On that (in)famous "saints rising" passage in Matthew 27
(Originally published at What's Wrong With the World. Link to original post at 'permalink' below.)
Why this post?
I am right now in the midst of writing an entire book on literary device theories and the historicity of the Gospels, using the work of Michael Licona as one of my main foils. (See here for all of my New Testament posts to date and here for a gateway to my 2017 Licona series. Scroll down in the latter for blurbs on each of the 2017 posts in the series.)
It suddenly struck me that I have no place in that book that really fits for a discussion of the passage that many people (unfortunately) think criticism of Licona's work is "really all about"--namely, the raising of the saints narrated in Matthew 27:51-53.
Since I like my work to fit together with a clear logical structure, and since I already have several appendices on other topics planned for the book, I was rather puzzled about what to do. It is a sociological fact that much controversy swirled around Licona's questioning of the historicity of this Matthew passage in his 2010 book, The Resurrection of Jesus, and that is how it has come about that so many people think that this is all "just about that." One of my major goals in the enormous amount of work I have done thus far is to dispel that mistaken view. Indeed, all of my work in disagreement with Licona could be written without mentioning that passage! (That's not to say there wouldn't be any connection. Just that it isn't necessary to discuss it to write what I've written. And the connection is somewhat indirect.) So the last thing I want to do is to create confusion once again on that point.
The decision that I've made in the end is to write up a thorough, careful post on the subject. (This one.) I will explain here why this discussion is somewhat tangential to the subject of the book. And I will discuss why I believe Licona's arguments for ahistoricity at that point in Matthew are weak. Then, in the book, I will include a footnote that refers to this post, summarizing very briefly what I say here and sending readers here for more details. It's perhaps not a perfect solution to the practical and organizational issues, but I think it's the best solution I can come up with.
Here's the short explanation of why the raising of the saints passage is not the same as the other passages discussed in my forthcoming book: In the case of the raising of the saints, Licona's suggestion has been that, in that very passage, Matthew intended his readers to understand that the raising of the saints (at least, and possibly also the earthquake) was not meant to be historical. (I say "suggestion" because he has repeatedly declared himself not fully decided on the matter, though he says he "leans" toward thinking it was unhistorical. In his 2010 book he said that ahistoricity as a poetical convention was "most plausible," p. 552.) This suggestion about what Matthew intended his readers to understand is quite different from many other suggestions of literary devices that Licona makes, and that is what makes it different from most of what I'm discussing in my book.
In general, the literary devices that Licona discusses in Why Are There Differences in the Gospels are (as I copiously document in my series and in my book) invisible within the document itself. Licona makes this clear himself in the book. The claim about the audience is not (this must be emphasized) that they could have looked in some special way at that passage, recognized some tell-tale sign or "tag" in that text, and concluded that this part of this passage was not historical. Rather, the claim about the audience is that they would have realized that certain types of changes might be made somewhere or other in this type of document and that they would not have minded that. The claim is that it was rather like your going to a movie based on true events. You may not know which characters, dates, and events are changed, but you know that some of them somewhere in the movie probably are.
Licona lists two different "devices," one of each kind, in an on-line debate with Bart Ehrman:
Bart’s second argument for his position that the New Testament provides a historically unreliable account of Jesus is “there are things related in the Gospels that did not happen as narrated.” He says that I agree with this. I suppose he’s referring to my positions that John probably changed the day and time of Jesus’s crucifixion and that the saints raised at Jesus’s death were probably added by Matthew as special effects (Matthew 27:52–53). I lean toward those interpretations and think they resulted from John’s and Matthew’s use of literary conventions in use at the time they wrote.
But when it comes to John's allegedly moving the date of Jesus' crucifixion (and hence of the Last Supper), in his book Licona says this,
John appears deliberate in his attempts to lead his readers to think the Last Supper was not a Passover meal. Why Are There Differences in the Gospels, p. 156
Licona concludes that it really was a Passover meal, per the Synoptics, which is why he thinks there is a contradiction and part of why he thinks John moved the day of the crucifixion. This is exactly the opposite of saying that John intended his readers to understand that the narration of the day of the Last Supper was not historical. The idea, rather, is that in the narrative "world" of John's Gospel it really does look like the Last Supper was not a Passover meal. (Needless to say, I disagree with this interpretation of John, as do Craig Blomberg and other scholars, but I'm not going to go into a digression on that here. I'm pointing out what Licona's picture is of John at this point.) Although Licona lists in the on-line debate only two "devices" that Ehrman might have in mind, there are a great many more invisible "devices" that Licona has suggested since then. These are discussed in my series and book. More recently, in a debate with Ehrman Licona suggested that Luke narrated realistically as if Jesus' first appearance to his disciples occurred in Jerusalem when in fact it occurred in Galilee.
In contrast, Licona suggests that Matthew did "intend his readers to understand" that the raising of the saints, in particular, was not historical.
