Lies vs. Legends

Objection: Qualm #2: You repeatedly insist in your book that Jesus' resurrection couldn't have been mere legend, because legends can't take root in a culture in a single generation, particularly when eyewitness "authorities" are available to denounce those legends. Yet I can think of many modern legends that have been concocted and have flourished in only one generation. Case in point: the popularly held conspiracy theories about the assassination of John F. Kennedy have sprung up in only one generation, despite hundreds of eyewitness to the event, an actual film of the assassination, and the existence of authorities (the Warren Commission, the news media, law enforcement) striving to preserve the official and credible account that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Other recent, outlandish, but stubbornly persistent legends include: the widespread belief in many Muslim countries that Israel was behind the 9-11 attack and that no Jews were present at the World Trade Center on the day of the attack; the belief in some quarters (most recently mentioned in the news by Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the former pastor of Barak Obama) that the government may have created the AIDs virus to target African Americans; widespread reports of UFO-related sightings and encounters in Roswell, New Mexico, and elsewhere; the apocryphal stockpile of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq under Saddam Hussein—a "legend" that took a war to disprove. Lastly, the supernatural beliefs of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints and other religions that quickly sprang up demonstrate that legends can prevail among large communities of believers in only a single generation.

RESPONSE: This is based on a confusion of legends with lies. Legends are the outgrowth of a period of oral transmission of a tradition until the original facts have been lost. As Richard Bauckham points out in his recent Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, in the case of the Gospels we shouldn't even speak of oral tradition, but rather of oral history, because the original eyewitnesses and fount of the tradition were still about to correct any departures from the tradition! But lies, such as all the cases you mention, can arise immediately, being deliberate fabrications. It only needs to be added that no scholar takes the disciples' belief in the resurrection of Jesus to be a deliberate fabrication. (See Reasonable Faith for detailed arguments.)
--Taken from Reasonablefaith