Would the
Apostles Die for a Lie?
I
frequently have occasion to debate conservative believers on topics such
as the historical existence of Jesus, the reliability of the gospels,
and the reality of the resurrection. My concern in this column will be
to address some of the major issues that come up like clockwork in
debate after debate. You may have wondered about these questions, or
they may have been posed to you in similar exchanges. The first I want
to take up is the claim that Jesus must have risen from the dead as the
gospels report, or else we would have to imagine the apostles of Jesus
giving their very lives for the sake of what they knew was a fiction,
and this is just too much to believe. That would be taking a joke, or a
hoax, farther than any sane person would be willing to do! Conversely,
since they were gladly martyred for (which means, literally, “witnessing
to”) their faith, isn’t this strong evidence that their testimony was
true, that Jesus did rise from the dead?
The psychological point is
not a bad one, though one must keep in mind the very great power of
“cognitive dissonance.” History has shown there is pretty much no
extreme people will not go to in defending that which they have a great
stake in. If you had spent decades defending the proposition that Jesus
rose from the dead, even if you had originally merely surmised or
guessed it, even had you made it up, you might well give your life than
back down from the claim, to save face, because otherwise your life
would be revealed as one big joke, and some people simply cannot live
that down. The second-century writer Lucian of Samosata tells us that
Proteus Peregrinus, a charlatan prophet, immolated himself because he
could not resist such a grandstanding opportunity. Also, remember Joseph
Smith; non-Mormons believe he had concocted the whole Mormon religion,
yet he was willing to die for it. Does that make it true?
But let’s go back a step.
In fact we do not know that the earliest preachers of Christianity
were martyred for their faith. The New Testament does not tell us
for sure. Acts 12:2 doesn’t tell us whether James had the chance to
recant before being axed, and John 21:18 is so vague that verse 19 has
to tell the reader that v. 18 somehow refers to Peter’s death, perhaps a
reinterpretation. Our earliest “information” comes from unreliable
second- and third century documents, starting with the anonymous but
so-called First Epistle of Clement, which says, vaguely, that Peter and
Paul “witnessed” to their faith in Rome (apparently implying their
martyrdom) because of “jealousy.” This in turn seems to be a reference
to the Apocryphal Acts of Paul, Peter, Andrew and others, which have the
apostles martyred at the instigation of jealous pagan husbands whose
wives, having been converted to Christianity, would no longer sleep with
them. These Acts abound in legends, such as Paul baptizing a talking
lion. Tertullian (late second century) says the Apostle John survived
being boiled in oil. Thus we have no real reason to believe the earliest
preachers, whoever they may have been, were martyred for their faith.
In fact, it is an open
question among New Testament scholars whether the earliest Christian
preaching even involved any resurrection. The early Q Document,
apparently used by both Matthew and Luke, seems to have had no mention
of either the saving death or the resurrection of Jesus. Maybe the
resurrection, as I think (see my book Deconstructing Jesus), was
a subsequent embellishment of the Jesus story.
Finally, while we are
usually safe in assuming that your average martyr, heroically giving his
or her life for a cause, sincerely believes in that cause, we still have
to ask whether sincerity is the same thing as being right. Plenty
of people are sincerely mistaken.
By
Robert M. Price