Skip to contentWillowOne's PositionsTagsWhat’s newMediaStatisticsSearch
WillowOne's Positions

Argument from Martyrdom

Form

As presented by Josh McDowell and in most evangelical apologetics:

  1. The apostles claimed to have seen Jesus alive after his death.
  2. They were persecuted for the claim and most of them died as martyrs rather than recant.
  3. People will die for what they sincerely believe to be true, but no one dies for what they know to be a lie.
  4. Therefore the apostles were not lying; they really saw the risen Jesus, and the Resurrection happened.

My Positions

  1. We do not know how the apostles died. The New Testament records one apostolic martyrdom, James son of Zebedee (Acts 12:2), and it says nothing about what he was asked to recant. The deaths of Peter and Paul are reported only in later and partly legendary sources; the rest come from apocryphal acts composed in the second to fourth centuries, which also have the apostles baptising lions and raising smoked fish from the dead. Candida Moss has shown how far the martyr narratives are later constructions. We have no evidence that any apostle was offered his life in exchange for a retraction and refused (Argument from Silence).
  2. Even granted, martyrdom proves sincerity, and sincerity is not truth. The hijackers of 11 September 2001 died for their beliefs; so did the members of Heaven's Gate, the dead of Jonestown, Muslims who deny the Resurrection, and Joseph Smith, shot in a jail in 1844 for a religion the Christian apologist regards as false. The reply, "but they did not see it, whereas the apostles did", assumes that the apostles saw a body rather than had a vision or a grief experience, which is the point in dispute (Circular Reasoning).
  3. The "lie" is a straw man. Nobody argues that the apostles conspired to invent a story they knew to be false. The alternatives are that they were mistaken, that they had visions (as Paul says he did), and that the stories grew in the telling over the decades before they were written down. Sincere belief in a vision is cheap and common, and it is all the argument's premises require.
  4. It would prove every religion with martyrs, which is every religion. The argument's logic establishes Islam, Mormonism, and the Baha'i faith with equal force, and the apologist accepts none of them.
  5. It is an Appeal to Emotion with a syllogism attached. The force of "they died for it" is the force of courage, and courage is admirable in anyone, including those who are wrong.

Sources

  • Moss, C., The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom (2013)
  • McDowell, S., The Fate of the Apostles (2015), the best apologetic case, which concedes good evidence for only a few deaths
  • Habermas, G. and Licona, M., The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus (2004)
  • Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History (c. 324)
  • Ehrman, B., How Jesus Became God (2014)

Also see