So if he is calling these both "conventions" or "devices," he's using that concept in two quite different senses. His advocacy of invisible devices, where there is no tag in the text, is far more widespread, and that is what I focus my book on. In that sense, the claim about the raising of the saints is the exception in Licona's theories, because of this matter of what supposedly the readers would have understood, and it can be confusing to focus on an exception in discussing what is wrong with a scholar's theories.
I firmly believe that it was Licona's claim that original audiences would have understood that Matthew didn't intend the raising of the saints to be historical that garnered a certain amount of sympathy and caused various people to say that his position on that point was compatible with inerrancy. After all, if it would be (as he seemed to imply) merely a matter of understanding a literary convention or idiom that the audience would have recognized in that passage, then that would seem to be no problem for the concept of error. It would just (allegedly) be a matter of understanding the language or cultural idiom used in that very passage.
Now, a big problem there is that Licona's argument for such a claim was really not strong at all, as I shall go on to discuss in this post. I think his critics at the time recognized that. And I think that there is a legitimate instinct to object, like this: "If you have nothing but a really flimsy argument for the claim that something in the Gospels would have been understood to be unhistorical, then the claim seems arbitrary and not subject to control. And this also provides evidence that your judgement is questionable and hence that you are likely to accept other such claims in all sorts of unpredictable places. You can't just say out of the blue, without any good argument, 'I'm sure the original audience would have understood that that was not intended as historical' and get a free pass for dehistoricizing some passage, no matter how historical it appears to be and no matter how weak the reason you provide." That is an understandable perspective as well. We can't just sit atop a mountain and decide whether someone's position is defensible.
However, the claim was out there--namely, that Matthew "intended his audience to understand" that this was not historical. And that made it seem much more harmless. People could say, "Oh, well, I disagree with him on that, but at least he's saying it would have been understood."
I think that this dynamic helps to explain both the opposition that Licona encountered about Matthew 27 and also the support that rose up on his side.
Since Licona has since then gone on to develop and defend at length a whole suite of claims about literary devices where he does not make any attempt to argue that the device was visible in that passage or could have been picked out by the audience, by some convention or other, while reading that passage, it seems to me most profitable to focus on that later book and those later claims. And that's what I've been doing with most of my time.
Here, however, I'm going to pause and talk a bit about Licona's arguments that Matthew did not intend the raising of the saints (and possibly the earthquake) to be taken as historical. That way, it cannot be said that I did not address it anywhere.
Here is the passage in Matthew, from the NASB, for reference:
And behold, the veil of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom; and the earth shook and the rocks were split. The tombs were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised; and coming out of the tombs after His resurrection they entered the holy city and appeared to many. Now the centurion, and those who were with him keeping guard over Jesus, when they saw the earthquake and the things that were happening, became very frightened and said, “Truly this was the Son of God!” (Matt. 27:51-54)
I find it especially notable that the passage expressly says that the centurion saw the earthquake. I'll return to this point.
"Are we really to believe?"
Here is a 2011 paper in which, subsequent to his 2010 book, Licona further discussed the theory that the raising of the saints is non-historical. In The Resurrection of Jesus, he discusses this topic in some detail on pp. 548-552.
Licona acknowledges that there are some items of evidence against the ahistorical conclusion. One of these that he mentions is that none of the church fathers seems to have interpreted the text that way. The other is that Tacitus also attests to some of the phenomena that Josephus attests to before the destruction of Jerusalem, and Licona thinks it possible that Tacitus might be an independent source. The Tacitus reference is actually a pretty big blow to the theory of a convention of ahistoricity applying to narrated "apocalyptic" phenomena, as I'll discuss below. I don't think Licona realizes just how big of a blow, but he at least acknowledges that it is counterevidence. Here I'll be discussing the evidence that Licona alleges supports the apocalyptic convention theory.
One major misfire is found at a point in the EPS paper where Licona is discussing a passage in the poet Virgil about alleged portents at the time of Caesar's death. There is a problem right at the outset in using an overtly poetic text as an argument for "poetic elements" in overtly historical texts, but set that aside just for the moment. Licona lists a bunch of such portents that Virgil describes (in poetry), which range from things that could happen naturally to things that sound quite bizarre. He follows that up with:
We do know that a comet appeared at that time because we have corroborating reports from the Chinese. It also appears very likely that Mt. Etna erupted around that time. However, we also know that no visible eclipses were viewable from within the Roman empire in 44 BC. And are we to believe that cattle spoke, streams stood still, dark intestines appeared outside of animals and that pale phantoms were seen at dusk when Caesar died? If you regard any of these as poetic additions, then you will understand that the ancients could mix factual observations with poetic devices.
Whoa, wait just a minute here. The question is not whether we believe that these things actually happened! The question is whether a given author who reported them believed them and whether he expected his readers to believe them. There is a serious false dichotomy here: Either you personally have to believe that bizarre things actually happened or you have to believe that those items are "poetic additions" and that "the ancients" who wrote about them didn't believe them themselves and expected their readers to understand that they didn't happen.
