Why Have Women Find the Empty Tomb First?

Although I am an agnostic, I still put out the Nativity set at Christmas every year because I still love the idea of God manifesting himself in such humble circumstances.  I always thought that the way that Jesus reached out to the outcasts in society is what made him such an appealing character and I always figured that it was a large part of the reason why Christianity caught on the way that it did.

As a result, I am puzzled when I hear Christian apologists argue that nobody could have invented the story of the women finding the empty tomb because of their low social status.  Here's a typical example:

When you understand the role of women in first-century Jewish society, what's really extraordinary is that this empty tomb story should feature women as the discoverers of the empty tomb in the first place. Women were on a very low rung of the social ladder in first-century Palestine. . . . Women's testimony was regarded as so worthless that they weren't even allowed to serve as legal witnesses in a Jewish court of Law. In light of this, it's absolutely remarkable that the chief witnesses to the empty tomb are these women... Any later legendary account would have certainly portrayed male disciples as discovering the tomb - Peter or John, for example.

William Lane Craig in The Case for Christ.

What the hell is this guy talking about?    The gospels have Jesus healing lepers and blind beggars, eating with tax gatherers and sinners, and forgiving prostitutes.   When the end of the gospels is reached, does Craig really think that the men who wrote these stories or the first people who read them would be concerned about the rung on the social ladder occupied by the first people to find the empty tomb?  Would "My gosh!  Women aren't even allowed to testify in court." really enter into anyone's thinking?

It really kind of saddens me that in their desperation to defend the historical accuracy of the gospel stories so many Christians should miss the point that indifference to social status is one of the things that gives the stories their meaning in the first place.  It saddens me that it doesn't occur to them that the women's low social standing might be the very reason the evangelists place them first at the empty tomb.

William Lane Craig is Still Wrong About A.N.Sherwin-White

A couple of years ago, I did a series of posts about the way that Christian apologists used a 1963 work of the late Oxford historian A.N. Sherwin-White to argue for the historicity of the gospels on the grounds that they were written too soon after the fact to be legendary.  The gist of those posts was that Sherwin-White made a few tentative, qualified remarks which apologists had greatly exaggerated at best and deliberately misconstrued at worst.  Yesterday, a commenter using the name Doubting alerted me to a podcast in which William Lane Craig answered a question about Sherwin-White so I thought I would take a look to see whether Craig had developed any intellectual integrity on the issue.

The format of the podcast has a moderator relaying questions that have been submitted to Craig.  Unfortunately, it is not entirely clear exactly where the submitted question ends and the moderator's elaboration begins, but the general subject was the impact of the legends about Alexander the Great on A.N. Sherwin-White's theories about the rate at which legends grew in antiquity.  Craig's response is pretty clear although not entirely coherent:

Let’s clarify what Sherwin-White said. What Sherwin-White said in Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament is that these mythical tendencies or the tendencies for oral tradition to corrupt cannot wipe out the hard core of historical fact within say two generations after the event; that you can still recover a historical core even within two generations despite these mythologizing tendencies. So he isn’t denying that the tendencies are there and operative, on the contrary, he says that the writings or Herodotus for example are just filled with legendary stories. They have all sorts of fabulous tales that Herodotus passes on but nevertheless he says Herodotus is still able to get at the facts about the war he narrates and is still able to get back to the historical core. And I think that the case of Alexander the Great is a wonderful illustration of this. The earliest biographies that we have of Alexander the Great come about four hundred years after the death of Alexander and yet historians still regard them as trustworthy accounts of Alexander’s life. The fabulous legends about Alexander the Great don’t begin to arise until after these two authors have written their biographies.

My guess is that the question was inspired by Kris D. Komarnitsky's 2009 book Doubting Jesus' Resurrection: What Happened in the Black Box? where Komarnitsky points out that Sherwin-White acknowledged that "[t]here was a remarkable growth of myth around [Alexander's] person and deeds within the lifetime of contemporaries, and the historical embroidery was often deliberate." (RSRLNT p.193)  Craig's comments about Alexander are drawn verbatim from an article that he wrote over a decade ago which apparently was not very carefully fact checked at the time and not reflected upon since.  The idea that the legends about Alexander the Great did not arise for four hundred years seems pretty silly on its face and is certainly not what Sherwin-White wrote.


