Body of Proof by Jeremiah Johnston
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Body of Proof: The 7 Best Reasons to Believe in the Resurrection of Jesus – and Why It Matters Today
By Jeremiah J. Johnston
Bethany House 2023
The most important thing the reader notices after finishing Jeremiah Johnston’s Body of Proof: The 7 Best Reasons to Believe in the Resurrection of Jesus – and Why It Matters Today is that it includes nothing even remotely approaching proof of its central subject, the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ.
The things Johnston proposes as his seven reasons to believe in the resurrection of Jesus are instead a collection of assertions and non sequiturs that are very nearly astonishing in their borderline incomprehensibility. Reason #1 is the most jaw-dropping of all: “Society Is Transformed Everywhere Christianity is Introduced and Embraced.” Leaving aside the back-door the author has left himself (if he doesn’t see the transformation he wants, well, they mustn’t have really embraced the faith), this claim is entirely true: Christianity does indeed transform societies where it becomes dominant – usually by making that society more fearful, more xenophobic, and infinitely more prone to sectarian violence. But obviously Christianity is a social and governmental ideology – its ability to transform a society is completely unconnected with the subject of this book.
Reason #2 is: “Jesus Called It – #OnTheThirdDay” – which, apart from the use of a hashtag unfortunately declaring that the author is an imbecile, indulges in the central problem of this book’s 170-something pages: taking the New Testament as documentary evidence. The New Testament is a collection of writings designed to exalt its main character as a deity – it could not be accepted uncritically as documentary evidence even if its central claims were attested anywhere else in ancient literature. Since those claims aren’t attested anywhere else in ancient literature, the conclusion is obvious: the New Testament cannot be used as any kind of “proof” for the veracity of its own contents. If you remove the New Testament from Johnston’s book, you’re left with a handful of typos and a couple of semicolons.
Reason #3 is “Jesus Demonstrated Resurrection Power.” Jesus only “demonstrates” this power in a collection of writings designed to exalt Him as a deity. Even a high school sophomore should be able to see that this does not constitute “proof” of anything except the marginal (it doesn’t happen in every Gospel) internal coherence of Christian mythology. Also, needless to say, Person X demonstrating Ability Y on other people doesn’t in any way prove that Person X ever used Ability Y on himself.
Reason #4, “No Motivation to Invent Jesus’ Resurrection Narrative Is Evident,” is so hallucinatory that it can only make sense if the reader, like Johnston, treats the New Testament as a series of annotated biographies and contemporaneous dispatches, which it certainly, demonstrably is not. Readers who see that the New Testament is a collection of writings designed to exalt its main character as a deity won’t have much trouble imagining a motivation for giving that character a resurrection narrative – or four different ones, as the case is.
Reason #5 is “Written and Archeological Sources Overwhelmingly Support the Gospels’ Resurrection Narrative,” and the reader hardly needs a nudge at this point to know how an allegedly educated author could make such a preposterous claim. There is not a single archeological source, obviously, that supports or even indicates any kind of resurrection mythos, and the written sources only support that mythos if you take as 100% of those sources … the New Testament, which is a collection of writings designed to exalt its main character as a deity. The resurrection story of Jesus isn’t so much as mentioned by any contemporary documents that aren’t these religious texts – and of course fifty such mentions or five thousand wouldn’t constitute any kind of proof that one particular dead body magically came back to life.
Reason #6 is “Only Jesus’ Resurrection Convincingly Explains the Conversion of People Not Previously His Followers,” and again this is nonsense on every level, not only directly – people convert for all kinds of reasons – but also inferentially, since one of those reasons for 2000 years has been overwhelming social pressure. And in the way of intentionally deceptive apologists everywhere, this “reason” also manages to be deeply insulting to the actual tenets of Christianity. It’s not those tenets that could ever convert later generations, no - instead, it must be a magic trick in a tomb.
Johnston’s final reason, #7, is his most appalling: “Jesus’ Resurrection Is the Only Basis for Making Sense of Suffering.” In a world where for two millennia such an incredible amount of that suffering has been caused by Christianity, this “reason” is the closest this little book comes to a kind of blasphemy.
And none of it matters anyway, since throughout his book Johnston is consistently and willfully misrepresenting what the word “proof” means. In the context of the pre-technological ancient world, the bare minimum of “proof” for the resurrection of a long-dead body would be multiple non-contradicting disinterested eyewitness accounts of it actually happening. Nothing even remotely like this exists for the Jesus resurrection narrative, since the accounts we have are neither eyewitness nor disinterested. This ends any discussion of “proof.” Everything that remains is legend.
Absent its ostensible main purpose, there isn’t much left to Johnston’s book.There are passages of almost comically bad prose. “One of the go-to texts regarding Jesus’ altogether unique, distinctive, and un-dieable resurrected body is Revelation 1: 18: ‘I died, and behold I am alive for evermore.’ Jesus’ body will never die again. I love how Dr. Luke explicitly states that those who are resurrected ‘cannot die anymore’ (Luke 20:36),” goes one such passage, referring to the Christian myth that the author of the Gospel of Luke was a doctor while also badly misunderstanding the meaning of the word ‘unique,’ and finishing with: “… Further, as followers did in the first century, we struggled to describe our Marvel-esk resurrection bodies’ otherworldly qualities …” Marvel-esk?
But probably the most pernicious element threading through Body of Proof is the one reflected in Reason #1: a stubborn, squinty habit of mischaracterizing of Christianity itself. Some of these mischaracterizations simply stun, as when Johnston writes about the conversion of St. Paul: “This experience converts Paul from the top of his head to the ends of his toes. He buys into the entire Jesus program,” he writes, despite the self-evident fact that Paul created his own “program.” But then Johnston goes on to describe that program, and it’s simply mind-boggling: “A program that lionizes women. That implies egalitarian principles. That loves children. Every child in Jesus’ economy is in fact a wanted child. All people are wanted. There’s no racism.” And on every beat, even a Christian reader might be point-by-point responding: St. Paul forbids women from equality with men. Jesus completely accepts the existence of slavery and refers to non-Jews as dogs. For 2000 years, Christian children were terrified with threats of hellfire. And so on, for nearly 200 pages.
Multiple non-contradicting disinterested eyewitness accounts of it actually happening. Not of it getting ready to happen, not of it having already happened, and particularly not of it having happened two generations ago, or so you heard, from somebody who knew somebody who was the grandson of somebody who knew somebody who was 90% certain it had actually happened.
Johnston doesn’t have that kind of proof, because that kind of proof doesn’t exist. Like all other works that lie about that one central fact, his book can be ignored, except by luckless critics.
Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News.