That is a huge false dilemma, and anachronistic to boot. Why assume that everything that sounds weird, crazy, and impossible to us would also sound weird, crazy, and impossible not only to an ancient author but to his readers, and that he would know that it would sound that way to his readers, and that he would therefore expect his readers to be able to separate the factual from the fictional in his reports of phenomena? This "are we to believe..." argument from incredulity is an extremely poor argument when an alleged convention of the time is in question.
Lucian's trolling
In an earlier post I wrote about the satirist Lucian, who wrote a work called "How to Write History." There I talked about Lucian's high standards in that work for serious historical writing and about how Licona took a couple of passages from "How to Write History" quite badly out of context, engaged in highly dubious interpretation, and gave a misimpression of the actual thrust of that work in Why Are There Differences in the Gospels. In fact, to some extent Licona does the same occasionally in his 2010 book as well. For example, in The Resurrection of Jesus, p. 35, n. 24, Licona confronts a place where Lucian says, "The sole mission of the historian is this: To tell it as it occurred." Licona says that this was Lucian's "dictum" "for writing history apart from biography," thus giving the impression that Lucian limited his statement about the role of the historian to "history apart from biography." Lucian does no such thing whatsoever anywhere in the work.
But here we have to discuss another aspect of Lucian: As a satirist he had plenty of contempt for his fellow man, and when he wasn't giving serious advice about writing history, he was evidently not above hoaxing people in daily life. (Let me just add here that privately making fun of people you think are stupid by seeing what tall tales they will swallow is not confined to the ancient world and is not a "literary device." The technical term for it is "being a jerk.") What is rather astounding is that Licona seems to think that an incident in which Lucian brags about taking in some credulous listeners helps to support the theory of a convention of understood "apocalyptic language" in the ancient world, when it supports exactly the opposite.
Lucian tells the story of how he told a tall tale to some people he obviously regarded as fools about a public suicide that he witnessed. Obviously, if Lucian's audience understood that all such talk was just an apocalyptic convention, he would not have had the fun of taking them in. Here is the passage from Lucian quoted by Licona.
I assure you, my friend, I had no end of trouble, telling the story to all while they asked questions and sought exact information. Whenever I noticed a man of taste, I would tell him the facts without embellishment, as I have to you, but for the benefit of the dullards, agog to listen, I would thicken the plot a bit on my own account, saying that when the pyre was kindled and Proteus flung himself bodily in, a great earthquake first took place, accompanied by a bellowing of the ground, and then a vulture, flying up out of the midst of the flames, went off to Heaven, saying, in human speech, with a loud voice:“I am through with the earth; to Olympus I fare.”
They were wonder-struck and blessed themselves with a shudder, and asked me whether the vulture sped eastwards or westwards; I made them whatever reply occurred to me.
As Licona also mentions, Lucian went on to tell with obvious amusement about someone else carrying out the same trick with the credulous, making use of a detail from Lucian's own previous tall tale:
On my return to the festival, I came upon a grey-haired man whose face, I assure you, inspired confidence in addition to his beard and his general air of consequence, telling all about Proteus, and how, since his cremation, he had beheld him in white raiment a little while ago, and had just now left him walking about cheerfully in the Portico of the Seven Voices, wearing a garland of wild olive. Then on top of it all, he put the vulture, swearing that he himself had seen it flying up out of the pyre, when I myself had just previously let it fly to ridicule fools and dullards.
Obviously, this is not what Licona is trying to claim that Matthew was doing! The whole point of the theory about the passage in Matthew is that he was supposedly using some kind of "convention" and meant his readers to "understand" that certain parts of what he told were not historical. This is worlds away from making fun of one's audience privately by making up a silly tale and seeing if they will swallow it, as the trolling Lucian and the grey-headed man were doing.
Licona simply lists these passages among other alleged examples of apocalyptic language in Roman literature, saying that they are "also of interest" (p. 549). What he does not seem to realize is that this text is "of interest" precisely in showing that an audience of "ancient people" might very well believe such stories, which is exactly the opposite of the conclusion he is arguing for from the presence of "apocalyptic language" in Roman death scenes.
Weak arguments from Roman texts
As already noted, Licona seems not to realize that one probably should not use totally poetical texts to argue for a convention of writing about portents with a wink and a nod in historical texts. So the fact that the poets Virgil and Lucan (not to be confused with Lucian) wrote poetry that included supernatural portents at the time of Caesar's death is probably irrelevant to whether or not Josephus or Tacitus believed the portents that he wrote about at the time of a death or some great event. Whether the poets did or didn't believe what they wrote or expect their readers to believe it, since their genre is manifestly not that of serious historical reportage, citing poetry (as Licona does) does not address the question at issue concerning conventions.
Licona does cite several historical writers--Dio Cassius, Plutarch, Josephus, and Tacitus--who report wonders on the occasion of great events. These range from the appearance of apparitions to raining blood to the appearance of a giant snake on the occasion when Octavian enslaved Egypt. (I should mention in passing that the "apparitions" in these works are not allegedly people physically raised from the dead, as in Matthew. For example, in Plutarch the scary apparition that appears to Brutus identifies itself as Brutus's "evil genius.") You can read Licona's summaries here, and they appear accurate as far as the description goes of the texts in question.
