Once again I find myself in a most odd position -- Parsons here addresses arguments by Kreeft and Tacelli against the "hallucination" hypothesis of the rez appearances; but most of their arguments I would not use anyway, and the argument I would use is hardly touched by what Parsons has argued.

For reference as well, I would send the reader here.

And what of my view? Here is why I regard the hallucination theory as completely untenable: As noted in the link above, "expectation plays the coordinating role in collective hallucinations". The critical problem here is that the disciples were not expecting a resurrection; any hallucination of Jesus would be interpreted as, if anything, his "guardian angel" (an exact twin), but not as a ghost of Jesus himself, nor especially as Jesus resurrected.

Does any of what Parsons has to offer address this? His reply to point 7 comes the closest, in which Kreeft and Tacelli say that the disciples did not expect or believe that Jesus would be/was resurrected. Parsons' reply is to posit that the Christians were first telling a "ghost story," which gradually evolved into a story of a resurrection; but this too would have been outside their expectation, along with vague reference to 1 Cor. 15:35 as evidence that some Christians doubted "the resurrection of the body" as a reason to invent the transition (which is flummoxed by the point that Paul himself teaches and had taught such a body in the first place; but that is outside of Parsons' scope).

Our only other points of contention with Parsons, then, are:

• His reply to point 11, in which Kreeft and Tacelli note the problems that a body in the tomb would cause for Christians. Parsons replies (in which he admits to differing with other authors in the book) by disputing that Jesus was buried in an identifiable tomb; but like some of his cohorts, Parsons stands manifestly uninformed with respect to McCane's study which obliterates all of his objections. He also buys into Ludemann's wacky thesis that there is a "progression" in how positively Joseph is portrayed in the Gospels; but this relies on 1) an assumption of Markan priority, which needs to be argued for independently; 2) overreading of the Gospels (see more here based on minor details that do not bear the exegetical weight Ludemann puts on them.
• His reply to point 12, in which Kreeft and Tacelli note that the body could have been produced by authorities. Parsons replies that the body would be too rotted to be produced or be identifiable; but as I have noted elsewhere, since the burial place was known, all that was needed was a public demonstration where the tomb was opened, and the body, such as it was, would be taken out or even pointed out; and this could be done in spite of any legal prohibitions, because we know well enough that the Sanhedrin wasn't one to care about the law when their personal interests were at stake. Or, should the Sanhedrin choose to be law-abiding, Wright notes in The Resurrection of the Son of God [707] that Joseph's tomb would not lay unused after this; as a family tomb, it would be expected to be used again and again, and all the Sanhedrin had to do was arrange to have authoritative witnesses present the next time the tomb was opened, or at a period six months to two years later when the bones would be removed for secondary burial in an ossuary. And what of identification problems? 50 days, or even two thousand years later (as we know from finding the remains of another crucifixion victim from the same era), there were plenty of ways to identify the remains with those of Jesus. Who needs modern forensics? If the skeleton taken out of Joe's tomb showed evidence of crucifixion that even an amateur could discern (i.e., nails still in their places; scratched and scraped bones, or bones stretched out of their sockets - but NO breaking of the legs!), and was also about the right size and had no contrasting features (i.e., a larger brow, missing teeth), that, along with the vested authority of the Sanhedrin saying that it was indeed Jesus' body, would have been completely sufficient to destroy Christianity - or at the very least, cause it to have to alter its tactics considerably in order to survive. Parsons' reply that all they had to do was deny that the body was Jesus is in a sense true, but does not capture adequately the broader problem this would have caused for the Christian mission, and the fact that it would have to show up in post-exposure apologetics.
• His reply to point 13, in which Parsons merely waves off the data of the rolled-off stone, the empty tomb, and so on with a vague comparison to UFO phenomena (not any sort of actual case study) and an assertion of his right as a Skeptic to dismiss whatever he pleases, which is a convenience I imagine we'd all appreciate being able to take advantage of, especially for (say) the idea of macroevolution.

