MYTH BUSTERS: Six Reasons the ‘Legend Hypothesis’ Fails to Account for Jesus’ Resurrection

Among the many critical attempts to explain away the literal resurrection of Jesus is the claim that He never called Himself God. So that whole thing about Him appearing alive  after being buried was just a legend that grew up in the decades that followed.

There is a logic behind the claim because legends do grow up around famous people, as illustrated by this scene from “Braveheart:”

Wallace killed a lot of Englishmen, but not 50 of them or 100 of them at one time with his famously long and lethal two-handed sword. So the legend hypothesis is put forward to explain how the resurrection claim allegedly came to be.

But here’s the most basic problem with the legend hypothesis: Christians were proclaiming Jesus alive on the third day after His death within weeks of it happening.

Peter proclaimed it in Jerusalem on the Day of Pentecost, and, as Professor Gary Habermas explains, simple creedal formulations about the resurrection were in circulation among the early believers within a few months after the trial, torture and Crucifixion.

I Need More Time, Captain

So there wasn’t sufficient time for the legend-making process to occur. But that’s not the only reason the legend hypothesis fails, as philosopher Kenneth Samples explains in his book, “Seven Truths That Changed The World.”

Samples’ first of six reasons is as I’ve described it above. “Even the most critical scholars today affirm that the claims about Jesus’ life and ministry date to the earliest stages of Christianity — back to the Apostles themselves … Moreover, many of these same scholars also recognize that a high Christology (calling Jesus ‘Lord,’ which means divine) can be traced to the earliest period of Christianity.”

Samples offers five more reasons:

• Because the resurrection claim was in circulation so soon after the event, the fact that the Gospels were written much earlier than previous generations of critics claimed indicates the legend formation process never got off the ground.
• The Gospel authors “knew the difference between legend on one hand and truthful eyewitness testimony on the other,” Samples writes. All of the first apostles claimed to have seen and talked with the Risen Jesus, just as Paul claimed to have famously encountered Him on the road to Damascus.
• Had the Gospel authors tried to falsify the truth, there were more than enough of Jesus’ enemies still around to dispute the resurrection claim. None did after the original claim concocted by leaders of the Sanhedrin and the Roman soldiers who were guarding the grave that the disciples stole Jesus’ body.
• The apostles, being orthodox Jews, knew their tradition was absolutely opposed to deifying a human and that the penalty for doing so could be stoning to death. Yet not one of the apostles ever recanted their claim to have witnessed the Risen Jesus.
• If the apostles were intent on inventing a legendary figure for the Jewish nation, they would have sought to portray Jesus according to the conventional understanding of the Messiah, somebody to free the people of the Roman conquest.
• And finally, as Samples puts it, “first and early second-century secular and Jewish sources (historians, government officials and religious writers) report general information about the life and ministry of Jesus that corresponds well to what is conveyed in the Gospels.

Samples concludes with this observation that ties it all together in one tidy package:

“Dismissing Jesus’s claims to deity as mere myth ignores the early historical sources (oral and written) that stand behind those claims. Moreover, this hypothesis also seems deeply indebted to unsupported, anti-supernatural presuppositions and doesn’t recognize the short period of time between the emergence of the Gospel writings themselves and the events they record. Therefore, this view must be considered implausible and an inadequate explanation.”

Now, Something to Think About:

This isn’t just an everyday claim — like “All the News That’s Fit to Print” — under discussion here. If Jesus really was resurrected, then everything He said about Himself, including what how He described Himself at John 14:6, has to be taken seriously.

“I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me,” is how the English Standard Version of the New Testament translates His most important claim.

So the question is, will you?

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