Craig doesn't seem to notice that he is contradicting himself as well as Sherwin-White.   In the same breath that he admits that the mythologizing tendencies are there in the oral tradition from the beginning, he claims that they were delayed for four hundred years with Alexander the Great.  In fact, he doesn't seem to remember that all Sherwin-White said about Herotodus was that he "was naturally predisposed in favour of certain political myths."  (RSRLNT p. 191) Sherwin-White said nothing about "fabulous tales" being passed on.

However, when the moderator claimed that there was "no room for mythological development" before the gospels were written, Craig did correct him:

I want to be careful about how we state this because I think it has been misunderstood. The point that Sherwin-White makes is not that there is no mythological or legendary development but that it is not to such an extent that the hard core of historical facts in obliterated. That’s why in my research or my case for the resurrection, I focus on the historical core of these narratives that a group of women for example discovered Jesus’ tomb empty on the first day of the week after his crucifixion, but the names of the women, the times of their visit, the details of the narrative are part of the secondary and circumstantial features of the narrative and I don’t claim to be able to show their historical credibility. It is the core of the narrative that I think you can show is plausibly historical and which most scholars do regard as representing a genuine historical core to the narrative.

If Craig recognizes Sherwin-White as an authority on this issue and understands his position to be that there would be at least some mythological development in the oral tradition prior to the composition of the gospels, I wonder what parts of the gospels Craig would deem to be legendary.  As far as I can tell, Craig defends the New Testament in all its particulars up to and including the zombie saints of Matthew 27:52-53.   Isn't it intellectually dishonest for Craig to cite Sherwin-White as an authority if the only legendary embellishment he will admit is the names of the women who found the empty tomb?

While insisting that his data should not be misused, Craig offers a defense of Sherwin-White that makes it clear that he doesn't actually know what he wrote.

By the same token, do not offer facile criticisms of him as I have also seen done on the internet, where for example its pointed out the number of fanciful and legendary tales that Herotodus does pass on. And A.N.Sherwin-White appeals to Herodotus as a case study for the rapidity with which these legendary tales accumulate and he says the tests show is that even two generations is too short a time span for these mythological tendencies to wipe out the hard core of historical facts and pointing to legends and fanciful tales in Herodotus does nothing to negate the point that Sherwin-White is making. Quite the contrary, Sherwin-White is saying here is a very unreliable author who loves to narrate these mythological stories and loves to hand on these legendary tales and yet even with him, we are still able to reconstruct with confidence the historical core of what happened in the war that he relates.

 As noted above, Sherwin-White doesn't say anything about fanciful tales in Herodotus, but if in fact there were lots of them, why wouldn't that negate the point that Craig thinks Sherwin-White has made?  After all, every time Herodotus reports a myth or a legend as a fact, there is some part of the historical core that isn't getting through.  What Craig never acknowledges is that Sherwin-White is very careful never to speculate about the size of the retrievable historical core in the gospels.  While he may not think that myth would obliterate all the history, Sherwin-White intentionally leaves open the possibility that  myth could obliterate a very substantial portion of the history. 

After interviewing Craig in The Case for Christ, Lee Strobel shamelessly described Sherwin-White's argument as a "famous study" in which he "meticulously examined the rate at which legend accrued in the ancient world." (p. 264)  Sherwin-White, by contrast,  described himself as an "amateur"  with respect to the New Testament who was "consider[ing] the whole topic of historicity briefly and very generally."  (RSRLNT p. v & p. 186)  Far from doing a meticulous study, Sherwin-White offered but a single example from Herodotus in support of his thesis. (RSRLNT p. 190-91)

The example cited by Sherwin-White concerned the assassination of  the Athenian tyrant Hipparchus by Harmodius and Aristogeiton in 514 B.C.  A popular myth arose that this act ushered in the Athenian democracy while the fact was that the tyranny continued for another four years.  Although this was the kind of political myth that Herodotus might have been expected to embrace when recording the events some half century later, "[h]e does not do so because he had a particular interest in a greater figure than Harmodius or Aristogeiton, that is, Cleisthenes, the central person in the establishment of the democracy."  (RSRLNT p. 190-91)  Thus, it does not seem to be that Herodotus got things right due to the inherent ability of facts to resist myth-making.  Rather, he chose not to report the myth because he had another horse in the race.

