianity," then we want to know what he taught, even in some detail.
It is interesting here that Dr. Craig (in the podcast) uses the analogy of a lawyer in court who has both witness testimony and circumstantial evidence. If I'm understanding his analogy correctly, he's comparing the witness testimony to what he thinks of as "core facts" (without arguing for gospel reliability) and comparing the argument for the reliability of the Gospels to extra circumstantial evidence.
This doesn't, I believe, work well as an analogy, since the very thing that is in question is a) what sort of core facts are needed (e.g., do we need robust information about the details of what the disciples claimed to have experienced?) and b) whether we have witness testimony to the crucial facts. If the Gospels are unreliable, then they probably don't represent witness testimony. How can we say that the most important facts are supported by witness testimony, or constitute or are comparable to witness testimony, if the documents that record them are irreconcilably contradictory at multiple points and chock-full of non-factual elaborations? Nor does it matter at that point if those non-factual elaborations were "accepted at the time." The impact upon the epistemic situation is the same regardless. See this post on what it would mean if the Gospels were bio-pics.
Dr. Craig responds that it's making things too hard for the unbeliever if he has to believe that every single harmonization works, that Jesus did cleanse the Temple twice, etc., in order to be justified in becoming a Christian. But that seems to me to be a faulty objection.
Consider the lawyer/witness analogy. Suppose that as a lawyer I want to put a key witness on the stand. Now suppose that the opposing lawyer brings a whole slew of objections to this witness's credibility, including claims that he has changed the facts on the following fifty occasions. Does the jury have to be convinced that the witness has never made a good-faith error on a single one of those fifty occasions in order to be justified in believing the witness? No. But that doesn't mean that I can just "concede for the sake of the argument" to the opposing lawyer that the witness has, in fact, changed the facts in virtually all of those instances! Obviously, that is going to weaken the jury's justified confidence in what the witness says, both because those would be deliberate fact-changing (as opposed to good-faith error) and because there would be so many of them. This is all the more relevant if the opposing lawyer claims to be finding many of these changes of facts right in the very area where the witness is testifying to the very event on which I need his testimony in the trial! Then we've really got a problem if I just waive the entire debate or declare it irrelevant or concede, for the sake of the argument, virtually everything the opposing attorney says against my witness.
It isn't possible to give a highly precise point that falls between, "The gospels don't contain a single error" and "The gospels, especially the resurrection accounts, are irreconcilably contradictory all over the place" and to say that it is just there that they become too unreliable to be good enough for purposes of the argument for the resurrection. But there certainly is such a point, and the allegation of deliberate factual change will make that point come up much, much sooner.
As I have often pointed out, suppose you do have a witness on the stand. If he is shown to have made a minor, good-faith error about whether an event took place on Saturday or on Wednesday, the jury may still quite justifiably consider him a reliable witness to the events he testifies about. But if he tells us that he has engaged in a "device" or a joke and has deliberately switched the event from a Saturday to a Wednesday in order to make a smoother story, we will justifiedly have a lot more doubt about the factuality of the rest of his narrative. Again, see this post on the epistemic effect of treating the gospels as bio-pics.
If we think of reliability and unreliability in these contexts, as we should, in terms of literal facts rather than in terms of higher or theological truths, the point becomes clear. If John deliberately and invisibly "made" Jesus cleanse the Temple in his narrative early in his ministry despite the fact that, in reality, Jesus didn't cleanse the Temple then, then John's gospel has been made deliberately unreliable concerning that factual question: When did Jesus cleanse the Temple? Saying that this was "accepted at the time" simply doesn't change that point, just as it would not for a bio-pic. (Oddly, Dr. Craig repeatedly asserts that such changes wouldn't make the gospels unreliable, and says it as though this is somehow related to their being acceptable at the time.) Indeed, if making such changes were so acceptable, then there could well be many of them. This is why it is important to investigate whether or not such things really were accepted by the gospel authors; this is also why it is good for the reliability of the Gospels that, as it turns out, the evidence does not support that conclusion. Again, see my Licona series for more on this.
Let me give one example here of the way in which harmonizing the Gospel resurrection narratives is particularly important for the evidence. Mike Licona has said in a recent debate with Bart Ehrman that he believes that the first appearance of Jesus to his male disciples really took place in Galilee and that Luke moved this appearance geographically along with "making" all of the resurrection appearances occur on Easter Day. I'm not attributing this position about the geographical movement to Dr. Craig. I have no reason to think he believes that the first appearance to the male disciples actually occurred in Galilee, and it certainly wouldn't follow from what he does think about Luke's "making" all of the resurrection appearances occur on Easter Day. But Dr. Licona advocates this view for other reasons which I've discussed here--namely, that he believes that the first appearance in Luke and the first appearance recorded in Matthew (which occurred in Galilee) must be the same appearance.
As I mention in my podcast with Brian Chilton, if you think that the resurrection narratives can't be harmonized, and in particular you think that both Luke and John just "make" the first appearance occur in Jerusalem, even though it really occurred in Galilee, what then becomes of the whole Doubting Thomas sequence? John locates this firmly in Jerusalem, and that is not an incidental matter; it's extremely difficult to imagine Thomas, while still in his doubting state, trekking seventy miles north to Galilee to meet Jesus based on the words of the women alone! According to Luke, even the other male disciples didn't believe the women at first. So the abandonment of harmonization in this case in the way that Licona does indirectly casts doubt upon an apologetically very important sequence.
