Refuting Gromacki

This is responding to an article from over 20 years ago, but I only came across it!

The Historicity Of The Resurrection Of Jesus Christ (Part II), by Dr. Gary R. Gromacki, Associate Professor of Bible and Homiletics, Baptist Bible Seminary, Clarks Summit, Pennsylvania. That the guy is from a bible Seminary tells us he will be assuming the Bible is true, but it is worth looking at anyway.

You may be able to get the article from here; you will need to register, but registration is free.

Harmonising the resurrection sightings

What attracted me to the paper is the author starts by trying to align the various accounts of the sightings of Jesus. Not something I have seen many Christians do, so I admire his bravery in addressing this thorny issue.

The first resurrection appearances of Jesus were made to women. The risen Jesus first appeared to Mary Magdalene (Mark 16:9). Mary Magdalene came with the other women to the tomb on that first Resurrection Sunday (Matt 28:1-8). An angel told her and the other women not to be afraid because Jesus was risen from the dead. An angel also told them to go quickly and tell the disciples of Jesus that he had risen from the dead. When the women saw that the stone had been rolled away and heard the announcement of the angel that Jesus was not there, Mary Magdalene ran ahead to tell the apostles while the other women returned slowly (Matt 28:8; Mark 16:8; Luke 24:8-10; John 20:2). ...

Note that at this point Jesus has not been seen according to the author.

What is interesting is how he confidently proclaims that Mary ran ahead of the other women, and then cites four Bible verses to suppose that.

The truth is that NONE of them say that.

Mat 8:8 So the women hurried away from the tomb, afraid yet filled with joy, and ran to tell his disciples.

Mark 16:8 Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.

Luke 24:8 Then they remembered his words. 9 When they came back from the tomb, they told all these things to the Eleven and to all the others. 10 It was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the others with them who told this to the apostles.

John 20:2 So she came running to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved, and said, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don’t know where they have put him!”

The author has just made this up. A pious lie? Or a bare-faced lie? You decide.

So now we come to the actual appearance.

... Peter and John then ran to see the empty tomb. Mary Magdalene then apparently came back to the empty tomb after Peter and John had visited the tomb and had left. Here she saw the risen Christ and mistook him for the gardener, but she immediately recognized him when he spoke to her (John 20:11-17; cf. Mark 16:9-11). After she had seen the risen Jesus, Mary Magdalene returned to the disciples and told them that she had seen the Lord (John 20:18; Mark 16:10-11).

So the women were told by an angel that Jesus had been resurrected, so Mary runs to the disciples, the other women just walk there (fair enough, at least one of them was a generation older). Two of the disciples run back to the tomb, presumably passing the other women on the way, but the other disciples just stayed where they were because..?

Mary did return to the tomb, she was now walking, because two disciples ran ahead, and the rest were not bothered. So she too must have passed the other women who were still on their way to the disciples. She then either met Peter and John at the tomb, or maybe passed them too on the way.

Jesus then appears to her, rather than John and Peter because...?

The second resurrection appearance of Jesus was probably to the other women who had come with Mary Magdalene to the tomb (Matt 28:9-10). The women listed in the gospels were Joanna, Salome, and Mary the mother of James (Mark 16:1; Luke 24:10). They met the risen Jesus after they told the disciples about the empty tomb.

So apparently the other women got to the disciples - other than John and Peter, and told them about the resurrection, but the disciples were having none of it. So now the other women go back to tomb, and so they must now pass Peter and John going the other way, and now they get their appearance.

Is this making sense to anyone?

Remember, 1 Cor 15 says Jesus first appeared to Peter, not the women, and no gospel suggests Jesus appeared twice to women, but we can pretend, right?

The third resurrection appearance of Jesus was to Peter in the afternoon of the resurrection day. There are no specific details given for this encounter. Luke reports that after the two disciples on the road to Emmaus had seen the risen Jesus, they went back to Jerusalem and told the disciples that the Lord had appeared to Simon (Luke 24:34). This means that either the Lord had told them that he had appeared to Simon (highly unlikely since they did not recognize Jesus until he broke the bread), or that they had seen Peter on their way back to Jerusalem or in Jerusalem. Paul confirms this resurrection appearance of Jesus to Peter in 1 Corinthians 15:5. 