The question then, is this: How well do these reports support the conclusion that the writers did not believe that the portents occurred and that they expected their readers not to believe that they occurred and that they expected their readers to know that they did not intend the reports to be taken as historical? For that is the supposed thesis about Matthew, and that is the kind of convention that these reports are supposed to support. And the answer is, "Not very well."
These passages are particularly questionable as evidence for that complex thesis given that, as Licona admits, the lists of portents in question sometimes include natural events like a comet or volcanic eruption that probably really did occur at approximately the times in question.
Licona confusedly uses the inclusion of the comet and a volcanic eruption to conclude that "there are obvious additions that appear to be poetic in nature." Why would one draw that conclusion rather than the opposite conclusion--that the writers and their likely audiences believed that what we would (rightly) consider impossible and crazy things were actually not much less probable as portents than a comet or volcanic eruption? In other words, the mixing of what we think could be natural events with what we think are crazy superstitions could just as easily (or maybe more easily) mean that the people in question didn't regard the latter as self-evidently crazy superstitions. There is certainly nothing in the texts of Josephus, Tacitus, Plutarch, or Dio Cassius to mark the distinction that Licona wants to make between "poetic additions" and real events. On the contrary, they are all listed in a heap and narrated with apparent seriousness. Why not take that as evidence in itself?
Licona appears to have no answer to this other than a sort of "Aw, c'mon" comment such as already discussed in the above section--"Are we really to believe," etc. Well, no, we aren't going to believe it. But that doesn't mean Dio Cassius didn't believe it and/or didn't expect his readers to believe it.
Perhaps (at least as likely) the attitude of Dio Cassius et. al was something like this: "Well, what the heck? I have a report of all this weird stuff happening, and I know that portents do sometimes happens, so who knows? It's in one of my sources. I'll just put it all in there and let people decide what to think for themselves."
But there's more: There's actually pretty strong evidence that Tacitus really did think that some things that we would roll our eyes about did happen. Licona doesn't seem to recognize the full force of this passage from Tacitus, though he does note it as some counter-evidence. Here's Tacitus, on alleged portents before the Fall of Jerusalem:
Prodigies had occurred, which this nation, prone to superstition, but hating all religious rites, did not deem it lawful to expiate by offering and sacrifice. There had been seen hosts joining battle in the skies, the fiery gleam of arms, the temple illuminated by a sudden radiance from the clouds. The doors of the inner shrine were suddenly thrown open, and a voice of more than mortal tone was heard to cry that the Gods were departing. At the same instant there was a mighty stir as of departure. Some few put a fearful meaning on these events, but in most there was a firm persuasion, that in the ancient records of their priests was contained a prediction of how at this very time the East was to grow powerful, and rulers, coming from Judaea, were to acquire universal empire. These mysterious prophecies had pointed to Vespasian and Titus, but the common people, with the usual blindness of ambition, had interpreted these mighty destinies of themselves, and could not be brought even by disasters to believe the truth. I have heard that the total number of the besieged, of every age and both sexes, amounted to six hundred thousand. All who were able bore arms, and a number, more than proportionate to the population, had the courage to do so. Histories 5.13
Tacitus doesn't include all of the portents at this time noted by Josephus, but there is no pattern whereby he includes the more naturally plausible ones. For example, he doesn't include a report found in Josephus about a man who went about prophesying doom, which isn't particularly supernatural. At the same time Tacitus includes hosts joining battle in the skies, a sudden radiance from the clouds, a huge door opening without natural causes, and spooky voices and sounds, supposedly of supernatural origin. Tacitus says that various Jews put various meanings on these events, meaning that Tacitus believes that the Jews took these to have actually happened. Even more pointedly, Tacitus himself obviously intends his readers to believe that these events occurred, because he is making his own comment on the stubbornness of the Jewish character in not realizing from these portents that something terrible was about to happen. If Tacitus meant this to be understood as non-historical, it would make no sense for him to draw this moral from it.
So it is clearly wrong to assume that our ideas of what counts as weird or impossible were held by the ancient writers in question, or their expected audiences, and hence we cannot use those ideas as a sorting tool for separating "poetical" elements from those the author intended to be taken as historical.
Weak arguments from Jewish writings
In his book, Licona also has an argument from Jewish writings. There he heaps up references (taken from Raymond Brown and Robert Gundry) containing supposedly apocalyptic language, intended to show that it was a Jewish convention to say things like what Matthew says and not intend them to be taken historically but rather symbolically.
One of the most striking things about this list of references is how many of them concern the earth quaking. As mentioned above, Matthew definitely appears to be narrating the earthquake with the intention that it be taken as historical, because he expressly says that the centurion saw the earthquake. Yet in the book Licona uses a pile of references, many of which refer to the earth quaking (usually overtly poetically, as I'll show in a moment) as though this supported the open ahistoricity of the entire passage in Matthew. But that is to attack the historicity of the passage at its strongest point. And it isn't particularly relevant to the historicity of the raising of the saints, either.
