Review of Body of Proof
(avg. read time: 10–20 mins.)
With Easter season now begun, my first post in this season will be related to the resurrection of Jesus. Specifically, I am reviewing a book that came out last year:
Jeremiah J. Johnston, Body of Proof: The 7 Best Reasons to Believe in the Resurrection of Jesus—and Why It Matters Today (Minneapolis: Bethany, 2023).
(Yes, the cover comes from the same location as the default cover image for my posts, albeit from a different angle.) Like me, Johnston wrote his dissertation on resurrection (his survey of biblical texts more generally was in the context of a dissertation on the apocryphal Gospel of Peter), and, like me, he has otherwise addressed the subject often. This is thus a popular work that represents a distillation of work he has done elsewhere. It is in many ways better fit for purpose than the “little book of guidance” by James Dunn that we reviewed a few months ago. However, I think there is substantial room for improvement here in terms of accuracy, organization, presentation, and clarity of focus.
But, of course, we are here to evaluate the book more intensively than that.
In his introduction, he says that “a staggering three hundred verses in the New Testament address the resurrection across its 260 chapters” (16). Unfortunately, Johnston does not reference a source of any kind that supports this figure. I have not kept a running tally of how many verses have been addressed in my studies on resurrection in the NT, and I am unsure if he includes both explicit and implicit references in this regard. I do not wish to claim at this time if his figure is too high or too low, simply because I am not sure how he arrived at it without a clear reference to a survey.
Even so, the basic point he makes is sound in that resurrection is clearly treated with more significance in the NT than it is in many churches today. This is almost word-for-word something I have said on many occasions: “These days it’s troubling that churches rarely preach series on Jesus’ resurrection. Outside of a funeral or Easter service, believers may go weeks or even months without learning about or considering his resurrection” (17). Sadly, too many funerals only mention resurrection in passing as some preachers prefer to speak about the dead as having “gone to heaven.” But if we are to take the NT seriously, then we must reckon with the fact that, as he says, “Christianity … is quintessentially a resurrection religion” (17). Thus, in this book Johnston aims “to illuminate your heart with he seven best reasons to believe in Jesus’ bodily resurrection” (18). The book is meant to be a helpful and hopeful resource providing both reasoning and comfort, as Johnston is not merely talking about the event; he also wants to tell his readers why it matters.
In chapter 1 he emphasizes how Christianity is historically grounded and is thus susceptible to historical testing. He gets overzealous here in telling his readers that we can establish a precise date in either 30 or 33 for when Jesus’s crucifixion or resurrection took place (27), something which I have written against here. He also says that Jesus’s crucifixion is the best-established fact of the ancient world (28). I get where the zeal for this claim comes from, but I just am not sure what he is using for comparison. If he were simply to say, “among the best-established,” I think I could go along with that without qualm, because I do agree that the evidential basis is rock-solid. And, of course, I agree with the general point of the chapter that it matters to affirm that Jesus bodily/physically and historically rose from the dead.
Chapter 2 then focuses on the case against Jesus’s resurrection by laying out the alternative explanations that have been appealed to. He divides these into misconception (the swoon theory, the wrong tomb theory, and hallucination/intramental events) and deceit explanations. It is all pretty standard stuff in this kind of resource. My personal preference would have been if either he laid out the different views initially and then went through the evidence to then return and evaluate the different explanations, or if he had gone through the evidence, then reviewed the explanations to show the problems with the alternatives. I think that could have helped readers see the problems for themselves and have an idea of what to draw on for themselves in responses they might make to the claims. But that is just a difference of presentation.
Chapter 3 is, well, difficult to pin down as to its intended focus. It is supposed to be part of Part 2 that “The Resurrection Bears a Heavy Burden of Proof” and it reviews the Christian claim of Jesus’s resurrection, but what it ends up being about is the authenticity of what Jesus said and did as well as the significance of the resurrection of Jesus in light of his teachings, deeds, and claims … kind of. The ideas are fine, but I wish he had been clearer in how this was presented from the outset, and that the chapter had been more refined to show how resurrection specifically connects to each of the points he discusses. As it is, he ends up talking about a number of issues, some of which are tangential. He does, unfortunately, perpetuate the resuscitation/resurrection distinction I have decried before (besides the aforementioned links, see here, for example). He also perpetuates a popular but, I and others would argue, an inaccurate reading of the dispute between Jesus and the Sadducees as Jesus resting his argument on the claim that Abraham continues to exist (48; which makes the basis of the argument about Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and not God per se).1 Also, he mentions the notion of Simon of Cyrene replacing Jesus at the crucifixion that is attributed to Basilides, but it is not quite accurate to say that a similar story appears in the Qur’an (50). That is simply a popular traditional interpretation of the text he cites from Surah 4. (For more on this issue, see here.)
