The Resurrection Conspiracy
The Resurrection Conspiracy
You might be a conspiracy theorist without even knowing it. . .
This Easter I spent some time contemplating the Resurrection of Christ and how the average person might be thinking about this topic in 2023, considering talk of miracles might strike one as being antiquated, if not outright laughable.
Secular and mainline academic thinking casts doubt upon the viability of something like Jesus' resurrection having taken place. However, I don't think enough time has been spent taking seriously what the alternative, positive proposition would necessarily have to be.
The TLDR of this piece is that the alternative to believing in the literal resurrection of Jesus Christ is to believe in a conspiracy—and not just any conspiracy, but what would be the greatest conspiracy ever perpetuated onto humanity.
Since Christians are defined as those who believe in the resurrection of Christ, the radical implication of my claim will be that all non-Christians must necessarily be conspiracy theorists (as it relates to this specific issue…)
Although that statement may sound shocking, when I use the term “conspiracy theorist”, note that I'm not suggesting that this is something intrinsically bad.
In fact, despite the term’s often negative connotation, history has been saturated with real conspiracies. And on some level, you could also say that everyone is a conspiracy theorist.
E.g. Ask any passionate sport fan about their theory of how the refs were paid off to make the game-changing call during that one playoff match.
If you’re feeling at all perplexed right now, please keep reading as I think you’ll find the logic stimulating. . .
Before I continue with the main point, I believe a necessary detour towards Materialism / Philosophical Naturalism is in order.
Giving the materialist perspective its due
None of us who are alive today have ever seen a “resurrection” (life → death → life) take place.
DM me ASAP if you have… 👀 🙃
A resurrection is not a repeatable event that we can test within the confines of a controlled experiment.
There is currently no defined or even hypothesized mechanism by which the input of a dead person can translate into the output of that person being alive again, in some glorified state.
As such, materialists reject the idea of the Resurrection under the premise that the process of “life → permanent death” is the rule for how human experience works, with no allowable exceptions, or at least with the belief that no evidence of an exception exists.
For materialists to accept the phenomenon of resurrection as being possible, in theory, they would require that it be replicable in the context of a controlled experiment, where the scientist can independently manipulate the conditions of the dead subject, bringing him back to life (hence reproducing the phenomenon of resurrection within a new instance of observation).
The hidden beliefs behind this line of reasoning include:
If one person can do something, generally speaking, anyone else should be able to do it.
i.e. If someone like Jesus could do a '“resurrection”, then there should be other people who could do it.
Similarly, if Jesus were to have in fact resurrected, he must have done this through a naturalistic mechanism that is intrinsic and accessible to all human beings.
i.e. Jesus must necessarily be only a homo sapiens, rather than also having a “divine” nature and access to abilities that transcend laws we’ve identified in nature.
In contrast, when a Christian professes belief in the Resurrection, he is not making the claim that resurrections are generically possible* nor does the Christian believe that there is a mechanism by which humans can naturalistically (or deterministically) reproduce the phenomenon of resurrection at their own personal discretion.
In other words, the Christian agrees with the materialist that, as a rule, resurrections don’t happen*. Yet simultaneously, the Christian posits that Jesus Christ (or those directly impacted by Christ, such as Lazarus) has been the exception to that rule.
(*A Tangential Clarification: The Christian’s belief that Christ is the only exception to resurrection isn’t entirely accurate. I say this because, per Christian belief, all who fully embrace the faith are destined to undertake the exact kind of resurrection that Jesus experienced, at the time of his Second Coming. So in that sense, “resurrection” would one day be a very common and pervasive phenomenon, despite it being nearly nonexistent thus far. )
At the core of this difference in views, as well as the passion one may imbue upon them, is the question:
Is it reasonable to believe in the possibility of an exception to the rule, as it relates to the topic of bodily life after death?
Materialists believe in the rule without an exception. Christians believe in the same rule with an exception. Those of other religious or spiritual persuasions may allow for the possibility of exceptions/miracles, but perhaps don’t believe that Jesus Christ, specifically, resurrected or that he was the unique exception to the rule.
So then, how does an unbiased truth-seeker come to believe in the possibility of an exception in the first place, when thinking about a challenge to any “solidified” rule or pattern in life?
Epistemologically, you could be most certain in there being an exception to a rule, if you directly experienced and observed the occurrence of that exception for yourself, or if the exception could be replicated in a randomized controlled trial.
Short of that, you’re left to rely on the documented observations of others, eyewitness testimony, causal inference applied to subsequent events that lack other compelling explanations, etc.
Let’s move onto the main thrust of this article and see what we have to go on for belief in the Resurrection of Christ. . .
Is there sufficient evidence for an Exception?
Since the Resurrection refers to a specific event in history, that naturally rules out our ability to conduct randomized controlled experimentation as well as to witness the event in question for ourselves.
Instead, we have written record from people who claimed to have seen Jesus alive, as well as having seen the empty tomb of where he was previously buried.
According to the written record, the resurrected Christ appeared on different occasions to Mary Magdalene, the disciples, all the broader apostles, a man who was leading an effort to kill all the Christians in Jerusalem, as well as to a group of more than 500 people.
If these appearances did not happen, then there are only a few possibilities of what would have happened instead, all of which would entail an element of massive deception:
The authors of these written testimonies were lying or misguided.