Here's an example of the passages Licona lists to which Matthew may be "alluding."
16 The waters saw you, God,
the waters saw you and writhed;
the very depths were convulsed.
17 The clouds poured down water,
the heavens resounded with thunder;
your arrows flashed back and forth.
18 Your thunder was heard in the whirlwind,
your lightning lit up the world;
the earth trembled and quaked. (Psalm 77:16-18)
Here's another:
Therefore the anger of the LORD was kindled against his people, and he stretched out his hand against them and struck them, and the mountains quaked; and their corpses were as refuse in the midst of the streets. For all this his anger has not turned away, and his hand is stretched out still. Isaiah 5:25
No, these really do not look like anything Matthew is alluding to in his passage. Matthew expressly talks about a specific, visible earthquake at a specific, historical moment (when Jesus had just died) that was seen by a specific, visible person (the centurion). That is not at all like these passages. It is not as though the Psalmist names someone who was struck between the shoulder blades by one of God's "arrows"!
For that matter, the very fact that we can ask about when (in Matthew's narrative) the holy people arose in relation to Sunday (see below), because Matthew says that they entered Jerusalem after Jesus' resurrection, makes that passage different from any of these Old Testament poetical or prophetic passages. Matthew gives a specific tie-down in time for the resurrection of the saints. The same cannot be said for the mountains quaking in Isaiah.
(It is sometimes rather astonishing how insensitive some scholars can be to genre, although those very theorists frequently talk about genre. This is not the only example I could give of this phenomenon.)
Other verses from the Old Testament cited by Licona are prophecies of future judgement where we simply don't know what the events are going to look like, either because the prophecy gives only the vaguest idea about when they will occur or because we can be pretty sure that they haven't happened yet. These include, for example, the prophecy of the destruction of Gog and Magog in Ezekial 38:19, which mentions an earthquake.
In the New Testament, this point about prophecy of the future is relevant to Jesus' mention of celestial phenomena in the Olivet Discourse, e.g., Matt. 24:29-30. It's probably worth saying: When apocalyptic language describes the actual apocalypse, the end of all things, the end of the world, and the second coming of Christ, we probably should not be quick to assume that there will be no astonishing, literal cosmic phenomena. Presumably, we'll know the answer to that eventually.
Licona also cites Daniel 12:2, which says,
Many of those who sleep in the dust of the ground will awake, these to everlasting life, but the others to disgrace and everlasting contempt.
I don't know what they quote at Licona's church, but last I checked the line, "I believe in the resurrection of the body" was part of the Apostle's Creed, and "he shall come again with glory to judge both the quick and the dead" was in the Nicene. The final judgement, including the physical resurrection of both the evil and the good, is a basic article of the Christian religion, and that certainly sounds an awful lot like what Daniel is describing here. This is a particularly poor data point to use for arguing that Matthew expected his readers to understand that he didn't mean the resurrection of the holy ones at Jesus' crucifixion to be taken as historical.
Licona also cites the passage in I Kings 19 where Elijah witnesses an earthquake, shattered rocks, and a fire in an experience with God, but in that case why not think that Elijah actually witnessed an earthquake, shattered rocks, and a fire? It is certainly far from obvious that the author of I Kings expects his readers to think that this did not really happen. Indeed, when these frightening phenomena are replaced with a still, small, voice Elijah covers his face with his cloak and goes out to the mouth of the cave, which sounds like a description intended to be taken historically and literally.
In Ezekiel 37, God uses the image of dry bones coming to life as a metaphor for the return of Israel to its land. God himself even explains the metaphor:
11 Then he said to me: “Son of man, these bones are the people of Israel. They say, ‘Our bones are dried up and our hope is gone; we are cut off.’ 12 Therefore prophesy and say to them: ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: My people, I am going to open your graves and bring you up from them; I will bring you back to the land of Israel. 13 Then you, my people, will know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves and bring you up from them. 14 I will put my Spirit in you and you will live, and I will settle you in your own land.
It should go without saying that this is pure, overt metaphor, not a narrative of an event of holy ones rising from the dead at a particular time and place.
These are the kinds of Old Testament passages that are used to argue for "apocalyptic language" in Matthew. It is a collection of intrinsically disparate materials, none of which provide good arguments that Matthew is narrating non-historically or expected his readers to understand him thus, either about the earthquake or about the raising of the saints.
Licona has one other type of argument from the Old Testament, an argument from supposed prophetic fulfillment. Here's how it goes:
The same may be said of the celestial phenomena tied to the Pentecost event in Acts 2 where Luke seems to link the wonders in the sky and signs on the earth prophesied by Joel to the wonders and signs performed by Jesus and His apostles, even using the same terms in the same context to describe them. Yet, Joel lists these as blood, fire, vapor of smoke, the sun going dark and the moon turning into blood. But these phenomena apparently did not occur on that day. Moreover, Joel as repeated by Peter says that in that day “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” Luke then reports Peter encouraging the Jews to call on the name of the Lord and be saved. Then he reports that about 3,000 believed that day. Thus, Peter appears to believe the prophecy of Joel was fulfilled at Pentecost.