In close, a comment on note 19, where Parsons delivers references for what he calls "old hat" objections of the reliability of the NT; we do indeed agree they are "old hat":

• Gospel 1) dates and 2) authors
• 3) The reliability of oral tradition
• 4) Helms' "Gospel fictions" thesis
• 5) "bias" in the Gospels
• 6) claims of error in the Gospels -- none specified by Parsons here, but his reference, Arnheim, is full of the usual refuted canards
• 7) Gospel agreement
• 8) Non-specific claim of lack of "independent support" for the Gospels -- as if this were regarded as a problem for any other historical document
• 9) The usual "it reports miracles so it's not believable" canard

A reader alerted us to a "reply" to this by Parsons done recently, and I put that in quotes because it hardly deserves the title. Parsons first denies that he dismiss whatever he pleases at his convenience, and then proves it by quoting himself saying that very thing when he says:

…Kreeft and Tacelli try to saddle the skeptic with the burden of explaining every detail of every appearance story (the stone rolled away, etc.,) in terms of hallucinations. There is no reason the skeptic should accept such a burden for the simple reason that skeptics do not have to accept the appearance stories as 100 percent accurate. Apologists are constantly assuming as “data” what skeptics rightly regard as hearsay (p. 448).

That, plain and simple, is Parsons saying that as a Skeptic he doesn't have to accept any burden and so can dismiss what he pleases as he finds it convenient. This is merely the typical semantic trick of the one who says that "the burden is on the one who claims," petulantly ignoring the fact that each side in any debate "claims" something is true, even if they do not have the courage to formulate their position. It is therefore a fact that Parsons and others like him DO have a burden; and thus for example he needs to defend (for example, here) the implied propositon denying the accuracy of the stories, as well as address why "hearsay" is to be rejected (which is another standard Skeptical canard that has been refuted and is itself merely a position of convenient dismissal). One may note that it is doubtful whether Parsons -- whose credentials are in philosophy -- is even capable of defending himself on such grounds as historicity in the first place.

Parsons then goes on to spin the wheel to claim that in his appeal to UFO phenomena, he was "really making" the point that "ufologists could make exactly the same claim. Only real E.T.’s in real extraterrestrial spacecraft could account for all the weird phenomena associated with the UFO myth—vivid abduction experiences," etc. That's nice. It's still vague and worthless, as I said, since he makes no effort to perform any analysis which legitimizes this claim, no doubt because he is incapable of addressing such issues as, eg, the social context of Christianity in the Greco-Roman world, or the relation of honor and shame to claims of the crucifixion and resurrection. We did not need any further news that Parsons was ill-prepared to treat his topic in depth; that much we knew from his original article.

When we finally get to the issue of hallucinations (and by the way, since I first wrote Parsons will now have this to answer as well), it is to my point of the role of expectation. (By the way, I do not note Parsons' lack of address to my argument as a way of saying that he should have; I note it as a matter of indicating to what extent the arguments he makes against Kreeft and Tacelli might apply to my own.) Parsons says that he has "replied to an argument of this sort, one used by William Lane Craig," (fair enough, since it wasn't in The Empty Tomb) although actually, it is only somewhat like mine; it is more like my point 3 in The Impossible Faith in that it argues that, "The Jewish conception of resurrection is a general raising of the dead at the end of time, not the raising to glory of a single individual as an event in history." Craig says nothing about what the disciples were actually expecting (as I argue, that they were expecting an ascension of the body) and thus Parsons still has not actually addressed my argument at all. Even so his response to Craig amounts to a non sequitur in context. He appeals to what he calls "the heretical and apocalyptic nature" of Jesus' teachings, and in the process shows why people like him without credentials in Biblical scholarship need to mind their own business, to wit:

But according to the gospels, Jesus's ministry contained many heretical elements. In Mark chapter 2 Jesus claims authority for the forgiveness of sins, which elicits a charge of blasphemy from the scribes. In Mark 7, he sets aside the traditional dietary distinctions between clean and unclean foods. In Mark 2:28 he even claims to be sovereign over the Sabbath. Further, Jesus's preaching was full of apocalyptic content. He famously said "Truly, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God come with power."--Mark 9:1. In Mark 8:31 and 10:34 he predicts that the Son of Man will die and rise three days afterward.

