One of the strongest arguments in favor of the truth of the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead is that there were many eyewitnesses to the event.
St. Paul wrote the earliest attestation:
1 Corinthians 15:3–8 (ESV): 3 For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, 4 that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, 5 and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. 6 Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. 7 Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. 8 Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.
This letter was likely written the A.D. 50s, about 20 years after the crucifixion, but some scholars believe that Paul is repeating a formula that he may have received on his visit to Jerusalem, which happened much earlier around A.D. 40.
The eyewitness accounts are also included in the Gospels with Mark having the least amount of detail since the appearances themselves are not included. (It’s possible the end of Mark contained these but was lost since it ends rather abruptly.)
Since the entire Christian enterprise is based on the resurrection, it is important to evaluate the evidence for it and many popular and scholarly books have been written on the subject making a powerful case in favor of the resurrection. The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel is probably the most famous.
Christian apologists point to not only the existence of these eyewitness accounts but also their reliability.
Most other religions do not assert anything similar, but Mormonism, the religion founded by Joseph Smith, does. Smith preached that the angel Moroni, a prophet in the Book of Mormon, in the 1820s, told him to dig up a set of golden plates buried under a hill near his home in Palmyra, New York.
To back up the claim that the Book of Mormon is divinely inspired 11 eyewitnesses claim to have seen the plates while 3 also claim to have seen the angel. No one else ever saw the gold plates or the angel.
Who is to say, therefore, that the eyewitness testimony to the resurrection is any different than that of Mormonism?
Alex O’Connor claims that this eyewitness testimony is actually better than the witness for the resurrection because it is more recent, more clearly traced to the eyewitnesses themselves.
Is this true?
Well, no, not even close because not all eyewitnesses are the same.
It is all in the reliability, and in this post, I will explain why the eyewitness testimony to the resurrection is more reliable than that of Mormonism to the point where the Mormon testimony can be completely discounted while that of the resurrection cannot.
Eyewitness accounts, especially in a police investigation and the court of law, are not all made equal and in evaluating the reliability of such accounts there are many sources of error.
The first source is bias. Do the eyewitnesses have a reason to lie?
In the case of the resurrection, the disciples had no incentive. They couldn’t gain money, fame, or power by promoting Jesus. They experienced instead persecution, torture, and death. People aren’t generally willing to die for a lie.
The Mormon witnesses, on the other hand, were never tortured into denying their claims. Although Joseph Smith himself was imprisoned and killed by a mob, he fought back with guns rather than words. It isn’t clear that any of the Mormon founders were willing to endure what the disciples did. In fact, they gained considerable power and prestige as founding members until some started to disagree with Smith and were excommunicated. Some later returned after his death.
None of the witnesses ever recanted their account but at the same time they had no good reason to do it.
Could they have been lying? Yes.
One of the suspicious aspects of the revelation to the 3 witnesses who claim to have seen the angel is that Smith was present in each case. (There were two separate cases, one with two and the other with one more.) Unless one asserts that Jesus survived the cross (which has been thoroughly debunked multiple times but keeps coming back from people who don’t understand how thorough Roman crucifixion was), Jesus was not present except in his resurrected form. This suggests that Smith could have manufactured the situation through some kind of suggestion or trickery.
Let’s note that these 3 witnesses are the only witnesses that are in a sense equivalent to the 100s of witnesses to the resurrection of Jesus. Even if one discounts the 500 witnesses because this comes to us through Paul rather than their own testimony, we have the Gospel testimony to the witness of the 11 disciples and the women.
Still, we need to address the issue that O’Connor brings up: these are not statements from the disciples themselves but second hand accounts.
One wonders why the disciples did not go through the same trouble as the Mormon witnesses? Likely this is because when the Gospels were written many of the disciples were still around telling people verbally what they saw. Unlike the 19th century, the 1st was a time when most information was not written down. People couldn’t generally read or write. Copies couldn’t be printed off but had to be laboriously hand-copied. Another reason is that they expected for a long time that Jesus would return very soon so there was no need to perpetuate their eyewitness beyond the current generation.
Nevertheless, there is no reason to expect that the Gospel accounts are made up. If they had been, they likely would have avoided mentioning the women being the first to see the risen Jesus, since women were not considered reliable witnesses. Also, if the disciples hadn’t seen the risen Jesus, would they have claimed to be at risk of death? Probably not.
Although hearsay is not admissible in a court of law, it is perfectly admissible in historical analysis. While it is better to have first-hand accounts such as Paul’s experience, it doesn’t mean that the second-hand accounts may be dismissed out of hand.
On the Mormon side, we also have the witness of Mary Musselman Whitmer who claims to have seen the angel and plates, but Smith never mentions this in his diary, and the story comes to us from her grandson speaking 50 years later. Also, the story says that a “stranger” showed her the golden plates, so there is nothing clearly supernatural about the encounter.