The written testimonies that we have access to today are not written by the original authors, but rather someone interfered with the transmission of the texts and modified them (e.g. the Church). . .
With regards to counterfactual #1, the possibility of the apostles and early Christians fabricating testimony of the resurrection, one must notice not only the contents of what these early Christians claimed, but also the degree of conviction they expressed.
These individuals who claimed they saw a man alive again after being dead (i.e. the resurrected Jesus) were faced with a life-threatening dilemma: Renounce everything they have said or be tortured and executed should they maintain their story.
As it stands, these apostles—for some reason—chose the latter path. They were crucified, beheaded, fed alive to wild beasts, stoned, burned, scourged, boiled in oil, drowned and more. To avoid such unimaginable peril, all they had to do was renounce their story, but for some reason they persisted.
If they lied, you really have to wonder. . . Why? Typically when people lie there is at least some motive of attaining personal advantage. And that advantage would presumably be greater than the cost of maintaining the lie.
It’s unclear what kind of wealth or status these early apostles had to gain by doing this (unless they knew they would go down in history to be remembered forever and somehow valued such an intangible, abstract notion over the intense suffering that awaited them? ).
Out of curiosity, I asked ChatGPT to give me a list of other reasons why people might lie.
Going through this, it’s hard for me to come up with any coherent Machiavellian-like dynamic that would explain the apostolic instances of martyrdom.
Echoing the concept of the rule and the exception from above, if these early Christians lied and maintained the lie through torture, their motive would have been a notable exception to the behavioral psychology rules of how 99.99%+ humans would act in such circumstances.
If we’re still inclined to pursue this path of thinking, maybe we could up with some variant of an altruistic explanation, a “noble lie” of sorts, where the intention was still sincere, despite the content being fudged.
That would go something like this:
The story of Christ is arguably the most potent narrative of unconditional Love and charity that humanity has ever encountered.
The disciples must have known and believed in the power of this story, as well as its positive effect on the human heart.
If they didn’t see Christ for themselves, perhaps they thought—for some reason—that the story of Love and triumph was worth promoting at all costs, even if it was through a knowing lie and in the face of excruciating torture. . .
Yet even this version of events strikes me as being strange.
Through what shared experience would these early Christians have come to intimate knowledge of this transcendent ideal of “Unconditional Love and Charity”? It seems that they must have experienced at least something profound, in order to develop such strong conviction.
That leads us to the next consideration. Maybe, at least in a subjective sense, the early Christians did collectively experience something that was like the appearance of the resurrected Christ.
In other words, the accusation would be that these individuals were somehow hallucinating or on some psychedelic, which would have had to create a very similar and specific outcome for different people across different settings within the reported 40 days that Jesus made post-resurrection appearances.
I’m no expert on hallucinations, but this theory also strikes me as depicting a peculiar exception to how such things normally operate.
Either way, if the early Christians were some kind of psychedelic cultists 🧠 ☮️ 🧖♂️, they must have known that their sensory perceptions were being heavily influenced. Omitting such knowledge from the written record would have to be considered grossly negligent, to the degree that one would posit that such omissions were intentional.
i.e. This would be a massive lie by omission, which would also fit the vibe of “conspiracy”.
If the original authors didn’t lie nor hallucinate, then the only other alternative to Resurrection happening is that the intermediary distributor of the written record (the Church) fabricated the texts centuries later.
Challenges with this view include:
We have access to very early (independently verified) manuscripts.
Any “nefarious” changes to the text would have had to take place shortly after the depicted events, rather than centuries later.
People who were alive during the depicted events were also alive during the earliest manuscripts of the New Testament (e.g. Paul’s letters), making the creation of a “legend” difficult to pull off.
By what power could the Church (still in its infancy, being formed) have pulled this conspiratorial effort off?
Christianity was started by a carpenter and some fishermen, attracting many who were on the outskirts of society.
What kind of infrastructure could these people have used to pull the levers of power to “invent” and distribute such a story, bypassing both the established Roman and Jewish orders of the time?
A critical piece of the narrative is that a group of women were the first to see the empty tomb.
At this time in history, women were significantly discriminated against and treated as lower status, excluded from many aspects of public life, including religious leadership and formal education.
If you were writing a fake story that you wanted other people to believe was real, tactically speaking, why would you have chosen to incorporate this demographic detail, when presumably it would lead to more people doubting your narrative rather than believing it?
Regardless of which viewpoint appeals most to the reader, I want to highlight the main point that these Resurrection alternatives all represent conspiracy theories.
The Life, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ has been the most influential meme in history.
This meme has been the driver of Western Civilization. It would be an error to discard something that is so influential without giving it much thought.
Understanding and having a strong opinion regarding this event is, in my view, essential to one’s worldview, as the implications are massive.
The choice of whether to believe the Resurrection took place is not inconsequential.
To truly believe in it, along with the rest of the Gospels, compels one to renounce a lifestyle of selfishness and surrender to an eternal exchange of Love.
To disbelieve it compels one to hold that this was the most impactful conspiracy ever perpetrated in human history (while presumably finding some other bedrock for justifying the ontology of Love 🙂).
Whatever one’s takeaway is after reading this, my hope is to encourage each one of us to take notice and challenge ourselves if ever we’re tempted to scoff and hold our noses up in an air of “Pfft… look at this silly thing that these uninformed people believe in.”
We all believe in things that others would consider silly.
Let’s embrace that mystery and dive in.
—Drago