Justified True Belief

Intro Bart Ehrman, an American New Testament scholar writing from a skeptical perspective, proposes the following sequence:
(1) The disciples remained convinced Jesus was the Messiah despite His crucifixion.
(2) They re-read Israel’s Scriptures and concluded God had vindicated Jesus by exalting Him to heaven.
(3) They later came to express this vindication in terms of “resurrection” and imminent return.
(4) By the time resurrection was publicly proclaimed the body had decomposed so the claim could not be checked.
(5) The appearance tradition arose through a combination of sincere visionary experiences and later story development. +

The following argument is a refutation of Ehrman’s hypothesis: The main question is whether these steps actually get us to what early Christians proclaimed, namely, that Jesus was bodily raised from the dead within history, and that this was publicly knowable and central to their message.

(P1) In Second Temple Judaism, “vindicated in heaven” is not the same idea as “bodily raised from the dead,” so the shift from exaltation to resurrection is not an obvious or natural step without further explanation. + Many Jews expected resurrection as a bodily event at the end of the age. By contrast, a person can be honored or exalted with God without implying their corpse has been transformed and raised. So if the first belief is simply “God vindicated Jesus in heaven,” the hypothesis still must explain why the message became “God raised Jesus from the dead” in a strong, bodily sense.

(P2) Visions, even if sincere, do not automatically lead to a bodily-resurrection conclusion, because visions can be interpreted as heavenly comfort or vindication without implying that death has been reversed in the body. + A reported experience of seeing a deceased person can support several interpretations, such as “God is honoring him” or “he is with God.” It does not, on its own, force the conclusion “his body has been raised.” Therefore a vision-based account must explain why early Christians settled on the specific conclusion of bodily resurrection, rather than a more general claim of heavenly vindication.

(P3) The appeal to decomposition as a reason the claim could not be checked is a weak support, because decomposition does not remove remains, and disputes about burial can still be raised and tested. + Even if soft tissue decays, remains may still exist, and people can still argue about where someone was buried, whether the burial story is accurate, and whether opponents could challenge it. If “no one could check” is doing important work in the hypothesis, then the timeline and social conditions that made checking impossible must be argued for, not simply assumed.

(P4) The early resurrection message is presented as public, stable, and tied to named witnesses, which is difficult to explain if the account depends on a slow drift from exaltation language to resurrection language plus a patchwork of invention. + A good historical explanation should account for why the claim did not remain vague, private, or purely spiritual. Instead, the message that took hold was strong and concrete: Jesus was raised, and He appeared to specific people and groups. If the hypothesis answers hard cases by saying “some reports were made up” and protects itself by saying “no one could check,” it begins to look less like a single explanatory story and more like a set of add-ons designed to keep the hypothesis afloat.

(P5) Because the hypothesis relies on several extra assumptions to get to the final result, it lacks the explanatory simplicity and unity we should prefer when comparing competing accounts. + The decisive steps are carried by additional moves that are not clearly demanded by the earlier steps: exaltation is made to become bodily resurrection, an unverifiability timeline is invoked, and selective invention is introduced to fill remaining gaps. The more a theory must rely on separate, independent assumptions, the less confident we should be that it is tracking what actually happened.

(C) Therefore, Ehrman’s hypothesis is not a satisfactory explanation of the origin of early Christian resurrection belief, because it does not give a clear and plausible bridge from exaltation to bodily resurrection and it depends on extra assumptions that weaken its overall coherence.