Christian apologists often cite Sherwin-White as if he proposed some empirically established process whereby fact and myth fight it out in the oral tradition with myth needing several generations in which to subdue its opponent.  Sherwin-White's example, however, suggests that each person in the oral tradition makes up his own mind whether he prefers the legendary version of events or the true one.  If enough people are interested in the true version of events to preserve it and pass it on, it will be accessible after several generations even if the mythological version proves quite popular.  That's a far cry from some inviolable principle that the true version will always survive within the oral tradition for some definable period of years.

In the case of the gospels, the questions remains (1) whether anyone was interested enough in the historical Jesus to preserve and pass on accurate information and (2) whether the evangelists were sufficiently interested in recovering that Jesus rather than reporting myths that furthered their theological agendas.  It is certainly possible that the answer to both questions is yes, but Sherwin-White's musings don't support Craig's insistence that there must recoverable historical information in the gospels.


I often get into debates about whether Irenaeus actually had any basis in 180 A.D. for attributing authorship of the canonical gospels to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Invariably, someone will argue that there must have been some factual basis for these names or someone who knew the truth would have corrected Irenaeus  If such errors are so easily resolved, how come nothing has deterred Craig from repeating his misstatements for so many years?  I see no reason to think that second century believers would have been any more diligent in pointing out Irenaeus' errors than today's believers are in pointing out Craig's.  Nor can I see any reason to believe that Irenaeus would have been any more conscientious in his fact checking than Craig.

Reason and Faith: Craig v. Dawkins

From William Lane Craig--Dealing With Doubt:

The way that I know Christianity is true is first and foremost on the basis of
the witness of the Holy Spirit in my heart. This gives me a self-authenticating
means of knowing Christianity is true wholly apart from the evidence. And
therefore, if in some historically contingent circumstances,the evidence that I
have available to me should turn against Christianity. I don’t think that that
controverts the witness of the Holy Spirit. In such a situation, and I should
regard that simply as a result of the contingent circumstances that I am in, and
that if I were to pursue this with due diligence and with time I would discover
that in fact that the evidence—if I could get the correct picture—would support
exactly what the witness of the Holy Spirit tells me.

. . .

Doubt is never simply an intellectual problem. There is always a
spiritual dimension as well. There is an enemy of your souls, Satan, who
hates you intensely, and is bent on your destruction and will do everything in
his power to see that your faith is destroyed. And therefore, when we have
these intellectual doubts and problems, we should never look at them as
something that is spiritually neutral and divorce them from the spiritual
conflict that we are involved in.

How can such a person ever engage in an honest evaluation of the evidence that supports his belief? Not only does he refuse to acknowledge that evidence against his position actually raises the possibility that he might be wrong, in fact he views such evidence as a trick of the devil.

Contrast this with a scientist's attitude towards evidence:

It is all too easy to confuse fundamentalism with passion. I may well appear
passionate when I defend evolution against a fundamentalist creationist, but
this is not because of a rival fundamentalism of my own. It is because the
evidence for evolution is overwhelmingly strong and I am passionately distressed
that my opponent can't see it — or, more usually, refuses to look at it because
it contradicts his holy book. My passion is increased when I think about how
much the poor fundamentalists, and those whom they influence, are missing. The
truths of evolution, along with many other scientific truths, are so
engrossingly fascinating and beautiful; how truly tragic to die having missed
out on all that! Of course that makes me passionate. How could it not? But my
belief in evolution is not fundamentalism, and it is not faith, because I know
what it would take to change my mind, and I would gladly do so if the necessary
evidence were forthcoming.