But the real meat of the work begins in chapter 4 and the following chapters when he lays out the titular seven reasons. They are: 1) society is transformed everywhere Christianity is introduced and embraced; 2) Jesus predicted his resurrection; 3) Jesus demonstrated resurrection power; 4) no motivation to invent Jesus’s resurrection narrative is evident; 5) written and archaeological sources overwhelmingly support the Gospels’ resurrection narrative; 6) only Jesus’s resurrection convincingly explains the conversion of people who were not previously his followers; 7) Jesus’s resurrection is the only basis for making sense of suffering.
The argument related to Reason #1 is in nuce what has been the subject of works by James Hannam, the late Rodney Stark, and Tom Holland’s book that came out a few years ago, among others (though they have not thereby argued that this is reason to believe in the resurrection per se). He writes of how every society where Christianity has been introduced and embraced has been transformed by 1) the revelation of a loving God, 2) improvement in ethics and morals, 3) more social and cultural freedoms for women, and 4) strides in science, the arts, and quality of life. The way he presents these arguments is rather simplistic as these factors are only covered in four pages and so, unfortunately, no space is given to answering inevitable objections. What is worse is that there are not many details given and the only source he refers to via the dreaded convention of endnotes for more information on such complex and broad history is his book Unimaginable. Sure, you do not need to get too bogged down in details here, but some would help. Moreover, this argumentation is only indirectly connected to the resurrection, except for the first point. It has more to do with the emergence of Christianity, which is, in turn, tied to the resurrection. The way it is presented without more thoroughgoing explanation can also make it look fallacious, specifically by way of affirming the consequent. After all, we are supposed to be exploring reasons to believe in the resurrection, not the notion of “because the resurrection is true, here are some of the consequences.”
As for Reason #2, as much as I refuse to use his hashtagged expression of it, I think this is a reason to believe in the historicity of Jesus’s resurrection. The predictions of his death and resurrection were preserved in traditions incorporated into all four canonical Gospels because they proved to be true, rather than being inventions after the fact, which is shown by a variety of factors of these predictions and their being coupled with the testimony of the disciples’ incomprehension until after the resurrection (Matt 12:40; 16:21 // Mark 8:31 // Luke 9:22; Matt 17:22–23 // Mark 9:30–31; Matt 20:18–19 // Mark 10:33–34 // Luke 18:31–33; Matt 26:61 // Mark 14:58; Matt 27:40 // Mark 15:29; Matt 27:63; Luke 24:7, 46; John 2:18–22). However, I am not as convinced as he is that this association with “three days/the third day” is derived from Hos 6:2 (67–68). If it was, this was ex post facto, and for the disciples this element of his prophecies was a historical memory of his predictions that they then sought to understand in scriptural terms (besides my dissertation where I review the reference in 1 Cor 15:4, also see here). He also notes how this contrasts with various messianic pretenders whose deaths marked the ends of their movements (66–67; though it would be more accurate to say that they are presented as false prophets and false messiahs, since not all of them are presented in potentially messianic terms). (See here and here for more on this and other subjects in Josephus.) He also tries to link the Lord’s Supper with this part of his argument for some reason, which leads to some sloppiness, like saying the words “do this in remembrance of me” in 1 Cor 11:24–25 clearly allude to Exod 24:8 (70), when I am pretty sure he meant to link that text to Jesus’s reference to the blood of the covenant. He also links the worship on Sunday as the Lord’s day with the resurrection, which is true, but it is not accurate to simply say that the “day of worship for Christians migrated from the Jewish Sabbath to Sunday” (72) because for the first few centuries Christians observed both (as one can see in references to worship on the Sabbath in Eusebius and the Apostolic Constitutions, among others). As with chapter 3, I think the argument here could have been improved with better focus.
The same applies to the arguments for Reason #3. He begins this chapter with an extended adaptation of a quote from another book of his on Jesus’s raising miracles (besides the link I gave earlier on Jesus’s resurrection miracles, also see here on Lazarus). He even notes how the same language is used for describing Jesus’s resurrection and these miracles (77). But he refuses to let this deter him from maintaining the distinction between “resuscitation” and “resurrection.” Nor do any of his subsequent clarifications indicate why we should continue to use these distinctions rather than “temporary resurrection” versus “resurrection to everlasting life” (or “eschatological resurrection” where appropriate) so that the distinction is not in the noun but in how we describe it. But again, I have gone over this matter elsewhere and will not repeat everything here. It does not do if we are going to be consistent in how we treat the language of the NT to say that “resurrection” simply means a bodily return to life “never to die again” (78) because the term itself does not mean that. It is the context in which the term is used that adds these other layers of significance to refer to resurrection to everlasting life (or resurrection that has the qualities of the age to come). Even the example he tries to cite from Luke 20:36 (79) shows in the context that it refers not to “resurrection” simpliciter but to the resurrection in the context of the age to come (Luke 20:35–36). Furthermore, he gives his readers the wrong terms for two main Greek words for resurrection as being “ἀνάστασις (literally, ‘to stand up’) and ἐγείρω (‘to rise, to have risen’)” (80). I am not sure why this mistake was made, but the verb form is ἀνίστημι, and there are other terms used, as I review here.