Given the heretical and apocalyptic nature of their master's teachings, and the experiences, whatever they were, that convinced them that Jesus had risen, the emergence of radically new concepts in the disciples' minds hardly seems to require supernatural explanation. For the early Christians, the Resurrection of Jesus was the first eschatological event, an event that ushered in the New Age, the coming of the Kingdom.

None of this does anything to refute the point that the disciples expected an ascension, not a resurrection. It only makes a rather fallacious claim that because the disciples believed X new thing, they could also easily believe Y new thing. But this does nothing to explain expectation BEFORE the Resurrection. It also overstates the case for the "radicality" of Jesus' teachings. The claim to forgive sins and moderate the Sabbath was wrapped up in Jesus' claim of divine identity; for the Jew, God had such authority, so the idea itself that the laws could be moderated was in and of itself hardly radical. Nor was there anything radical or heretical about apocalyptic teachings (they were a staple of Judaism of the period). The only serious variance revolves around Jesus' self-identity, and in that context a resurrection is just as "radical" a claim as an ascension inasmuch as it claims special honor for Jesus that the crucifixion would have rendered impossible to conceive.

Parsons' quote of a textbook and of Paul both reflect POST-resurrection views and so again do nothing to address my argument (and for that matter, fail to counteract Craig's as well). He then turns to the matter of identifying the body. If he knew his Bible, which he apparently does not, he'd know the answer to his "thought experiment" ("What if we found the body today?") is found in 1 Cor. 15: "If Christ is not raised, your faith is in vain." And so it is that yes, "the world’s 2 billion Christians" would indeed be obliged to "immediately abandon their faith" or at the very least retreat into some sort of Bultmannian spirituality. It is not an argument against what I said to say that others would not accept it. I would add further that Parsons obviously has no idea who he is dealing with, since he thinks it worthwhile to introduce "the old hymn" which says, "You ask me how I know He lives: He lives within my heart!" We here do not subscribe to touchy-feely epistemology of that sort, and Parsons would do well to educate himself in that regard and not think that we are fundies in the ex-Babinski mold (since it seems that is the only sort he knows of).

In terms of actual objections, Parsons claims that there are "dubious assumptions" involved in producing the body, all of which demonstrate further his lack of serious education on matters of Biblical scholarship:

1. It assumes that the Sanhedrin had the authority to exhume and display the body. Jesus’s execution was an official act of the Roman authority. Joseph of Arimathea had to ask for Pilate’s permission to take down and bury the body (Matthew 27:58). Wouldn’t the Jewish authorities have had to ask permission to dig it up again and display it? What would the Romans have thought of such a bizarre request? This hardly matters anyway, since even pointing to the tomb would have sufficed as a rebuttal that would have to be dealt with. That said, since (as McCane's study shows) the Sanhedrin was itself responsible for the dishonorable burial of Jesus, the obvious answer to the question of whether they would have had the authority to exhume it is a patent YES. As for what the Romans would have thought of such a "bizarre request," it would hardly be considered "bizarre" given the reasons that would be given for it ("we need to squelch this subversive cult that tells us not to pay taxes to Rome, etc.") and since the Romans gave leeway to other "bizarre" (in their view) Jewish religious rituals, this would hardly be seen as anything extraordinary. Indeed it could be phrased as a request to perform a normal Jewish reburial for the sake of preventing a theft.
2. The argument assumes that the authorities could have gotten hold of the body, but, even if we assume that they knew the site of Jesus’s tomb, the body could have been missing for non-supernatural reasons. Whatever THAT is supposed to mean. There isn't any sort of actual argument here; if Parsons is saying that we didn't here defend against such idiocies as the "evil twin Jesus" thesis or the "wandering necromancers" thesis, then he needs to look elsewhere on this site. But as noted, Parsons considers it his right as a Skeptic to not to have to satisfy any burden of argument, so this is not a surprising "argument." The only specific implied is not knowing the site of the tomb, which is ridiculous since (again, as McCane shows) they were the ones responsible for the burial (aside from the patent inanity of claiming they would not be able to locate the tomb even if they didn't know where it was in the first place!).
3. The argument assumes that the Jewish authorities would have been sufficiently impressed by the first Christians even to bother refuting them. To the Jewish authorities, if they even noticed the Apostles’ preaching, yet another ragtag band of loudmouthed preachers (and Jerusalem had plenty of those) would hardly create an intellectual problem, one that would have needed confutation with argument and empirical evidence. Did any authorities of our government bother trying to refute the Branch Davidians? Why give publicity to some tiny, nutty group (as the authorities would have perceived them), when in all likelihood they would just go away if ignored? It is patently obvious that Parsons has little if any insight into the workings of an honor and shame society. This, and the subversive nature of Jesus' teachings about himself, called out for confutation (as opposed to the way things work in modern, "do your own thing" America, and may we add that ultimately the government here DID "refute" the Branch Davidians, with firepower). Parsons feels no obligation, apparently, to name any of those "plenty" of preachers, much less explain their relevance in detail, but perhaps he can name some who were claimed to have been resurrected and to have claimed authority to overturn the Temple cultus, and name some also that were not otherwise countered (eg, by the Roman military machine). The "why" of the publicity is found in the reaping of thousands of converts (including some priests), the serious deviancy of the movement in a collectivist, conformist society, and that it undermined the uniqueness of Judaism. But since there are no more specifics offered here (since Parsons does not think he needs to actually do any real work), not much more can be said. (Of course, Gamaliel did offer the "ignore them and they'll go away" advice after the resurrection -- but he did so on the premise that if God was not behind the movement, it would fail, which is not the sort of argument that Parsons can avail himself of.)