It does happen. I have previously told the story of a respected elder statesman
of the Zoology Department at Oxford when I was an undergraduate. For years he
had passionately believed, and taught, that the Golgi Apparatus (a microscopic
feature of the interior of cells) was not real: an artefact, an illusion. Every
Monday afternoon it was the custom for the whole department to listen to a
research talk by a visiting lecturer. One Monday, the visitor was an American
cell biologist who presented completely convincing evidence that the Golgi
Apparatus was real. At the end of the
lecture, the old man strode to the front of the hall, shook the American by the
hand and said — with passion — ‘My dear fellow, I wish to thank you. I have been
wrong these fifteen years.’ We clapped our hands red. No fundamentalist would
ever say that. In practice, not all scientists would. But all scientists pay lip
service to it as an ideal — unlike, say, politicians who would probably condemn
it as flip-flopping. The memory of the incident I have described still brings a
lump to my throat.

Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion.

Minimal Facts = Maximal Crap

That leads me, then, to my first major contention, namely: There are four historical facts which must be explained by any adequate historical hypothesis: Jesus’ burial; the discovery of his empty tomb; his post-mortem appearances; the origin of the disciples’ belief in his resurrection. Now, let’s look at that first contention more closely. I want to share four facts which are widely accepted by historians today.
William Lane Craig (from his 2006 Debate with Bart Ehrman).

Is this really the way history works? Is there any intellectual legitimacy in picking out a handful of facts that support a predetermined conclusion and insisting that a conclusion be reached solely on that handful of facts? Isn’t this what crackpot conspiracy theorists do? The 911 nuts find a couple of clips that make it look like there were explosions at lower levels of the buildings. They find a couple of witnesses who report hearing explosions or report seeing flashes. Then they triumphantly claim that only their theory of a controlled demolition explains those clips and quotes. They see no need to consider the overwhelming mountain of evidence that establishes beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Twin Towers fell because terrorist hijackers flew airplanes into the buildings.

Of course, we know that conservative Christians think that medicine works that way, too. Who can forget the carefully edited video of Terri Schiavo that seemed to show her responding to the people in her hospital room? Would any sane person think that her condition could be diagnosed solely on that video? Republican Senator Bill Frist did! After looking at the video for an hour, he declared on the Senate floor, “There just seems to be insufficient information to conclude that Terri Schiavo is [in a] persistent vegetative state.” Bill was quite right. The video did not contain the information that was available to the doctors who had examined and treated Schiavo over the fifteen years since her accident.

Real historians do history by weighing all the facts and evidence in order to reach a conclusion. Crackpots do history by cherry-picking the evidence.

More of Craig's Crap

God I'm a dancer. A dancer dances.
The Music and the Mirror from A Chorus Line

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

William Lane Craig is not plagued by any hobgoblins when he is presented the opportunity to score cheap rhetorical points. In an August 2002 debate, Craig attacked Peter Slezak for suggesting that the lack of evidence for God's existence might be some reason to think God might not exist. Craig insisted that the lack of evidence was not a concern as long as you did not expect too much.

We need to ask what is the evidence for atheism. And here Dr. Slezak says that the only evidence against God’s existence is the absence of evidence for God’s existence. Now this admission is highly significant because it means that he tacitly agrees that all of the traditional arguments for atheism like the problem of evil and the incoherence of the concept of God, all of these arguments fail. The only argument for atheism is the absence of evidence for God. But the problem here is that the absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence....

So when then does the absence of evidence count as evidence that something does not exist? Well theorists of knowledge agree that the lack of evidence for some entity X counts as positive evidence against X’s existence only in the case that if X did exist then we should expect to see more evidence of X’s existence than what we do see....

Now apply that then to the case of God, the absence of evidence for God’s existence counts as evidence against God’s existence only in the case that if God did exist, then we should see more evidence of his existence than we do in fact see. In practical terms what that means is this: if God exists should we expect to see more evidence of his being than the origin of the universe out of nothing; the exquisite fine tuning of the universe for intelligent life; the apprehension of a realm of moral an aesthetic values; the radical claims and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth from the dead; and the immediate experience of fellowship with God? Well I think the answer is obviously not.