He also tried to justify this distinction by saying that he is appealing to both emic and etic categories, the former when using “resurrection” and the latter when using “resuscitation” (80–81). Strictly speaking, since he cites the “Trinity” as an example of an etic term because it derives from the Latin trinitas, one could describe both terms as etic because they are the applications of Latin terms to the Greek, as resurrectio appears to be a Christian coinage and resuscito has some pre-Christian attestation. Thus, this distinction is more obfuscating than illuminating. If readers think I am overegging this point, you may be right, but this is also something he spends four pages on after a three-page quote of his book in a chapter that is twelve pages.
And after that point, the chapter is once again presented in sloppy fashion, as the reader is left confused about what text he is focusing on, as he has a section putatively discussing resurrection belief in early Judaism, of which one of the examples cited is Paul in 1 Cor 15. And then he references Paul in 1 Thessalonians, after which he says, “In the same passage in 1 Thessalonians, Paul answers at least four vital questions that give us hope now and in the future” (83), but then the questions are directly linked to 1 Cor 15 rather than 1 Thessalonians after the first question. How does all of this relate to the argument about Reason #3? It is not clear. The portion about our own resurrection could have been reserved for a later section on why the resurrection matters, unless there was going to be more focus on Jesus’s agency in the general resurrection or why the truth of the general resurrection and the truth of Jesus’s resurrection are inextricably linked. But the latter argument would be a reason to believe in the general resurrection, not so much Jesus’s resurrection if there were no other reasons to believe it really happened. This chapter could have used better focus on the context of Jesus’s resurrecting power, how it revealed his identity, and how God’s resurrecting action vindicated this identity if that was the point he was trying to make. But that would still need to be sharpened to make it a reason to believe that the resurrection of Jesus happened (i.e., it explains theologizing about Jesus given that this was the framework he set up and it was the framework his followers used).
I think his arguments for Reason #4 are stronger. After all, at best, even if the earliest Jesus followers held on to hope for Jesus’s vindication, they could have held onto the idea that he would be vindicated at the final judgment following the general resurrection, like the hope for the martyrs in Daniel or 2 Macc 7. Even this counsel of desperation would have been hard to hold to in the face of his crucifixion, but there is no clear reason why this different claim would be invented apropos of nothing if his resurrection did not happen. They could have even deleted his predictions of his resurrection “from the record” to say those were false claims made up by his opposition to portray him as a false prophet. Instead, they held onto all that they did and claimed that he was resurrected shortly after his death with a body fit for the age to come and that he was never to die again. But even here, Johnston perpetuates some errors, like how the early Greeks (without qualification) found the notion of resurrection grotesque (88; on which, see here and here). It is also odd to say that the disciples went so far as to create a “new religion” (89, 92), which does not appear to have been the motivation of the earliest followers. They insisted that they were proclaiming the fulfillment of their Scriptures and their traditional practices. That is, they saw their movement as Judaism fulfilled or brought to fruition.
Admittedly, I was suspicious of what he could even cite in Reason #5 in terms of “archaeological” support for this reason or what written sources he could be referring to outside of the NT. As it turns out, the archaeological evidence he appeals to concerns burial, which is not an especially strong point to cite in favor of resurrection per se (97–102). It just means that the presentation of burial is in line with what we know from other sources. Unfortunately, he does not interact with anticipated objections of why we ought to think the rabbinic texts he cites are reflective of first-century reality. As I have noted elsewhere in my work on chronology (related to Jesus’s birth and the timing of the Pascha), there are times when we can make that argument, but the argument needs to be made and not simply assumed. Also, he makes a rather concerning slip here to say that “After all, according to Jewish tradition, spirits could be raised up and appear to people” (103). Such careless language implies, against the evidence, that “raising up” terminology used for resurrection was applied to spirits at this time among Jews, when there is no evidence that it did. (He uses “actually … raised up” in reference to Jesus’s resurrection on 103 as well, so you can understand my concern about this looseness in terminology.) And for whatever reason the actual survey of post-resurrection appearances of Jesus is simply tacked on to the end of this chapter in a bullet point list. I would have hoped that this evidence could have been reviewed more extensively in a book that is about reasons to believe in Jesus’s resurrection. But more space in this chapter is devoted to his burial.
