Tag Archives: conspiracy

Did Jesus’s Disciples Conspire to Lie about Him? Part 2

Post Author: Bill Pratt 

In part 1, we started to look at J. Warner Wallace’s analysis of whether the disciples of Jesus could have successfully conspired to lie about his death and resurrection. We already saw that there were too many conspirators (disciples) for them to be successful, and the disciples were separated by great distances, unable to communicate with each other to keep their story straight.

In part 2, we will finish Wallace’s analysis by looking at whether there was a short time span, significant relational connections, and a lack of pressure. Here is Wallace, from his book Cold-Case Christianity:

The apostles would have been required to protect their conspiratorial lies for an incredibly long time. The apostle John appears to have lived the longest, surviving nearly sixty years after the resurrection. [Two criminals] couldn’t keep their conspiracy alive for thirty-six hours; the apostles allegedly kept theirs intact for many decades.

To make matters worse, many of them were complete strangers to one another prior to their time together as disciples of Jesus. Some were indeed brothers, but many were added over the course of Jesus’s early ministry and came from diverse backgrounds, communities, and families. While there were certainly pairs of family members in the group of apostolic eyewitnesses, many had no relationship to each other at all.

Philip, Bartholomew, Thomas, Simon the Canaanite, and Matthias had no family relationship to any of the other apostles. Whatever the relational connection between these men, the short years they spent together would quickly pale in comparison to the decades they would spend apart from one another prior to the time of their final interrogations. At some point, the bonds of friendship and community would be tested if their individual lives were placed in jeopardy.

Successful conspiracies are unpressured conspiracies. The apostles, on the other hand, were aggressively persecuted as they were scattered from Italy to India. According to the records and accounts of the local communities, each of them suffered unimaginable physical duress and died a martyr’s death. Ancient writers recorded that Peter was crucified upside down in Rome, James was killed with the sword in Jerusalem, and Thomas was murdered by a mob in Mylapore. Each story of martyrdom is more gruesome than the prior as we examine the list of apostolic deaths. This pressure was far greater than the fear of state prison faced by [modern conspirators], yet none of the Twelve recanted their claims related to the resurrection. Not one.

What is Wallace’s conclusion?

I can’t imagine a less favorable set of circumstances for a successful conspiracy than those that the twelve apostles faced. Multiply the problem by ten to account for the 120 disciples in the upper room (Acts 1: 15), or by forty to account for the five hundred eyewitnesses described by Paul (1 Cor. 15: 6), and the odds seem even more prohibitive.

None of these eyewitnesses ever recanted, none was ever trotted out by the enemies of Christianity in an effort to expose the Christian “lie.” Don’t get me wrong, successful conspiracies occur every day. But they typically involve a small number of incredibly close-knit participants who are in constant contact with one another for a very short period of time without any outside pressure. That wasn’t the case for the disciples. These men and women either were involved in the greatest conspiracy of all time or were simply eyewitnesses who were telling the truth. The more I learned about conspiracies, the more the latter seemed to be the most reasonable conclusion.

The idea that the disciples conspired to lie about Jesus is simply implausible. Only a miracle could have allowed the disciples to lie about Jesus and never be detected by their contemporaries. Unfortunately for most skeptics of Christianity, miracles aren’t an option.

Did Jesus’s Disciples Conspire to Lie about Him? Part 1

Post Author: Bill Pratt

In a previous post we laid out the requirements for successfully pulling off a conspiracy:

  1. small number of conspirators
  2. thorough and immediate communication
  3. short time span
  4. significant relational connections
  5. little or no pressure.

Former cold case detective J. Warner Wallace, after sharing these requirements, investigates whether the disciples of Jesus could have conspired to lie about his death and resurrection and never be found out. Here is Wallace, from his book Cold-Case Christianity:

The number of conspirators required to successfully accomplish the Christian conspiracy would have been staggering. The book of Acts tells us that there were as many as 120 eyewitnesses in the upper room following Jesus’s ascension (Acts 1: 15). Let’s assume for a minute that this number is a gross exaggeration; let’s work with a much smaller number to illustrate our point. Let’s limit our discussion to the twelve apostles (adding Matthias as Judas’s replacement). This number is already prohibitively large from a conspiratorial perspective, because none of the other characteristics of successful conspiracies existed for the twelve apostles.

The apostles had little or no effective way to communicate with one another in a quick or thorough manner. Following their dispersion from Jerusalem, the twelve disciples were scattered across the Roman Empire and, according to the most ancient accounts, were ultimately interrogated and martyred far from one another. Methods of communication in the first century were painfully slow . . . .

From Peter in Rome, to James in Jerusalem, to Thomas in Mylapore, the apostles appear to have been ultimately interrogated in locations that prevented them from communicating with one another in a timely manner. They had no idea if any of their co-conspirators had already “given up the lie” and saved themselves by simply confessing that Jesus was never resurrected. While skeptics sometimes claim that these recorded locations of martyrdom are unreliable because they are part of a biased Christian account, there isn’t a single non-Christian record that contradicts the claims of martyrdom offered by the local communities and historians.

We will continue with Wallace’s analysis in part 2.

How Can a Successful Conspiracy Be Pulled Off?

Post Author: Bill Pratt 

Former cold case detective J. Warner Wallace investigated many criminal conspiracies during his career.  Because of this experience, he was able to summarize rules for successful conspiracies in his book Cold-Case Christianity. Here they are:

A SMALL NUMBER OF CONSPIRATORS

The smaller the number of conspirators, the more likely the conspiracy will be a success. This is easy to understand; lies are difficult to maintain, and the fewer the number of people who have to continue the lie, the better.

THOROUGH AND IMMEDIATE COMMUNICATION

This is key. When conspirators are unable to determine if their partners in crime have already given up the truth, they are far more likely to say something in an effort to save themselves from punishment. Without adequate and immediate communication, co-conspirators simply cannot separate lies from the truth; they are easily deceived by investigators who can pit one conspirator against another.

A SHORT TIME SPAN

Lies are hard enough to tell once; they are even more difficult to repeat consistently over a long period of time. For this reason, the shorter the conspiracy, the better. The ideal conspiracy would involve only two conspirators, and one of the conspirators would kill the other right after the crime. That’s a conspiracy that would be awfully hard to break!

SIGNIFICANT RELATIONAL CONNECTIONS

When all the co-conspirators are connected relationally in deep and meaningful ways, it’s much harder to convince one of them to “give up” the other. When all the conspirators are family members, for example, this task is nearly impossible. The greater the relational bond between all the conspirators, the greater the possibility of success.

LITTLE OR NO PRESSURE

Few suspects confess to the truth until they recognize the jeopardy of failing to do so. Unless pressured to confess, conspirators will continue lying. Pressure does not have to be physical in nature. When suspects fear incarceration or condemnation from their peers, they often respond in an effort to save face or save their own skin. This is multiplied as the number of co-conspirators increases. The greater the pressure on co-conspirators, the more likely the conspiracy is to fail.

What does this have to do with Christianity? Well, many skeptics claim that the disciples of Jesus simply lied about Jesus rising from the dead. They formed a conspiracy that has fooled the world for two thousand years.

Is this conspiracy theory really a plausible explanation? In our next post, we will look at whether the disciples of Jesus met the criteria for a successful conspiracy.