As this argument goes, Peter must have believed that the celestial or astonishing natural phenomena ("wonders in the sky," "blood, fire, and smoke") in the passage in Joel 2:28-32 were non-literal, since they did not happen in Acts 2 and since Peter says that the prophecy in those verses of Joel was fulfilled in Acts 2.
This is a fairly shaky inference. One major problem with it is that it ignores the way that Jewish interpreters of the OT often gave an application of an OT text that was fairly different from the apparent original meaning, requiring something like a double fulfillment or multiple applications of the text. One example of this is that Matthew 2:15 says that the flight to Egypt fulfilled Hosea 11:1, which says, "When Israel was a child, then I loved him, and out of Egypt have I called my son." But it is quite obvious that Hosea 11 is giving the history of the nation of Israel. In fact, immediately in Hosea 11:2 it tells about how Israel went astray and sacrificed to Baal, which clearly does not apply to Jesus. Similarly, Matthew applies the prophecy in Jeremiah 31:15 to the slaughter of the innocents by Herod. But in its original context, Jeremiah 31 is very likely talking about the forthcoming Babylonian captivity.
On the face of it, Joel 2 appears to be talking about what we would call "end times." It therefore falls into the category of prophecies whose fulfillment may or may not appear literal to those who live at the time. We don't know, because the end time events have not yet occurred.
It would be wooden and anachronistic to assume that a Jew of Peter's time would be saying that there was one and only one way in which an OT prophetic passage was fulfilled and that everything must be fulfilled from that passage precisely on one particular day. Indeed, that is in general a wooden way to interpret prophecy.
One can also note that all three Synoptic Gospels record darkness at the time of Jesus' crucifixion and that Peter, who applies the reference to signs on earth to Jesus' miracles, may have thought of the darkness at the crucifixion as a partial (and in this case literal) fulfillment of the passage in Joel when it says that the "sun will be turned into darkness." The very fact that Jesus' miracles may be in Peter's mind as the "signs on earth" means that he is not seeing the fulfillment of Joel 2 as all happening on just one day but rather in a somewhat on-going fashion. Peter also did not know when Jesus would return and may have guessed that it would occur sooner following the day of Pentecost than has turned out to be the case. We should not be over-confident about what sort of phenomena Peter did or did not think might happen in the near future when he spoke at Pentecost.
Perhaps the biggest problem of all with Licona's argument from Peter's application of Joel 2 is the simple fact that Joel 2 is manifestly prophecy worded in fairly high-flown language, not narrative of a specific past historical event. We already know that prophecies can be dark and ambiguous and that the specifics of their fulfillment may be understood and recognized only after the fact. What Joel 2 and Peter's use of it do not illustrate, regardless of what precisely was in Peter's mind, is a convention, understood by readers in Matthew's time, of taking narrative of an amazing event on a specific, named occasion in space and time, found in an otherwise historical work, to be non-historical.
In fact, none of these passages, either Roman or Jewish, are at all clear examples of that sort of convention. The argument that such a convention existed and that Matthew's readers would have picked out just certain events (just the raised saints? just the raised saints and the earthquake?) and understood them not to be intended historically is thus quite dubious.
Misunderstanding another scholar
Licona devotes some paragraphs of his EPS paper to comments about the alleged badness of claiming that this or that position is incompatible with inerrancy. In the course of those comments, he cites two scholars who, he says, also question the historicity of the raising of the saints. One of these is William Lane Craig, and that interpretation (one finds upon checking) is accurate. Craig did indeed indicate in the place Licona cites that he doesn't think that event in Matthew is historical but rather "apocalyptic language."
The other citation, however, seems to embody an inaccurate interpretation. Here is what Licona says about Craig Blomberg:
Pertaining to the temple curtain splitting and the raised saints, Craig Blomberg writes, “All kinds of historical questions remain unanswered about both events.” In the book Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up? edited by Paul Copan, William Lane Craig responded to Jesus Seminar fellow Robert Miller who claimed that Matthew freely added to Mark’s Gospel the story of the resurrection of the saints, a story which Matthew did not take literally, but included it as a figurative expression of the apocalyptic significance of Jesus’ death. Dr. Craig commented, “Dr. Miller’s interpretation of this passage strikes me as quite persuasive, and probably only a few conservative scholars would treat the story as historical." Does Geisler think Blomberg and Craig are likewise denying biblical inerrancy because, like me, they remain undecided pertaining to how Matthew intended for his readers to interpret the raised saints?
While the phrase "remain undecided pertaining to how Mathew intended for his readers to interpret the raised saints" is somewhat ambiguous, the strong implication is that Craig Blomberg, like William Lane Craig, thinks it at least somewhat plausible that the raised saints verses are non-historical. If that is not what Licona meant, he should not have grouped these two together and written in this way, because that is certainly the impression given.
In fact, that does not appear to be an accurate interpretation of that sentence from Blomberg when it is seen in context. In the immediate paragraph where it occurs, one might think Blomberg is going in a non-historical direction, but if one reads just one more paragraph, things appear quite different. Here is the long context of that sentence in Blomberg's commentary on Matthew.
