This is typical argumentation from unbelievers.  O’Neill begins his argument, not with evidence, but with a really big, unsupported assumption/statement.  This is a presuppositional argument.  Then he supports the conclusion he has already reached with dubious and sometimes simply inaccurate reports of the surrounding facts.  Stating your conclusion as your opening argument is an example of circular reasoning. O’Neill is guilty of presuppositional argumenting.

First of all, he literally assumes that the resurrection was not believed in the first generation of Christianity.  Notice,he begins his argument with this statement, not with evidence to support this statement.  I will argue below that this statement that the resurrection was a sheer invention of later believers is patently absurd, which pretty much disqualifies this gentleman as an unbiased commentator.  There is not a moment in the history of Christianity that the resurrection of Christ was not believed and assumed to be true.  Christianity would never have gotten off the ground if the resurrection was not believed.  There is no evidence whatsoever to oppose this rather obvious conclusion, and O’Neill presents none to support it.  The resurrection was preached, in Jerusalem, at Pentecost.  That is, unless you believe that Luke, Mark, Matthew, Paul, Peter, John, and all other Christian witnesses were simply lying and making this up.  But even if they were, which is absurd on the face of it, given that nearly all of them were executed for this supposed conspiratorial lie, the historical fact is that the resurrection was believed.  We can debate whether it was true, but not whether it was believed by the Church.

Mr. O’Neill begins with this rather dubious assumption, and, only after making this assumption, does he proceed to discussing the actual written accounts of the resurrection.  He notices that Paul talked about over 500 eye-witnesses to the resurrection just after AD 50; 20 years after the event of the death of Jesus.  Then he implies that Paul believed in the resurrection, not because of the eye-witnesses to the physical resurrection that he mentions, but because of a debatable vision he had.  Well, let us suppose for the sake of argument that his vision on the road to Damascus was some sort of hallucination.  That is not a crazy proposal.  But that is not the reason that Paul gives for believing that Jesus was raised from the dead.  Or at least it certainly was not his principle reason.  His reasoning was the 500+ eye-witnesses, most of whom were still alive when he wrote.  His mention of his own vision is nearly an afterthought in Paul’s evidence list.

In what reasonable world could Paul make this claim, if these 500+ witnesses literally did not exist?  And besides, it is a fact that Peter and John, not to mention most of the other apostles, also were alive when Paul wrote this.  If he was putting words in their mouths, then they would have spoken up.  The idea that Paul was inventing this out of whole cloth is simply, plainly and obviously absurd.

Then O’Neill goes on to make statements about the gospel writers which are either highly biased or outright untrue.  He states that the biblical Matthew did not write Matthew, niether did the biblical Mark, Luke of John write their gospels. What is his evidence that they did not write these gospels?  To propose the possibility that they did not is not unreasonable, but to assume this as fact, which O’Neill does, is blatant atheistic/scholarly bias. Then he quotes dates quite a bit too late for all four gospels.  Mark was almost certainly written by the early 60s, Luke by the mid 60s, as well as Matthew.  John was definitely written in the first century.  In fact, we have a manuscript from AD 125 (The Rylands Papyrus).  O’neill shows clear bias in order to make his conclusion more believable.  Yet, in the end, he presents literally zero evidence for his conclusion that the resurrection was not believed in the first years of the Church.  Zero.  None.  He has no evidence that the resurrection was not believed by Christians before the time of Paul.

Besides, Paul wrote 1 Corinthians just over 20 years of the date of the resurrection.  O’Neill implies that this was two generations or more after the event!   I am able to remember with great clarity things which happened 20 years ago.  Those who were in Jerusalem in AD 30 were well aware what happened twenty-five years later when Paul wrote.  It is clear and obvious bias when atheists claim about believers in the first century what would be absurd to believe if it happened in the 21st century–that their memories would be unclear or somehow erased.  Such a sheer invention as the empty tomb and the resurrection appearances could not be made when the great majority of the original witnesses were still alive.  And do not fail to notice that when Paul wrote his First Letter to the Corinthians, nearly all of the eye-witnesses were alive. Consider this.  Of those reading this letter I am writing now, how many will still be alive in 25 years?  75%?  How many will be alive in 35 years, when Mark and Luke, and probably Matthew were also written?  This claim by O’Neill is clearly false and should be rejected by all thinking people.

John Oakes