So to carry his argument, Dr. Slezak has to prove that it is highly probable that if God exists we should have more evidence of his existence than what we do in fact have, and that I think is sheer speculation. And thus in the case of God, I do not think that the absence of evidence is at all a positive argument
against the existence of God and yet that is all he’s had to offer you tonight on behalf of atheism, so I don’t think that we have seen any good reason to think that atheism is true.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-5PFRc2FIA

It seems to me that Craig is saying that by lowering our expectations for the less evidence that we expect there to be for God, we lower the probability that atheism is true. By this logic, we should not reject the existence of leprechauns since we don’t expect there to be any evidence for them in the first place.

As strange as Craig's argument against Slezak might be, he was not plagued by any foolish consistency in February 2005 when Austin Dacey tried to make the very argument that Craig said Slezak failed to make. When Dacey argued that we should expect to see more evidence of God's existence, Craig insisted that the only evidence we should ever expect to see is whatever evidence we actually do see.

Now in this speech I would like to examine Dr. Dacey's arguments on behalf of atheism to see whether they pass philosophical muster.
All five of his arguments share the same basic form: Step one is to say that if God existed, we should expect to find "blank," and you fill in the blank, step two is “but we do not find blank” and therefore one concludes that God does not exist.

Now I want to make two general comments about this style of argumentation: First of all, its enormously presumptuous. Basically, what Dr. Dacey is saying is that if God doesn’t fulfill our expectations, then we should conclude that He doesn’t exist. But who says that God has to fulfill our expectations? How can we predict with any confidence what God would do if He existed? If we find that our expectations aren’t met, then isn’t it the better part of discretion and humility to reexamine and perhaps revise those expectations? We’re simply not in a position to dictate to God that He has to act in accordance with our expectations

http://youtube.com/watch?v=j9VWz0tTdpc

Woohoo!!!!! Brilliant!!!! We should adjust our expectations to whatever evidence we find for God’s existence. Then, since the evidence always perfectly meets our expectations, we can never conclude that God doesn’t exist. What bullshit.

BTW, I don't cruise YouTube looking for Craig videos. These were both cited by bloggers in the last few days as examples of Craig's brilliance.

What's that Smell?

Consider the following three statements:

(1) Commenting on John McCain’s speech to at the Conservative Political Action Conference today, former House Majority leader Tom Delay told MSNBC’s Chris Matthews: “He laid out a good treatise on what conservative principles are, but then he didn’t apply those principles to the issue of global warming for instance.” When asked the conservative position on global warming, Delay went on to say: “Man is not causing climate change. . . . It is arrogance to suggest that man can affect climate change.”

(2) Leading apologetics scholar, William Lane Craig says: “The way that I know Christianity is true is first and foremost on the basis the witness of the Holy Spirit in my heart. This gives me a self authenticating means of knowing Christianity is true wholly apart from the evidence.”

(3) Leading apologetics popularizer Josh McDowell says: “Postmodernism is a worldview that asserts that external, absolute truth—that is, a truth that is true for all people, in all places, and at all times—cannot be known through reason or science because truth is either nonexistent or unknowable.”

So there you have it. Delay denies the findings of the climatologists on the basis of political ideology. Craig rejects historical evidence in favor of his subjective religious feelings. Nevertheless, McDowell claims that it is the postmodernists rather than the theists who reject the idea of objective truth.

"There ain't nuthin' more powerful than the smell of mendacity!" Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams.

William Lane Craig's Double Standard Regarding Evidence.

I recently ran across a video on YouTube in which William Lane Craig, makes the following statement:

The way that I know Christianity is true is first and foremost on the basis the
witness of the Holy Spirit in my heart. This gives me a self
authenticating means of knowing Christianity is true wholly apart from the
evidence. And therefore, if in some historically contingent circumstances,
the evidence that I have available to me should turn against Christianity.
I don’t think that that controverts the witness of the Holy Spirit. In
such a situation, and I should regard that simply as a result of the contingent
circumstances that I am in, and that if I were to pursue this with due diligence
and with time I would discover that in fact that the evidence—if I could get the
correct picture—would support exactly what the witness of the Holy Spirit tells
me.