Reason #6 is better argued through appeal to the story of Saul of Tarsus and, briefly, James. There is some needless repetition here that could have been avoided with better organization, but the points about Paul’s experience and his passing on a declaration that goes back to the earliest days of the Church in 1 Cor 15 are accurate (on the latter point, besides the pertinent portion of my dissertation, see here and here). But even here with my general endorsement of the argument, there remains an asterisk. He says that Saul was outraged that the earliest Christians “now believed in an open community where gentiles were welcome. And it was not required that gentiles convert in the usual pharisaic understanding. They didn’t have to eat kosher food. They didn’t have to get circumcised. And Saul saw this as a threat” (111). It seems like Johnston is unaware of his anachronism, not only that this has not come up in the early chapters of Acts, but that the controversies emerge after Saul’s conversion in chs. 10, 11, and 15. I am having a difficult time understanding how this mistake was made.
I get that Reason #7 is related to what is surely true of the mega-narrative of the Bible, meaning that suffering and the problem of evil can only be ultimately addressed eschatologically (as all alleviations of the present are temporary). But like with Reason #1, this is putting the cart before the horse. This is not a reason to believe Jesus’s resurrection. It is, “because Jesus’s resurrection happened, this is what we can say.” The comfort is supposed to be the result of the truth, or else it could be false comfort. This chapter also involves a breakdown in sermon-like fashion of John 11:25–26 (indeed, this chapter illustrates how much of this book reads like sermons). In the process, he commits himself to what I regard as two errors. One, he thinks the promise “he shall live” is in reference to life immediately after death and not to the resurrection, for which he also cites 2 Cor 5:8 (I have addressed this text here and others here). Two, he translates the phrase οὐ μὴ ἀποθάνῃ εἰς τὸν αἰῶνα used here (cf. 8:51–52; 10:28) as “shall never die” when it rightly means “shall not die forever,” since the negative properly negates the verb and not the prepositional phrase. Again, it is a promise of resurrection and not of disembodied post-mortem life.
The final two proper chapters are then taken up with “Further Assessing the Evidence.” They are meant to be a “more scholarly treatment of ways we can argue for the authenticity and historicity of Jesus’ resurrection” (131). And yet chapter 11 is occupied with arguments about Jesus’s tomb. It is a fine analysis of the evidence, but I still wonder what it is doing here (at best, it should be an appendix if it is to be included at all). It is odd to have so many pages of this short book dedicated to Jesus’s burial that could have been devoted to texts that are actually about his resurrection.
Chapter 12 has the most citations by far in the entire book. And it is no wonder, too, since this is where he takes up work he did for his dissertation. That is, he argues that the disciples did a terrible job of telling fictional stories if they had, in fact, invented the stories associated with Jesus’s resurrection. This can be seen in how works like the Gospel of Peter—the focus of his dissertation—sought to respond to criticisms of the culminating portions of the Gospels. This is where this book is at its strongest. Even here, though, there are some issues. Some are simply repetitions of issues I have found elsewhere. Another is more confusing. I saw multiple points in this book when he cited something from Mark 16:9–20 without asterisks or any indication that he had issues with drawing from this text, and yet in this chapter he says, “The Markan tradition (rightly omitting 16:9–20) has no appearances” (152). So why did he wait to spring this on his readers here? (I would think after my recent posts, my view on the matter of Mark 16:9–20 would be plenty obvious.) Still, these issues do not take away from what is easily the high point of the book.
There are definitely strong points to this book besides the last chapter, particularly those chapters on Reasons #4 and #6. When the chapter is on Reason #2 is focused, it is also fairly strong. The other points are misdirected or lacking in clear expression. As such, I do not think Johnston has given the seven best reasons here or provided overall clear guidance that is going to be especially helpful. It also would have helped if he had a chapter, a section, or sections of each chapter where he could lay out directly “why it matters.” He could have had something like the third part of N. T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope. But we cannot get caught up on what this book could have been or what its potential might have been. As it is, I think the problems are significant enough that I cannot recommend the book as a whole as a guide for the subject. It is simply too diluted by features that lower its quality as a defense of resurrection belief.
Also see A. D. MacDonald, “Resurrection in Mark 12: Refining the Covenant Hypothesis,” JSNT 41 (2019): 433–57; Bradley R. Trick, “Death, Covenants, and the Proof of Resurrection in Mark 12:18-27,” NovT 49 (2007): 232–56.