Does Apostolic Suffering Have Apologetic Value? (November 7, 2005)

For the next several weeks I'll be dealing with some defense-of-the-faith issues brought up in an email my son wrote me from college. He wrote, "Hey Dad, I went to an interesting lecture/discussion earlier this week by a religion professor. Of course, he was ridiculously liberal, and I ended up challenging him on a lot of his stances, but the discussion was nonetheless intellectually stimulating, so I was wondering how you would respond to some of his views...

"This is a question I had on my own. Often times, I've heard used as proof of the resurrection the willingness of the apostles to die for their belief. My question is: how is this different from cult members who drink poison kool-aid because they honestly believe a space-ship is coming to abduct them? I don't mean to sound sacrilegious at all with this question, I'm just honestly asking for the sake of argument. After all, just as the apostles, those cult members must have really believed their outrageous claim to be willing to die for it. What separates the apostles? (In the intellectual form of the question, rather than just the obvious 'because their claim was true').

Thanks, Ben"

My response:

People have always been willing to die for outrageously kooky beliefs that they held sincerely. On that criterion alone, nothing distinguishes the apostles of Christ from the Jim Jones Kool-Aid drinkers or the Marshall Applewhite self-castrated spaceship riders. But willingness to die for an amazing belief really isn't the issue. The issue is whether a group of people would choose to suffer and die (and not in an afternoon, but through decades) over something they all knew to be false! As you point out, the cult members "must have really believed their outrageous claim to be able to die for it." That is true, they did. They weren't snickering to themselves in private, "Boy what a bunch of baloney this is." They were true believers. But on the theory that Jesus did not rise from the dead - the disciples stole the body, disposed of it somehow, made up these stories about seeing him alive - then the disciples weren't true believers at all; they were knowingly perpetrating a scam. On that assumption, why in the world did they all go to their deaths (after multiple beatings, imprisonments, etc.) for something they themselves knew they had just made up?

I seem to recall that Lee Strobel addresses this issue in The Case For Christ. (Yes, here it is):

Strobel: "'They were willing to die for their beliefs. But so have Muslims and Mormons and followers of Jim Jones and David Koresh. This may show that they were fanatical, but let's face it: it doesn't prove that what they believed is true.'"

J. P. Moreland: "'[T]hink carefully about the difference. Muslims might be willing to die for their belief that Allah revealed himself to Muhammad, but this revelation was not done in a publicly observable way. So they could be wrong about it. They may sincerely think it's true, but they can't know for a fact, because they didn't witness it themselves.

"'However, the apostles were willing to die for something they had seen with their own eyes and touched with their own hands. They were in a unique position not just to believe Jesus rose from the dead but to know for sure. And when you've got eleven credible people with no ulterior motives, with nothing to gain and a lot to lose, who all agree they observed something with their own eyes - now you've got some difficulty explaining that away.'"

Strobel: "I smiled because I had been playing devil's advocate by raising my objection. Actually, I knew he was right. In fact, this critical distinction was pivotal in my own spiritual journey. It had been put to me this way: People will die for their religious beliefs if they sincerely believe they're true, but people won't die for their religious beliefs if they know their beliefs are false." (The Case For Christ, (page 247).