The fact that there are no specific details of this encounter is very bizarre. Remember that Mark was the secretary of Peter, and Peter was one of the three leaders of the earlier church, and yet we have next to nothing about this sighting!

Also, although Paul does indeed confirm this encounter, Paul would have us believe this was the first sighting! Meanwhile, Luke and John do not mention it at all. How very odd!

The Hallucination View

The author takes time to address the hallucination explanation for the gospel stories. I think that hallucination makes a lot of sense, but it has to be understood to be the basis of a lot of mythical development. That is to say, the disciples saw something they mistakenly took to be the risen Jesus, but this was in Galilee, and all those appearances in and around Jerusalem, as well as the empty tomb, were made up later.

There are several ways of refuting the hallucination view. First, the hallucination view fails to account for the appearances of Jesus to various individuals and groups of people at different times and places. By definition, a hallucination is a private event, a purely subjective experience void of any external reference or object. Psychologist Gary Collins says, “Hallucinations are individual occurrences. By their very nature only one person can see a given hallucination at a time. They certainly aren’t something which can be seen by a group of people. Neither is it possible that one person could somehow induce an hallucination in somebody else. Since an hallucination exists only in this subjective, personal sense, it is obvious that others cannot witness it.”

The author is attempting to define the problem away!

He labels it "The Hallucination View", and then declares that that must be wrong by virtue of the definition of hallucination label. In reality, all he is done is proven the view is poorly named.

Let us call it the "Mass Psychogenic Illness View". Suddenly his objection disappears.

The gospels tell us that the risen Jesus appeared to many different people at different times and places. The risen Jesus appeared to Mary Magdalene, to Peter, to two disciples on the road to Emmaus, to the apostles, to the apostles as a group with a skeptic named Thomas who wouldn’t believe unless he physically saw the risen Jesus, and to a persecutor of the church who afterwards would become the great apostle Paul. The risen Jesus appeared to five hundred people at one time. How does one explain five hundred people having the same hallucination at the same time?

Simple. It was made up.

Of course, the author is from a Bible seminary, so naturally he assumes the Bible is true. Once you appreciate that perhaps it is not, all his objections disappear.

Second, the hallucination view fails to account for the initial unbelief of the disciples. It is interesting that the disciples did not initially believe the reports of the empty tomb and that later they were amazed when they saw the risen Jesus (Mark 16:11, 13,14; Luke 24:41). Jesus himself rebuked the disciples for their unbelief (Mark 16:14).

Or so they made up later.

Mark 16:11 and Mark 16:14, and indeed all of Mark 16:9-20, are generally accepted to have been added at a later date, and a lot of Bibles even admit that this is the case (eg here).

Any half-way decent scholar of the Bible should know that. And yet here is the author using those verses to support his nonsense.

Third, the hallucination view fails to account for the surprise of the disciples at the appearances of the risen Jesus. People who have hallucinations often are expectant and are looking for something. The gospels tell us that on that first Easter Sunday the disciples were fearful and were in hiding for their lives. They did not expect the risen Jesus to suddenly appear. Luke tells us in his gospel that the disciples were “terrified and frightened” when the risen Jesus appeared to them. They thought that when they saw the risen Jesus they were seeing a spirit (or ghost), but Jesus proved that he was not a hallucination or spirit by showing them his hands and feet with the crucifixion marks and then by eating some broiled fish and some honeycomb in their presence (Luke 24:36-43). Jesus proved to them over the forty days between his resurrection and ascension that he was risen from the dead.

Or it was all made up. Sure, the disciples saw something, but as Mark tells us, this was in Galilee. Why believe Mark, but not the other gospels? Because Mark is the earliest gospel we have, and likelt the only one written while witnesses were still around to keep the story straight, at least to some degree.

The later gospels move the action to Jerusalem, but all of that was made up decades later, once the people who were actually there had died.