Apologists are always claiming that they just follow the evidence wherever it leads, but in fact, the rule for Christians is: Follow the evidence whenever it leads to Christianity; otherwise follow your subjective feelings.

William Lane Craig's Unbelievable Quotation Marks

In my first post on this topic, I noted William Lane Craig’s description of A.N. Sherwin-White’ position: “When Professor Sherwin-White turns to the gospels, he states that for the gospels to be legends, the rate of legendary accumulation would have to be ‘unbelievable.’ More generations would be needed.” What disturbs me most about this characterization is that Craig puts the word “unbelievable” in quotation marks. The fact is that Sherwin-White never used that word and it suggests a much more authoritative statement than he was making. That probably explains why so many apologists cite Craig’s version rather than the Oxford professor’s original.

In order to appreciate the nature of Craig’s distortion, it is necessary to take a little more detailed look at what Sherwin-White wrote and its context.

What is to an ancient historian the most surprising in the basic assumption of form-criticism of the extremer sort (i.e., those who maintain “that the historical Christ in unknowable and the history of his mission cannot be written”(RLRSNT p.187)), is the presumed tempo of the development of the didactic myths—if one may use that term to sum up the matter. We are not unacquainted with this type of writing in ancient historiography, as will shortly appear. The agnostic type of form-criticism would be much more credible if the compilation of the Gospels were much later in time, much more remote from the events themselves, than can be the case. Certainly a deal of distortion can affect a story that is given literary form a generation or two after the event, whether for national glorification or political spite, or for the didactic or symbolic exposition of ideas. But in the material of ancient history the historical content is not hopelessly lost. (RLRSNT p.189)

Sherwin-White is not saying that the extreme form-critics are demonstrably mistaken, he is saying that he, as a professor of Roman history, does not find their position persuasive.

It is important to remember that an authority in ancient Roman history is commenting on biblical form-criticism, an area of scholarship outside his field of expertise in which he considers himself “an amateur.” (RLRSNT p.187) However, he had just spent 185 pages discussing the extent to which the stories in the New Testament reflect what is known by scholars in his specialty. It is easy to imagine skeptics asserting that he was wasting his time because the Bible was just a bunch of myths. So Sherwin-White explained why he thought the biblical accounts were worthy of an historian’s attention, but he was not attempting a systematic refutation of the skeptics’ position because he was not an authority on biblical form-criticism.

I would liken Sherwin-White’s position to my own experience as a law school graduate who has not practiced law for almost fifteen years. When I hear someone express a bizarre opinion about constitutional law or contract law or criminal law, I might say something like, “Based on what I remember from law school, that doesn’t sound right to me.” However, I am not up to speed on the latest legal developments and I don’t consider myself qualified to make authoritative statements (especially since I no longer carry malpractice insurance). When it comes to the law, I consider myself an educated amateur and I am careful to express my opinion from that perspective. By the same token, Sherwin-White was offering an educated amateur’s take on form-criticism, not a thoroughly researched refutation.

Sherwin-White is certainly an extremely well-educated amateur and his opinion is worthy of great respect. In fact, however, his opinion was that the New Testament merited critical study in order to determine what could be known about the historical Christ. It is an opinion shared by many modern liberal scholars like those found in the Jesus Seminar. It is a position that I find persuasive as well (although my amateur status is beyond dispute).

I am very curious to know how Sherwin-White’s “[t]he agnostic type of form-criticism would be much more credible if the compilation of the Gospels were much later in time” became Craig’s” the rate of legendary accumulation would have to be ‘unbelievable’.” I would be particularly interested in hearing Craig’s justification for putting “unbelievable” in quotation marks when Sherwin-White never used the word and never purported to be making such a definitive statement. The failure to put quotation marks where they belong is known as plagiarism. The insertion of quotation marks where they don't belong seems equally dishonest.

The Apologists' Abuse of A.N. Sherwin-White

Author's Note (June 29, 2013):  This post deals with the manner in which Christian apologists have misrepresented the views of A.N. Sherwin-White.  Kris Komarnitsky has written an excellent substantive critique of the views themselves, Myth Growth Rates and the Gospels: A Close Look at A.N. Sherwin-White’s Two-Generation Rule.


