Price (2005, pp. 80-81) questions
the reliability of the detail concerning the ‘more than five hundred brethren’
by asking why it is absent from the Gospels, if it is part of an early
tradition. Price rejects the explanation that the Gospels’ authors were
responding to another set of needs and situation, for he thinks that the
apologetic motives which scholars have suggested for 1 Corinthians 15, would
have been present in the Gospels’ authors as well. He argues that if such an
overwhelmingly potent proof of the resurrection as the appearance to the ‘more
than give hundred brethren’ had occurred, it would have been widely repeated
from the beginning and be included in the Gospels.
In reply, there are valid and
invalid forms of argument from silence, and Price’s argument is an invalid form
of argument from silence. An argument from silence works only when it can be
shown that the silence would have been broken if the conclusion were otherwise.
Price’s argument is invalid because it fails to meet this condition. To
illustrate, Price fails to consider the possibility that an oral tradition
concerning the ‘more than five hundred brethren’ mentioned by Paul had already
been circulated among early Christians and known by the Gospels’ authors and
their audiences, thus the Gospels’ authors did not see the need to mention it.
For example, suppose that the ‘more than five hundred brethren’ were with the
11 disciples who ‘saw the Lord’ in Galilee, as portrayed in Matthew 28:16-20
(Robertson and Plummer 1911, p. 337). The author of Matthew might not have
thought it necessary to mention this detail but close to keep the narrative
focused on the 11 instead. ON the other hand, if the ‘resurrection appearance’
to the ‘more than five hundred brethren’ indeed occurred in Galilee, many of
them would have remained there, and this would explain why there were only 120
believers in Jerusalem as portrayed in Acts 1:15 (cf. Acts 2:7, which refers to
them as Galileans). Against Lüdemann who claims that the appearance to the five
hundred brethren is a legendary reference to the event at Pentecost, Craig
(2000, p. 191) objects that most of those people were still alive in AD 55 when
Paul wrote 1 Corinthians, and hence they could be questioned about the
experience and correct the legendary developments. Moreover, the event of
Pentecost was fundamentally different from a resurrection appearance, in Acts
2:1-13 all the characteristics of an Easter narrative are missing, above all
the appearing of Christ. Again this, Chilton argues that the narrative in Acts
2 is related to Jesus’ resurrection in the sense that
the steady outworking of that
theme during the course of the book of Acts is skillful and programmatic, so
that there is a broadening and at the same time an intensification of the
conception of God’s Spirit as related by the resurrection.
(2019,
p. 112)
However, Chilton confuses the
effect of Jesus’ resurrection (‘God’s Spirit as related by the resurrection’)
with the appearance of the resurrected Jesus, which is offered as a proof to
sceptics of resurrection by Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:6, as explained earlier.
Thus, Chilton’s argument is invalid. (Andrew Loke, Investigating the
Resurrection of Jesus Christ: A New Transdisciplinary Approach [Routledge
New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies; Oxfordshire:
Routledge, 2020], 53-54)
Against the reliability of
Matthew, (Crossley 2013) claims that Matthew 27:52-53 “The tombs also were
opened and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised. After
the resurrection they came out of the tombs, and entered the holy city and appeared
to many’ is fictional, arguing it is unlikely that contemporary non-Christian
figures such as Josephus would not have recorded such a speculation. In reply,
Josephus also did not mention that there were people who claimed to have
witnesses the resurrected Jesus, a fact which is well established by the
evidence . . . As explained [earlier], the silence of non-Christian authors
could have been illustrative of their embarrassment about Christianity (e.g.
they thought they could not explain away the events convincingly), and thus
they chose not to write about them. Thus the silence in this case is not a
valid argument against historicity. Alternatively, it has been suggested that
Matthew 27:52-53 can be interpreted non-literally as the ‘special effects’ of
an apocalyptic symbolic imagery typical of Jewish apocalyptic symbolic imagery
typical of a Jewish apocalyptic writings to convey how ‘earth shattering’ a
literal event (in this case, Jesus’ death) was (Licona 2010, pp. 548-553, 2016,
p. 252, n. 120). Even if the details in Matthew 27:52-53 are intended to be
taken literally and are inaccurate, this does not imply that all the details in
all the Gospels are inaccurate; we would need to assess case by case and
consider the reasons given for each case . . . (Ibid., 130-31)