Welcome to Defenders, the teaching class of Dr. William Lane Craig.

Today, the Doctrine of Christ, Part 43.

For more information and resources from Dr. Craig, go to reasonable faith.org.

We're in the process of examining competing hypotheses to explain the facts of Jesus' empty tomb, his post-mortem

appearances, and the origin of the disciples' faith.

Up to this point, all of the hypotheses that we've examined are defunct hypotheses.

That is to say, they are not defended by modern scholars.

But today we come to an alternative hypothesis to the resurrection hypothesis, which is currently

defended by some scholars, and that is the myth or legend hypothesis.

You'll remember that David Strauss effectively buried the old conspiracy hypothesis and the

apparent death hypothesis in his book on the life of Jesus in 1835.

Strauss correctly saw that neither the conspiracy theory of Reimaros nor the apparent death theory

of Heinrich Paulus was a plausible explanation of the facts of the case.

And therefore, Strauss sought a third alternative in the mythological explanation.

According to this theory, the miraculous events of the Gospels never happened.

Rather, the Gospel accounts of them are the result of a long process of the accumulation

of legend and religious imagination. This is what Strauss wrote. In the view of the church, Jesus was

miraculously revived. According to the deistic view of Rai Maros, his corpse was stolen

by the disciples. In the rationalistic view, he only appeared to be dead and revived.

According to our view, the imagination of his followers, aroused in their deepest spirit,

presented their master, revived, for they could not possibly think of him as dead.

What for a long time was valid as an external fact, first miraculous, then deceptive,

...