When it comes to Paul, scholars have long presumed that he received the famous creed (1 Cor. 15:3-7) from people. For example, C. H. Dodd: "Writing about a quarter century after the death of Jesus, [Paul records] the tradition passed on to him, presumably when he became a Christian some twenty years earlier" (The Founder of Christianity, Macmillan, 1970, 167 & 168, emphasis added). Today, however, even a mainstream scholar objects. Instead of presuming, he acknowledges that most scholars believe Paul was "passing on a formal early Christian creed that he got from the Jerusalem apostles.... Although this is possible, I don't think it is at all certain, since Paul swears so adamantly that the gospel he 'received' was not through men or from men, but by a direct revelation of Christ (Galatians 1:11 - 12)" (James Tabor, Paul and Jesus, Simon and Schuster, 2012, 63). Regarding the creed, in verses 10 & 11, Paul wrote, "I have worked harder than all the other apostles.... It makes no difference who worked the hardest, I or they; the important thing is that we preached the Gospel to you, and you believed it"
(The Greatest is Love: A Paraphrased New Testament, The World Home Bible League, 1971, 257). According to Dodd, all of the apostles preached the following: "that Christ died; that he was buried; that he was raised to life on the third day; and that he appeared to Cephas and afterwards to the Twelve. Then he appeared to over five hundred of our brothers at once, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. Then he appeared to James, and afterwards to all the apostles" (The Founder of Christianity, 168). All of the apostles preached the creed. If they all received it through direct relevation (like Paul did), then we are dealing with a miracle. Miracles are not allowed when one is doing history. As many have argued,
[S]cientific investigation of the world - including, in particular, any historical study of the past - would be rendered impossible by the admission of supernatural interventions in the world. The argument is that inferences about the past (and future), indeed, inferences of any kind from known effects to unobserved causes, or known causes to unobserved effects, require that nature behave in orderly ways. So the very possibility of history ... assumes that natural events are governed by laws without supernatural interference.... [I]f miracles are possible, how can we know that they occur only sparsely, and with limited effects on the course of nature? Must not the evidence for such a claim itself presuppose the validity of scientific methods - and hence presuppose that the world is not chaotically miracle-infested? The admission that miracles occur seems ... to raise a ground for deep skepticism about inductive [factual] inference. (Evan Fales, "Naturalism and Physicalism," The Cambridge Companion to Atheism, ed. Michael Martin, Cambridge UP, 2007, 124)
Because of the revelation, 1 Corinthians is not an ordinary historical report. Christian apologists would apparently like it to be so. If it were, the apologists could at least be methodological naturalists (real historians) in the beginning of their inquiry. They don't have that option unless they presume events that were never reported anywhere. According to Paul himself, "I solemnly swear that the way to heaven which I preach is not based on some mere human whim or dream. For my message comes from no less a person than Jesus Christ Himself, who told me what to say. No one else has taught me" (The Greatest is Love, 278). When does Paul say that his informants were humans? It's evidently a presumption. On the contrary, as most Bibles translate the verses, "I did not receive [the gospel] from a human source, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ" (Galatians 1:12 NRSV).
FOLLOW-UP
Another issue with 1 Corinthians is that it isn't our earliest document. What it relates about Christian preaching can't resolve the question about what the earliest Christians were preaching. Paul tells us in Galatians, which is usually dated earlier than 1 Corinthians, that Peter and James were apostles. If so, I find it a bit weird that they were preaching a list of appearances that included their own names. Would they have to refer to themselves in the third person? Gerd Lüdemann has pointed out that after 1 Cor. 15:3-5, "the construction changes" (Paul Copen & Ronald K. Tacelli, eds., Jesus' Resurrection: Fact or Figment?, Downers Grove: Intervarsity Press, 2000, 53). It's possible that the original creed didn't include any names. According to Burton Mack, "the statement 'And he appeared' does not require further qualification." When Mack quoted verses 3-5, he put the words "to Cephas, then to the twelve" in parentheses. Indeed, when you take those words out, you are left with a well-constructed statement. Having even one name ruins the symmetry (Burton Mack, A Myth of Innocence, Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988, 104 & 113 fn). Bart Ehrman, in his masterful book How Jesus Became God, only cut out the words "then to the twelve" when he reconstructed "the original form." If I'm reading him right, he had reasons for thinking that at least one name would have to be in the statement even though it violated the parallel form. Apparently, the Greek words literally mean "he was seen by" (How Jesus Became God, 2014; HarperOne-HarperCollins, 2015, 139 & 141). One would have to know Greek to know whether you could cut out the name without making the sentence incomplete. Regardless, the discovery of a parallel or near parallel construction in the epistle is important. If Ehrman is correct, then the long list of eyewitnesses was added sometime between the 30's and the 50's. If these appearances occurred quite some time after the appearance to Peter, then it's very doubtful that they were anything like the ones that we read about in the Gospels. In a debate with Antony Flew, Gary Habermas insisted that some of the appearances in Paul's epistle were group appearances. Group appearances, he argued, must have been caused by a person who was really there. I am not going to argue about that here, but I will dispute that we can really know that we are dealing with group appearances. As I wrote elsewhere, "Paul didn't write 'at once' in this verse [the one about the apostles] as he did in verse 6." It seems that when Paul and the apostles wanted you to know that Jesus was appearing to a lot of people "at the same time," they would explicitly say so. Therefore, the only definite group appearance is the one to the five hundred. Flew and Habermas, if I recall, couldn't agree on whether the appearance to the Twelve was really a group appearance, but it can be interpreted as one. If we only consider the appearance to the five hundred, we are dealing with hearsay even if the earliest followers of Jesus did in fact preach that it happened.
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