27:51-53 Here appear the second and third events from the world of nature which testify to the monumental significance of the crucifixion. One apparently natural event, an earthquake, leads to two somewhat supernatural effects. The temple curtain is split “from top to bottom,” perhaps to symbolize God acting from heaven, and the cemeteries disgorge their dead. Yet it is not bones but risen bodies that emerge! Like the preternatural darkness, earthquakes and resurrections resonate with strong apocalyptic overtones (cf. esp. Amos 8:9). The latter event is perhaps the most unusual in all of the Gospels and found only in Matthew. All kinds of historical questions remain unanswered about both events, but their significance clearly lies in the theology Matthew wishes to convey. Judgment against the temple has begun (recall chaps. 23-24), and a new age of salvation history has dawned. The temple curtain that was torn was probably the one that separated the court of the Jews from the court of the Gentiles. Ephesians 2:14 seems to recall this rupture when reflecting on the abolition of the barriers between Jew and Gentile in Christ. Garbled accounts of the torn curtain may be reflected in other Jewish sources too (see, e.g., Josephus, J.W. 6.5.34 and b. Yoma 39b), but it is hard to be sure. As an alternative, if the curtain protecting the holy of holies was in view, then Matthew’s point could be the new access to God provided by Jesus’ atoning death (as in Heb 4:16). The resurrections illustrate the teaching of I Cor 15:20-22. Christ is the firstfruits of the new age, guaranteeing the bodily resurrection of all his people. “Holy people” (often translated saints) apparently refer to selected Old Testament believers. This episode further foreshadows I Cor 15:23. As the NIV stands, Matthew’s account contradicts Paul, inasmuch as the saints actually precede Christ out of the tomb. But the text should probably be punctuated with a period after the “tombs broke open.” Then the rest of vv. 52b-53 would read, And the bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life, and, having come out of the tombs after Jesus’ resurrection, they went into the Holy City [i.e., Jerusalem]. Contra the NIV rendering of v. 53, there is no “and” in the Greek nor any other reason to pause between “tombs” and “after.” If these saints were genuinely resurrected rather than simply revivified or reanimated like Jairus’s daughter or Lazarus, then presumably, like Jesus himself, they appeared to others only for a short time and were eventually taken to heaven. But the text refuses to satisfy our curiosity about these points. It is interesting, however, to note Matthew’s twofold reference to Jews and Jerusalem as “Holy” (“holy people,” v. 52; “holy city,” v. 53) even after his sweeping condemnation of Israel in chaps. 23-24. Hints again emerge that a remnant in Israel will be preserved.
I note that Blomberg takes the earthquake to be historical right at the outset. His vague mention of "historical questions" that "remain unanswered," together with the emphasis upon theological meaning in the first paragraph might be taken to mean that he questions the historicity of the raised saints. But as one moves to the second paragraph one sees him taking it to be historical. His comments about the punctuation of the verses and their relationship to when the holy people came into Jerusalem would be pointless if the event did not occur. His reference to when they returned to heaven seems definitely to take their resurrection to be historical, as does the question of what their resurrection was like:
If these saints were genuinely resurrected rather than simply revivified or reanimated like Jairus’s daughter or Lazarus, then presumably, like Jesus himself, they appeared to others only for a short time and were eventually taken to heaven. But the text refuses to satisfy our curiosity about these points.
If Blomberg thought it plausible that the text is simply non-historical, these remarks would make no sense. The natural interpretation is that Blomberg takes the raising of the holy people to have occurred but recognizes that there are still things we don't know about the nature of their resurrection and what happened next. In fact (see next section) this paragraph directly contradicts Licona's own interpretation of the passage in another way concerning whether or not the narrative appears to be saying that the raised people hung around outside the city until Sunday--another point Licona may have missed.
This is not the first time that I have found a misunderstanding of a fellow scholar simply by looking up the context of a quoted sentence. This sometimes arises when Licona thinks that another scholar is in agreement with himself in questioning historicity. In an on-line debate where Licona indicated that he is unsure about the historicity of the infancy stories in Matthew and Luke, he misinterpreted Jonathan Pennington, taking him to be describing a real, vexing, possibly intractable problem with the infancy stories, when in fact Pennington was just setting up his own sensible solution. See the update at the end of this post. In the case concerning Blomberg and the raising of the saints, probably the most charitable conjecture is that Licona didn't read more of the context in Blomberg's commentary.
The event itself
I'm not going to spend a lot of time discussing purely skeptical cavils that have been directed at the raising of the saints. My main point has been to argue that Licona's case for a convention here, understood by the readers, making the event non-historical, is extremely weak. Indeed, it is quite arbitrary to select that event to question, especially given that Mark and Luke confirm the darkness and the rending of the veil of the Temple. A fairly obvious conclusion from the three Synoptic accounts taken together is that it was widely agreed among Christians that several portentous, probably miraculous events really did occur at the time of Jesus' death. The earthquake (causing the rocks to split) and raising of the saints are just two of these that happen to be related in Matthew alone. Earthquakes, as Licona himself notes (The Resurrection of Jesus, p. 551) are geologically common in that region, though Matthew would probably have believed that this particular one was divinely ordained at that time rather than occurring by coincidence. What Licona does not seem to recognize is the extreme epistemological arbitrariness of picking out just this or that portentous event to think of as a "poetic addition," especially when the claim is supposed to be that the original readers would have understood which ones were not intended to be taken as historical.
