Why Christianity Fails (The Testimonial Case)

Christianity doesn’t treat the resurrection as a side issue. It treats it as the load bearing claim. Paul says it plainly: “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins” (1 Cor. 15:17). If that claim doesn’t hold as an event in history, the system doesn’t merely lose a doctrine, it loses its foundation.

Christianity stands or falls on a single historical claim: that Jesus of Nazareth rose bodily from the dead. I want to keep this thread narrow. I’m not starting with the assumption that miracles are impossible, and I’m not trying to settle theology by opinion. I’m asking a more basic question: is the testimonial evidence strong enough to justify belief in a bodily resurrection as knowledge, rather than as conviction?

The question here is epistemological because it’s a question about the difference between belief and knowledge. People can be sincere, transformed, and willing to suffer, and still be wrong. Conviction doesn’t settle standing. When a claim is treated as a historical event, it’s the kind of claim where we normally ask what supports it, how the support is transmitted, and what would count as correction if it were mistaken. Since Christianity carries the resurrection forward primarily through testimony, the natural way to test its standing is to examine the testimony by the same criteria we use elsewhere when testimony is asked to carry serious weight.

In my book From Testimony to Knowledge I lay out simple criteria for evaluating testimony. Testimony isn’t a weak route to knowledge. Most of what we know comes through the reports of others. The issue isn’t whether testimony can ever justify belief. The issue is what makes testimony good evidence, especially when the claim is weighty. In Chapter 2 I give five criteria that strengthen testimony: number, variety, consistency, corroboration, and firsthand character. In ordinary life, when these criteria are present, testimony can be strong. When they’re missing, testimony can still produce conviction, but conviction alone isn’t the same thing as justificatory standing.

For clarity, I’m not ignoring the usual Christian supports for the resurrection. Christians typically appeal to a cluster of considerations: the Gospel narratives as witness reports, Paul’s summary in 1 Corinthians 15, the empty tomb tradition, appearance traditions, the transformation and persistence of the early disciples, the rapid emergence of the movement, and, in some cases, philosophical arguments about probability or warrant. My plan is to take these in turn and ask how they fare when measured by the criteria for strong testimony.

Here’s how I’m going to run the discussion. I’ll take each criterion in turn and ask a focused question.

Firsthand character: How much of the resurrection claim rests on direct eyewitness testimony that we can identify, and how much is secondhand report?

Corroboration: What independent confirmation do we have for the central claims, confirmation that doesn’t simply repeat the same tradition in another form?

Consistency: Do the accounts substantially converge on the crucial features without requiring harmonization to make them fit?

Variety: Do we have testimony coming through diverse, independent contexts that would normally reduce shared scripting and group reinforcement?

Number: How many independent lines of testimony do we really have once we separate sources from repetition?

My contention is that the resurrection testimony is weaker than Christians often assume when it’s measured by these criteria. It may sustain belief within a tradition, and it may support participation in a religious life. But the question is whether it has the strength required for the bodily resurrection of a man to be treated as a historical event known to have occurred.