This point shows how harmonization actually plays an important apologetic and evangelistic role, before one has convinced a person of the basic facts of Christianity and as part of convincing him. Harmonizing in such a way as to retain the Doubting Thomas sequence, without casting doubt on its provenance in the original witnesses, allows us to assert with confidence that the disciples claimed that Jesus invited them to touch him, that he appeared to a particular, skeptical disciple (Thomas), and that he showed them his wounds.
Returning to the question of whether one has to convince the skeptic of every single harmonization, consider another analogy: Suppose I'm trying to convince someone that the campus of my alma mater is beautiful. Do I have to convince him that the student center, specifically, is beautiful? Maybe not. Maybe he can believe that the student center is kind of boring or even ugly but still be justified in thinking that the campus as a whole is beautiful. But if nearly every building is ugly, or if the most prominent, most notable building on campus is hideous, then the campus is not beautiful. And if I think that the student center is, in fact, a marvel of architecture, it's completely relevant for me to point out the beauties of the student center as part of my cumulative argument for the beauty of the campus. The argument doesn't stand or fall with the student center alone, but that's still relevant to the overall question of the beauty of the campus.
So do I have to convince a skeptic specifically that Jesus cleansed the Temple twice before he's justified in becoming a Christian? Of course not. But do I need to be prepared to give him good reason to think that the Gospels are reliable records of what Jesus said and did and that the resurrection narratives are authentic indicators of what the original putative witnesses attested? Yes, I do. If he the skeptic believes to the contrary and receives no answer to his skepticism on these points, is he strongly epistemically justified in changing his mind and becoming a Christian? Absent some powerful, unusual evidence available to him, no. And is the question of whether John moved the Temple cleansing one part of that larger epistemic picture concerning the reliability of the Gospels? Yes, it is.
Aside from harmonization to answer objections, there are many, many positive arguments such as I discuss in my webinar on maximal data (see about minute 54 onward), including the argument from undesigned coincidences, the argument from unnecessary details, the argument from the unity of the character of Jesus throughout the Gospels, and so forth. In fact, it may well be that (as I do in my book Hidden in Plain View) a good approach to arguing for the literal, historical reliability of the Gospels is to make a strong positive case for their reliability first and to discuss harmonizations of alleged contradictions at some other time. But however one orders one's presentation, it just isn't true that the question of whether or not the Gospels are full of irreconcilable contradictions on matters great and small is epistemically irrelevant to the case for the resurrection.
I want to emphasize something here about the matter of time and presentation. Although at one point in the podcast Dr. Craig does mention the matter of time, he is not really merely making a point about what we take time to do in giving a presentation. He is making stronger points about what would make it "too hard" for the skeptic to believe. If it really would make it too hard in the evangelistic context for a non-Christian to believe if we were to depend on the reliability of the Gospels, then presumably we shouldn't do that even if we had lots of time. Moreover, his point is epistemic: The case is allegedly quite strong enough even if, as he said in the 2015 podcast, we "concede for the sake of the argument" that the gospel accounts are full of many contradictions.
I, on the other hand, am not saying that we need to present the case for the reliability of the gospels as part of a brief debate. In terms of sheer, practical time constraints, what I call the "maximal data" case for the resurrection can be presented just as briefly as a case that relies only on a smaller set of facts (whether we think of it as Habermas's "minimal facts" case or Dr. Craig's "core facts" case). I have given examples of how such a brief, positive presentation might look in my webinar on "Minimal Facts vs. Maximal Data" beginning at about minute 41. The brief statements that I recommend assume that the Gospels give us a reliable account of what the disciples claimed. One then needs to be prepared to defend that if it is alleged that the Gospel narratives of the resurrection are hopelessly contradictory and do not come from eyewitnesses.
The same would apply, mutatis mutandis, if one were attempting to convince using "maximal data" a potential convert or group of some given doctrine that is part of "mere Christianity," such as the deity of Jesus. One would not have to give in a brief presentation the entire case for the reliability of the Gospels as records of what Jesus taught, though one could certainly allude to the availability of such a case. But one would rely on the gospels, including verses in the Gospel of John, and one would be prepared to answer if it were alleged that the Gospels give an historically enhanced record of Jesus' teachings, putting into Jesus' mouth things he never said that arise from the reflections of later Christians. For the purpose of answering such skepticism, one prepares oneself to defend the reliability and provenance of the Gospels more globally. One does not and should not attempt to strip down the case so that it does not rely, even tacitly, upon the gospels' reliability.
All of these matters are very important, and I'm extremely glad that this sort of fruitful exchange can take place. I encourage readers to mull all of these matters for themselves, and I heartily thank Dr. Craig and Kevin Harris for their gracious engagement.
P.S. Kevin Harris says that he hopes he'll be invited to dinner if he's ever nearby. Kevin, you're cordially invited to dinner at the McGrew house if you come through southwestern Michigan. I make a mean lasagna.
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