As far as the historicity of the event itself, skeptics make a dismissible argument from silence on which I will spend virtually no time. There was no Jerusalem Times, no live-blogging, no day-to-day Roman account of what was happening. Nor do we have anything detailed of that kind from the Jewish side. If some people were raised from the dead at this time, they would not have gone about emitting a special glow. One presumes that only those capable of recognizing them would have known for sure who they were and that they had previously been dead. (Here I disagree with Blomberg's theory that these were probably named Old Testament figures.) Of course the story would have gotten about from friends of the previously deceased, which is presumably how we have Matthew's account. If we applied a wrong historical standard that every event has to be duplicated in other accounts, we would have virtually no ancient history at all.
We should also (needless to say) not be influenced by the sheer bullying of skeptics like Ehrman who like to use the word "zombies" concerning this passage. Jesus allegedly raised people from the dead. If Jairus's daughter was not a "zombie," presumably neither were these. Supposedly we are not being influenced by a sheer anti-supernatural bias, yet the contempt that emanates from skeptics when pressuring Christians about this passage positively shouts "anti-supernatural bias." Why should we give an inch to that?
A supposed oddity that moves Licona is the question of what those raised were doing from Jesus' death to his resurrection:
There is further support for this [non-historical] interpretation. If the tombs opened and the saints being raised upon Jesus' death was not strange enough, Matthew adds that they did not come out of their tombs until after Jesus' resurrection. What were they doing between Friday afternoon and early Sunday morning? Were they standing in the now open doorways of their tombs and waiting? The Resurrection of Jesus, p. 553
Licona's footnote at this point cites John Dominic Crossan for this objection. Perhaps instead he should have asked evangelical scholar Craig Blomberg, who discusses this very issue in the very next paragraph after the one Licona himself cites. As Blomberg rightly points out, the Greek of the passage in Matthew in no way requires that these people were physically raised at the time of Jesus' crucifixion, much less that they hung around aimlessly until Sunday. Rather, the passage indicates that the tombs were opened and that at some time thereafter holy people were raised, coming into the city of Jerusalem on or after Easter Sunday, when Jesus was raised. The passage does not say precisely when they were raised after their tombs were opened.
It has seemed to me for quite some time that the questioning of the historicity of this passage arises in no small part from the fact that Matthew is so brief about it. This brevity about that particular supernatural event causes even some Christians to feel, without being able to put their finger on why, that there is something odd and lacking in verisimilitude about that one short part of the passage. Matthew ties the event down (as already mentioned) by saying that the graves opened at the time of the crucifixion and that the holy people entered Jerusalem after Jesus' resurrection. But he does not name any of those who arose and does not tell us any more about them, including what happened to them. Contrast, for example, John's naming of Lazarus and mentioning that he was present at a later dinner in Jesus' honor, that people came from miles around to see him, and so forth. Matthew does not give us any such details about those who arose at this time. But it is a huge leap to conclude therefore either that it did not happen or, still more implausible, that Matthew did not even believe that it happened. I myself am inclined to guess that Matthew may have known no more than what he says here. If that conjecture is right, then he did not personally know any of the people who (he believed) rose from the dead. He had to take the word of others. If the story came to Matthew at one or more removes and/or some time after the events, that could well explain its inexplicitness. In contrast, many events in the Gospels are related in a way that gives us reason to believe that the authors knew a great deal about them and may even have witnessed the events themselves. It is this contrast, even within the crucifixion narrative, that strikes the reader oddly when reading the very few words Matthew devotes to the resurrection of the saints.
From a purely secular perspective, the conjecture that we have here an account of this particular event at some remove(s) makes that event perhaps somewhat less probable than some others related in the same document, though the general reliability of the document should still be taken into account. But it certainly does not mean that it did not happen, it does not justify the use of a consideration like "that seems weird to me" as a criterion of ahistoricity, picking out one or two narrated events to doubt from the others around, and it does not at all justify the conclusion that Matthew did not mean it historically.
Update: I am adding a link to an excellent supplementary article by Christopher Haun on this same topic. What Haun has done is something that I didn't do: He's gone to the Church Fathers, both those whom Licona discusses and others whom he didn't, and looked up their interpretation of the passage. Haun has also looked up a bunch of pseudopigraphical literature and shown that it also interpreted the passage as literal. This is relevant to showing how the passage was understood by ancient readers, even if the work in question was not written by the person whose name was put on it. This is truly useful, painstaking work, and it shows that the situation is much more unequivocal as far as ancient interpretations of the passage even than Licona portrays it as being.
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