   Then it comes to the matter of identifying the body, and all Parsons can mutter is, "Who knows how many crucified bodies, roughly similar to Jesus’s, would have been available at that time?" The answer is, as "fresh" as Jesus' body and buried in a particular tomb, NONE. Parsons further misses the point that while "the Apostles could easily have dismissed any purported corpus delicti as a fake" the fact that defense against this does not show up anywhere indicates that it could not be done at all. Parsons digs even deeper into the well of unidimensionality with this commentary:

   Further, exhuming and displaying the decayed body of a victim of crucifixion would have been an intensely shameful and repellent task for a first century Jew, an act far beneath the dignity of the distinguished members of the Sanhedrin.

   Golly -- anyone ever hear of, like, Gentile servants? Or of ordering some Temple functionary to do the hands-on part of the job, maybe for a suitable financial reward? Or of getting some guy who owed a member of the Sanhedrin money to do it as a favor for getting some debt relief? Apparently Parsons thinks no one but the Sanhredrin lived in Judaea in the first century. And he digs even deeper with this:

   Such an act would have so scandalized the Jewish community (most of whom no doubt pitied Jews executed by the Romans) that it would probably have backfired and created a popular wave of sympathy for the Christians.

   This, note, after Parsons has already declared such about Jesus' "heretical" teachings. So which is it? Was Jesus popular or not? Parsons is wrong in any event; there was no pity for those shamefully executed by crucifixion, unless they were part of one's own ingroup (here, the disciples), and there would especially be no pity for one who made such incredible claims of honor and then conspicuously failed to lived up to them. If anything, the further shame would be seen as "just desserts" for that deviant and his deviant followers. And there's still the option of merely pointing to the tomb with the vested authority of the Sanhedrin, which hasn't been considered. Of course, there's also the matter of that Parsons assumes that the Sanhedrin would have come to this conclusion in advance; it's rather that, seeing the claims of resurrection advancing, they would have properly calculated a way to display the body (if needed) so as to counteract any possible sympathy among those not priorly committed (eg, reminding everyone that Jesus wanted to destroy the Temple and said stuff which would bring the Romans down on them). Parsons seems unable to think in more than one dimension, and it is little wonder that he is so hesitant to engage in specifics and retreats so often to the excuse that he doesn't have a burden to defend anything. That's how it has to be when you haven't done sufficient homework.

   Two things in close. First, Parsons naturally declines to deal at all with any of our linked items. Second, if any of his admirers (such as a certain Ed Babinski) can return their courage to face us on TWeb to repeat arguments that we have already refuted in other contexts, they know what to do.

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