I recently looked at the argument that the thirty year period between the death of Jesus and the composition of the Gospel of Mark was too short for the accounts of the resurrection and miracles to be legends. My curiosity had been piqued by some Christian bloggers who suggested that historians generally accept the principle that legends don’t grow that quickly. The argument seems to have been developed by William Lane Craig who relies on the work of an Oxford historian named A.N. Sherwin-White. Craig writes, "When Professor Sherwin-White turns to the gospels, he states that for the gospels to be legends, the rate of legendary accumulation would have to be "unbelievable." More generations would be needed." The Evidence for Jesus. However, the popularity of the argument seems to stem from Lee Strobel who interviewed Craig in The Case for Christ. In an effort to understand this argument better, I obtained the Oxford Professor’s book Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament (Oxford 1963) and read the passages that Craig cites.

The first thing I noticed is that the book has nothing to do with the historical reliability of the resurrection accounts or any of the miracle stories. As the book’s title suggests, Sherwin-White’s interest was Roman law and society. The book addresses the procedural and jurisdictional issues that arise in the gospel accounts of Jesus’ trial and the issues of Paul's Roman citizenship that arise in the book of Acts. "[O]ne may show how the various historical and social and legal problems raised by the Gospels and Acts now look to a Roman historian. That, and only that, is the intention of these lectures." (emphasis added) (RSRLNT p. iv)

Sherwin-White’s analysis did not require him to reach any conclusions about the historical reliability of the New Testament stories. He simply offered his opinion on the extent to which the accounts reflected what historians knew about the legal system of ancient Rome. Much as a doctor might comment on the extent to which an episode of E.R. reflects real medical practice or a lawyer might comment on the courtroom scenes in Law and Order, the Oxford professor offered his opinions about the events reported in the gospels and Acts in light of contemporary scholarship (as of 1963) regarding ancient Rome. This does not mean that Sherwin-White either affirmed or denied that any particular story in the New Testament was factual or fictional. For his purposes, the question was not relevant.

Nevertheless, after discussing legal issues for 185 pages, Sherwin-White took 7 pages to “consider the whole topic of historicity briefly and very generally, and boldly state a case.” (RSRLNT p. 186) He declared himself an amateur in the field of biblical criticism, but he questioned those skeptics who declare that “the historical Christ is unknowable and the history of his mission cannot be written.” (RSRLNT p. 187) He admitted that "a deal of distortion can affect a story that is given literary form a generation or two after the events," (RSRLNT p. 187) but his response was that the gospels were no more obviously distorted than many of the sources that historians of ancient Rome must deal with on a regular basis. He did not assert that the gospels were historically factual. He asserted that they could be used to do history.

Professor Sherwin-White noted that even the “most deplorable” sources can be read critically by historians to yield a “basic layer of historical truth.” While he did not claim that the Bible was a deplorable source, he repeatedly compared it to writings that are replete with problems. Consider the following statements: "material has not been transformed out of all recognition;" "the falsification does not automatically and absolutely prevail;" and "the historical content is not hopelessly lost." (RSRLNT p. 189,190,191) Sherwin-White did not “suggest the literal accuracy of ancient sources, ecclesiastical or secular;” (RSRLNT p.192-193 n.2) he merely rejected the view “that the historical Christ is unknowable.”

The part of Sherwin-White’s essay that has attracted the most attention from Christian apologists is his comments on the length of time it takes for mythology to displace historical fact. However, contrary to Craig, Strobel, Geisler and a host of others, he did not attempt to calculate a rate of legendary accumulation that is universally applicable. Nor did he lay out a rule that enables an historian to identify a point before which an oral tradition can still be considered historical. Indeed, Sherwin-White acknowledged that various types of bias can be present both in the original source of the oral tradition and in the writer who finally records it. He merely asserted that “historical content is not hopelessly lost” to the critical historian even after a period of two generations. (RSRLNT p. 191)

The apologetic abuse of the Oxford professor starts with William Lane Craig. His claim that Sherwin-White “states that for the gospels to be legends, the rate of legendary accumulation would have to be ‘unbelievable’" is at least a gross distortion if not an outright falsehood. Sherwin-White never classified the gospels as either legend or fact. Nor did he ever use the word “unbelievable” despite Craig application of quotation marks. Throughout his essay, the Oxford professor acknowledged that all of his ancient sources contain both fact and fiction. What he did argue is that it would usually take more than two generations for the legendary elements to so completely displace the historical facts as to make the gospels useless to the critical historian. But he made no attempt to identify where such displacement occurred in the gospels or which parts could be considered historical.

