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Investigating the Resurrection of Jesus Christ Investigating the Resurrection of Jesus Christ This book provides an original and comprehensive assessment of the hypotheses concerning the origin of resurrection Christology. It fills a gap in the literature by addressing these issues using a transdisciplinary approach involving historical-critical study of the New Testament, theology, analytic philosophy, psychology, and comparative religion. Using a novel analytic framework, this book demonstrates that a logically exhaustive list of hypotheses concerning the claims of Jesus’ post-mortem appearances and the outcome of Jesus’ body can be formulated. It addresses these hypotheses in detail, including sophisticated combinations of hallucination hypothesis with cognitive dissonance; memory distortion; and confirmation bias. Addressing writings from both within and outside of Christianity, it also demonstrates how a comparative religion approach might further illuminate the origins of Christianity. This is a thorough study of arguably the key event in the formation of the Christian faith. As such, it will be of keen interest to theologians, New Testament scholars, philosophers, and scholars of religious studies. Andrew Loke is Associate Professor at Hong Kong Baptist University. He is the author of multiple books including God and Ultimate Origins: A Novel Cosmological Argument (2017), The Origins of Divine Christology (2017), and A Kryptic Model of the Incarnation (2014). Routledge New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies The Routledge New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies series brings high quality research monograph publishing back into focus for authors, international libraries, and student, academic and research readers. This open-ended monograph series presents cutting-edge research from both established and new authors in the field. With specialist focus yet clear contextual presentation of contemporary research, books in the series take research into important new directions and open the field to new critical debate within the discipline, in areas of related study, and in key areas for contemporary society. Theology and Evolutionary Anthropology Dialogues in Wisdom, Humility, and Grace Edited by Celia Deane-Drummond and Agustín Fuentes Racism and the Weakness of Christian Identity Religious Autoimmunity David Kline Past and Present Political Theology Expanding the Canon Edited by Dennis Vanden Auweele and Miklos Vassányi Schleiermacher’s Theology of Sin and Nature Agency, Value, and Modern Theology Daniel J. Pedersen Investigating the Resurrection of Jesus Christ A New Transdisciplinary Approach Andrew Loke For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ religion/series/RCRITREL Investigating the Resurrection of Jesus Christ A New Transdisciplinary Approach Andrew Loke First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Andrew Loke The right of Andrew Loke to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. The Open Access version of this book, available at www. taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has for this book been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-47756-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-03725-5 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC To Dr William Lane Craig For answering so many of my questions Contents Acknowledgements viii 1 Introduction 1 2 The earliest Christians claimed to have witnessed the resurrected Jesus 40 3 The earliest Christians experienced something which they thought was the resurrected Jesus 68 4 The earliest Christians witnessed an extramental entity 89 5 The extramental entity was Jesus who died on the cross 112 6 What happened to Jesus’ physical body? 121 7 Combination hypotheses 143 8 Problem of miracles 166 9 Conclusion 199 Bibliography 207 Index 227 Index for Ancient Sources 235 Index for Scripture and Apocrypha 237 Acknowledgements This book has taken 14 years to write, and there are many to thank along the way. The main idea first came when I was still working as a medical doctor back in 2006. A translation of the text of the Gospel of Judas had just been published by the National Geographic, generating a lot of publicity and interest in conspiracy theories concerning the historical Jesus. Sitting in my clinic one day after seeing a patient, I began to ponder how one might exclude all the conspiracy theories and (more broadly) various kinds of nat- uralistic hypotheses concerning Jesus’ resurrection, and the idea came to me in the form of a logical syllogism which I develop in this book. I would like to thank Professor Michael Wilkins for supervising my research paper on Jesus’ resurrection at Biola University in 2007 and my schoolmate Manuel Cota for helpful comments. This resulted in an article published in 2009 by Oxford University Press titled ‘The resurrection of the Son of God: a reduction of the naturalistic alternatives,’ Journal of Theo- logical Studies 60: 570–584. I am grateful to my other schoolmate Ray Yeo for encouraging me to expand it into a book, and to OUP for permission to reproduce the content of this article in this book. I would also like to thank Harold Leong, Timothy McGrew, and David Graieg, and my colleagues Mark Boone, Andrew Brenner, and Ellen Zhang for helpful discussions, and my research assistants Zhu Weida and Justin Grace for their help with the bibliography. I would like to thank the team at Routledge—in particular Joshua Wells and Yuga Harini—for their assistance, and to the two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments and recommendations for publication. I am very grateful to the Hong Kong Baptist University Research Com- mittee for the Start-up Grant which funded part of my research and for their generous support for Open Access Publication (Project Code: 101004-RC Committee). Finally, I would like to thank Dr William Lane Craig whose work on Jesus’ resurrection and other topics in philosophy of religion has been a constant inspiration for me—it is to him that this book is dedicated. January 13, 2020, Hong Kong 1 Introduction 1.1 Significance of the question On Easter Day every year, millions of people celebrate the resurrection of Jesus. But did this event really happen? The proclamation that it did stands at the foundation of traditional Christianity, and throughout the centuries there has been intense debate concerning its truth. The contemporary debate is hamstrung by difficulties concerning whether it is in principle possible to reason from empirical evidence to Jesus’ resurrection given its supposed miraculous nature, and whether all the naturalistic alternatives can be elimi- nated (Novakovic 2016; Shapiro 2016; Allison 2005a, 2005b). There is a lack of agreement concerning ‘what is the task of historical research and to what extent can someone’s faith convictions influence her evaluation of the available evidence’ (Novakovic 2016, p. 128). Additionally, in spite of the vast amount of literature on the historical argument for Jesus’ resurrection—which has been the focus of at least 3,400 academic books and articles written since 1975 (Licona 2010, p. 19)—it has not yet been demonstrated in a single piece of work how all the naturalis- tic hypotheses can in principle be excluded. This problem is illustrated by the large monographs by Wright (2003), Swinburne (2003), Licona (2010), Bryan (2011), Levering (2019), and others. Although they make many good arguments, they do not consider a number of naturalistic hypotheses and various new combinations of them in recent literature, for example, swoon, remain buried, intramental, and mistaken identity hypotheses (Eisenberg 2016), and sophisticated combinations of hallucination hypothesis with cog- nitive dissonance, memory distortion, and confirmation bias (e.g. Philipse 2012; Carrier 2014; for discussion of these combinations, see Chapter 7 of this book). Now I am not claiming that demonstrating the exclusion of all possible naturalistic hypotheses is essential for the historical argument or for believing that Jesus resurrected—demonstrating that Jesus’ resurrection is as good as (or better than) the currently available alternative naturalistic hypotheses would suffice to show the rational permissibility (or reasonable- ness) of believing that Jesus resurrected. Nevertheless, where offering the historical argument is concerned it would be better if the argument can be made more rigorous. 2 Introduction This book offers a new contribution by addressing these and other issues using a transdisciplinary approach, that is, one which integrates different disciplines—in this case, historical-critical studies of the Bible, psychology, comparative religion, analytic philosophy, and theology—to create a new methodology that moves beyond discipline-specific approaches to address a problem. Utilizing an original analytical framework, I shall demonstrate that a logically exhaustive
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