The Deconstructionists

I have been listening to your Podcast for a couple of years now. You and your guests have helped me with the reorder of my faith, not throwing the baby out with the bath water (hearing Richard Rohr). This episode was very informative with information easy to digest. Thank you for all you do. Your work is greatly appreciated!!

This is an intelligent and thought provoking podcast that keeps expanding my heart and my horizons! The God I know is so much bigger than the box that most churches try to stuff Him into…and this podcast of love stretches me each time! I appreciate the 2 part podcasts…allows for the discussions to not be rushed and I am able to be thoughtfully more engaged.

So glad I found this podcast a few months ago. I’m working my way through the older episodes and listening to the new ones as they drop as well. I’ve been on this journey for so long and am exponentially comforted to find community to learn and grow with.

Don’t be deterred by long episodes! This is an excellent podcast! Intelligent and thoughtful hosts, interesting and articulate guests, helpful and thought-provoking content.

This is a review of two older episodes (4/02/23 and 4/07/23) featuring an interview with Dale Allison about the resurrection. I am hesitant to give a podcast a low rating because of a disingenuous or misleading guest because I know a host cannot really keep a guest from blowing smoke and blurring the line between facts and beliefs. At the same time, a host can ask tough questions and ask a guest to provide evidence for their claims. The host of this podcast did neither in the two-part interview with Dale Allison. Allison misrepresented the ‘evidence’ for the resurrection. Allison is not a fundamentalist or an apologist, but he employed the same sleight of hand used by many fundamentalists and apologists by equating Christian claims about the resurrection with objective evidence for the historical truth of the the resurrection. The New Testament is a record of early Christian claims about the resurrection; it is NOT evidence that the resurrection actually took place. The NT is full of claims which Allison freely rejects as historical, and there are other claims he believes are true. The problem is he does not offer any objective criteria for determining what he thinks is true and what he thinks is false. How does he sort the true claims in the NT from the false claims in the NT without engaging in circular reasoning or appealing to other parts of the NT? He is conspicuously silent on this matter, and the host doesn’t seem interested in asking Allison to justify his claims with objective evidence. There is no verifiable proof that any of the events surrounding Jesus’ death happened as described in the gospels or that they even happened at all. The four gospel accounts are wildly contradictory and the later three are hard at work correcting the errors they found in earlier accounts. We know early Christians made up all kinds of claims about Jesus. Both the canonical and non-canonical gospels are stuffed with fictional and legendary material. Allison admits this freely, but he still thinks he can isolate a few bits of historically reliable information in the four canonical gospels (and maybe the Gospel of Thomas). However, he seems unwilling to entertain the idea that the very earliest followers of Jesus could have made up all the details related to his death, burial, and subsequent missing body (empty tomb). We cannot know for certain they did not invent such claims since we know they invented other claims. There is no reliable, objective way to determine what’s fiction and what’s historical. Allison leans heavily on Paul’s writing about the resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15. But what if Paul is simply repeating earlier claims about the death, burial, and resurrection? Paul’s repetition of oral tradition and hearsay does not establish the veracity of the claims. Paul wrote before the composition of the gospels, so he’s not corroborating their stories. And if the gospel stories are simply narrative expositions of the death, burial, and resurrection based on the same legends that Paul knows about, we are no closer to determining what really happened. Dale Allison seems unwilling to acknowledge this. There is no evidence that Jesus made post-mortem appearances to anyone. All we have are claims that he did. Paul’s account in 1 Corinthians leaves out some of the most famous post-mortem appearances found in the contradictory gospel accounts. Paul doesn’t mention any appearance to Jesus’ female followers or to doubting Thomas or to the two disciples on the road to Emmaus. Paul says Jesus appeared to the twelve, but this doesn’t make sense since the disciples were down to eleven after Judas’ suicide. The appearance to 500 people at once is just hearsay. We don’t know when it happened, where it happened, or who was there. There is no independent, eyewitness testimony from any of these 500 people regarding what they saw. All we have is second/third/fourth-hand hearsay that Jesus appeared to this large group. We have no way of knowing anything about Jesus’ alleged post-mortem appearances to Paul. All we have are Paul’s claims. Acts repeats these claims without any evidence of fact-checking. Acts states other people were with Paul when Jesus appeared to him (although Acts gives multiple, contradictory versions of this event), but we don’t know who these people were nor do we have shred of testimony from them. It’s simply impossible to objectively verify any of the Bible’s claims regarding the life and death of Jesus - much less what may have happened to his body after he died. Dale Allison seems unable to state this plainly and succinctly. Instead he tries to stake out a middle ground between the apologists and the skeptics in order to appear reasonable and open-minded. This is perhaps his most dishonest tactic because legitimate historians only go so far as the evidence allows. They do not conflate religiously motivated claims with multiply-attested, independent historical data. Skepticism regarding the resurrection is not the opposite of the positions taken by fundamentalist Christians like William Craig and liberal Christians like Dale Allison. Rather, it is the only objective and logical stance to take with respect to miraculous events lacking evidential support beyond the claims of religious believers who have staked their very lives and careers on the truth of these claims. And the host simply sat there, never bothering to ask any tough questions to ask for objective evidence regarding anything Allison said. I appreciate what the host is trying to do with the overall thrust of his podcast, but I think he’d better serve his listeners by taking a more no-nonsense approach to his guests.