Not surprisingly, Lee Strobel is even less circumspect in his use of Sherwin-White. In his summary in The Case for Christ, Strobel bloviates

What clinched it for me was the famous study by A. N. Sherwin-White, the great classical historian from Oxford University, which William Lane alluded to in our interview. Sherwin-White meticulously examined the rate at which legend accrued in the ancient world. His conclusion: not even two full generations was enough time for legend to develop and to wipe out a solid core of historical truth.  (The Case for Christ p. 264)

Contrary to Strobel’s imagination, the comments in Roman Law and Roman Society in the New Testament do not constitute a “study” and they do not reflect “meticulous” examination. No such study was required to support the rest of the book, which is why Sherwin-White described himself as considering the topic of historicity “briefly and very generally.” (RSRLNT p. 186) Most importantly, Strobel ignores the fact that it still takes critical historical methodology to identify that "solid core." Sherwin-White did not admit the possibility of accepting the gospels at face value.

Another interesting misuse of Sherwin-White comes from Gary Habermas who appears to simply alter words to meet his own purposes in Why I Believe the New Testament is Historically Reliable. According to Habermas, "The sort of thoroughgoing propaganda literature that some critics believe the Gospels to be was actually nonexistent in ancient times. Sherwin-White declares, 'We are not acquainted with this type of writing in ancient historiography.'" The only problem is that Sherwin-White did not declare that! He declared that "we are not unacquainted with this type of writing."(emphasis added)(RSRLNT p. 189) The point of Sherwin-White’s essay is that historians were familiar with this type of literature and were capable of using critical analysis to get at the historical content despite the difficulties posed by the genre.

Now to be perfectly fair to Dr. Habermas, it appears that he was working with a 1978 reprint of RLRSNT so it is possible that his version contained a typographical error. It is even possible that his edition corrected a typo in the original that I was using. I doubt it though because the alternate wording just does not make any sense. The original reads “We are not unacquainted with this type of writing in ancient historiography, as will shortly appear.” In the next paragraph, he discussed a history written by Herodotus and said “The parallel with the authors of the Gospels is by no means as far-fetched as it might seem.” (RSRLNT p. 190) Why would he claim that he was not familiar with that genre and that he was going to demonstrate that unfamiliarity, and then identify a historical work that parallels it? It looks like Habermas was engaged in some sloppy quote mining.

As Sherwin-White’s work gets taken up by the web’s amateur apologists, the distortions get more outrageous. Writing at tektonics.org, Ralph J. Asher attributes an express affirmation of the resurrection: “Prof. A.N. Sherwin-White writes in his book Roman Law and Roman Society in the New Testament that the appearance reports cannot be mainly legendary.” On Townhall.com, we find that “Sherwin-White, argued that the resurrection news spread too soon and too quickly for it to have been a legend.” This assertion cites an article by Craig in Jesus Under Fire, but I don’t have access to that particular book so I don’t know what Craig actually wrote there. I suspect that Townhall has exaggerated as Craig seems to be more careful than that. The references to Sherwin-White become exaggerated in the retelling just as the skeptics suspect the gospel stories did.

It is interesting the way apologists have seized upon Sherwin-White's work. The essence of his argument was not that the gospels were immune to legendary corruption. Rather, his argument was that the legendary corruption was not sufficient to render the gospels immune to critical historical analysis. It seems that he would applaud the efforts of modern scholars like Bart Ehrman, Dominic Crossan, Karen Armstrong, and John Shelby Spong who seek to identify that core of historical facts that the gospels contain.