The 8 witnesses to the plates only one can discount since they witnessed nothing supernatural. Everyone in Jerusalem was a witness to the empty tomb and there is no record that Jesus’s body was not gone. Smith merely showed them the plates which he could have made himself and then caused to disappear so they couldn’t be examined more carefully or with scientific instruments.
So far it seems that the reliability of the Mormon case is weaker than that of the resurrection but there is nothing to indicate that the testimony is false in either case.
In order to do that, we need to look at corroborating evidence.
The Gospel accounts of Jesus appear to be generally accurate in terms of history and geography as far as can be tested against archaeology and historical documents. Even areas of doubt that once existed are being put to rest by archaeology. We also have several extra-biblical sources that are a witness to the crucifixion of Jesus. Our manuscript sources for the New Testament, meanwhile, are better than any other documents from antiquity by orders of magnitude. This doesn’t necessarily improve the case for the historicity of the resurrection itself, but it puts many doubts to rest that the Gospels are otherwise reliable. If the Gospels had gotten the language, geography, and politics of the time completely wrong, we wouldn’t want to believe any other claims they make because clearly, the authors didn’t know what they were talking about.
Archaeology, meanwhile, has been far less kind to the Book of Mormon.
While the Mormon rank and file are told that archaeology backs up the claims in the book and they will offer you literature that makes these claims seem compelling, this is far, far from the truth. The fanciful literature of the faithful is filled with half-truths and unscientific reasoning. Even Mormon scholars admit that the Book of Mormon has almost no relationship to the actual archaeological finds or anthropology of the New World.
Bear in mind that knowledge of the New World prior to the arrival of Columbus in the 1820s was probably quite limited and so far the claims in the book bear out that limited understanding.
Stated bluntly: there is absolutely no archaeological evidence for the Book of Mormon. While biblical archaeology is very much a productive area of study that continually confirms the geographical, political, and anthropological details of the Bible, both Old and New Testaments, Book of Mormon archaeology isn’t even a serious field of study. No professional archaeologist, Mormon or not, uses the Book of Mormon to choose sites (unlike the Bible) and even Mormon archaeologists doing work in Mesoamerica find absolutely nothing to substantiate the claims in the book.
In fact, the archaeology that has been done is quite damaging. Claims such as ancient people in Mesoamerica speaking and writing in “Reformed Egyptian” and Hebrew have absolutely no evidence. We would expect to find these artifacts and we do not.
The Smithsonian Institution, in a statement, said this about it:
No inscriptions using Old World forms of writing have been shown to have occurred in any part of the Americas before 1492 except for a few Norse rune stones which have been found in Greenland.
The huge battle the book claims occurred around the hill in New York where Smith claims to have found the plates with hundreds of thousands killed and left unburied around it also has left zero evidence.
Only about 7000 soldiers were killed in the battle of Gettysburg, by comparison.
If this ancient battle had actually occurred 1600 years ago, there would be skeletal and metal remains still there. There is no way that time and scavengers could have removed all traces.
The overwhelming consensus of the evidence is that the events in the Book of Mormon were fabricated in the 1820s.
This goes to show why corroboration is so important because eyewitness accounts, although important, cannot always stand on their own. While archaeology improves the witness of the Bible, it hopelessly damages The Book of Mormon.
Let’s also point out that while we have “eyewitness” accounts to the angel and the gold plates, these simply point to a document that claims eyewitness authority to events that occurred thousands of years earlier. There is no paper trail tracing this document back toward the original events, unlike the New Testament. The New Testament describes events that occurred only decades before it was written. Meanwhile, we have absolutely no evidence that the Book of Mormon existed before the 1820s.
While Atheists would like to make the claim that the unreliability of the witnesses to the Book of Mormon points to the even greater unreliability of the New Testament witness, this is a false comparison and if you were to imagine this as two separate murder trials, it becomes manifestly clear.
Imagine in one case you have a set of documents attesting to a murder that happened a long time ago, say 50 years ago. It is clear that these documents are, however, brand new, from a few months ago. Accompanied with the document are several testimonies from people claiming to have witnessed a time traveler stepping out of a portal in thin air, handing them a tablet containing the document, and disappearing again. The original tablet is nowhere to be found, however, and you are asked to accept the document on faith.
These documents claim that this murder occurred in your backyard at your street address and the body is buried there, but you know for a fact that your house and street didn’t exist back then and there is no evidence of the murder or anybody.
Meanwhile, suppose you find a set of documents that attest to a murder about 50 years ago. These documents are copies but you can find many of the prior copies in libraries and they have fragments of even earlier ones going back to within months of the event. While these documents themselves do not contain any eyewitness testimony, they claim that this murder occurred and that many people were witnesses. The details of the murder indicate a place in the next town over while a particular person was mayor. You check records and these were real places and this person was mayor at the time. You also know that the authors of the document as well as many of the witnesses were arrested and imprisoned for talking about the murder but refused to recant.
Which are you more likely to believe?
The point here is that eyewitness testimony is only part of the equation. You also have to look at the corroborating evidence and reliability of the claims being made. Otherwise, you are just fooling yourself.
The Universe of Tim Andersen 