Artificial intelligence, photoshop, the resurrection and the ugly broad ditch
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| A flooded and muddy (but I don’t think ugly!) broad ditch Grantchester Meadows, February 2024 |
Easter Sunday is a day when most Christians celebrate the resurrection of Jesus, but as many of you will know, there are dozens of contradictions between the texts found in the New Testament that speak of post-resurrection appearances of Jesus, that is to say, Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, the Gospels according to Matthew, Luke and John, and the Book of Acts.
Some of you will have immediately noticed I have excluded from my list the earliest of the Gospels, that of Mark written sometime after 70 CE, and will correctly complain that the Gospel as it is printed in our modern bibles contains three post-resurrection appearances, firstly to Mary Magdalene, secondly to two unnamed disciples going into the countryside, and finally to the eleven remaining disciples as they were reclining at table. However, in the earliest complete version of the Gospel’s final chapter that survives — dated around 325–350 CE, i.e. some 255-280 years after the original, during which time it had already been copied, and recopied, and recopied — there is no post-resurrection appearance, only a claim, made by “a young man . . . clothed in a white robe” who may, or may not be an angel, that Jesus “has been raised,” and that some promised appearance may happen sometime in the future. And there the gospel ends, not in joy and celebration, but in trembling, bewilderment, fear and an unfulfilled promise.
Anyway, it’s a fascinating exercise to place all these different New Testament accounts side by side in order to see clearly the often very considerable differences between them, but time forbids me doing that now. But, for my purposes, all you need to be aware of is that, today, we have very good reasons to doubt the historical accuracy of all these accounts — even that by Mark. Firstly, the earliest claim to there being a resurrection, was made by Paul 25 years or so after Jesus death who we know never met Jesus in his life. Secondly, since the original gospels were written between 70 and 100 CE, the resurrection claims they contain were also made by authors who had not known Jesus and who, by then, were relying on decades old stories not necessarily originally told by anyone who had actually been present in Jerusalem following Jesus’ execution. Thirdly, as you have already heard, today we only have copies of copies of copies of the original letters and Gospels, and they are full of discrepancies that have entered into the texts due to mistakes — or sometimes deliberate changes — made during the copying process. Fourthly, we now live in an age that can call upon the natural sciences which make it clear that the resurrection of Jesus as recounted by these texts is so vanishingly unlikely to have occurred that we can take it that it did not happen, because it cannot happen. Taken together, these things — to which other things may be added — mean that we can say these accounts simply cannot be taken as proof that the resurrection occurred.
And here we find ourselves standing at the edge of the philosopher Gotthold Lessing’s (1729-1781) famous “ugly broad ditch.” This term was coined by him in a short essay of 1777 called “On the Proof of the Spirit and of Power” (Lessing: Philosophical and Theological Writings, Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. 83-88) in which he argues that there is a “ditch” that cannot be crossed between history and what he calls “eternal truths.” This meant that for him, religious revelation in history was not possible, because certain historical truth simply cannot be demonstrated due to the reasons I have just outlined. Consequently, he feels able to state that the “accidental truths of history can never become the proof of necessary truths of reason.” For Lessing, the result of this was he became “convinced that the bible could not be trusted as a source of description of any truth, let alone the truth of God.” It goes without saying that Lessing would also have said that what is true of the Bible is true of all ancient scriptures from whatever religious tradition.
Following Lessing — as do I and the radical enlightenment religious/spiritual tradition such as the one in which the community where I am minister stands — this does not mean we need utterly to dismiss or wholly throw away these scriptures as being utterly useless, but it is to see them, not as incontrovertable proof of any religious truth, but simply as works of mythopoetry containing sometimes helpful, and quite beautiful, spiritual intuitions and insights from our forebears.
Of course, a stretch of Lessing’s “ditch” not only appears in religious settings but also whenever a person turns to old texts that claim to tell the truth about what happened many years ago. Whether we turn to an early historian like Herodotus (c. 484 – c. 425 BC), or to a later one like Christopher Hill (1912–2003), this will always-already remain true of every historian, even the most scrupulous modern, scientifically inclined of them. This is because they are always going to be engaged in seeking, not simply fixed historical facts, but what the events they are trying to describe meant for those who experienced them at the time and now means for those us looking back through history.
In the midst of all this skepticism, a claim is often made that eyewitness accounts of events are more trustworthy and intrinsically more reliable than any secondhand account, and so, wherever possible, we should always rely most heavily upon them. But, as anyone who has ever been called as a witness in a court, accurately remembering what really happened is not easy, and different eyewitnesses to the same event will many times tell very different stories to each other. What one sees and what what one doesn’t see in any given situation is quite remarkable; see, for example, the invisible gorilla experiment conducted at Harvard University in about 2000.
Given all this, it becomes understandable how photography began to be seen as a way to help us out. The great hope was that, somehow, it could reliably fix and freeze some historical moment which could later be used as proof that x, y or z had, in fact happened. At least initially, it offered us an improvement in many ways — especially when combined with eyewitness accounts — even though it always remained true that every photograph always needed interpreting. But, at least, it seemed that some kind of potentially verifiable, fixed moment in time could be produced. Moving film, of course, went a step further in providing some of the wider context needed to interpret what actually happened. Thanks to photography and film, although Lessing’s ugly broad ditch never quite disappeared I think it may reasonably be said that, for a while, the ditch considerably narrowed and we had in our possession a tool that, in the right hands and in the right circumstances, could, for a lot of the time, be trusted.
But then came photoshop and Artificial Intelligence (AI). But before we get to them it’s important to acknowledge that fraudulent manipulation of photographic images has been around since the beginning of photography. The earliest known example was in 1840 photograph when the photographer Hippolyte Bayard produced his “Self Portrait as a Drowned Man.” But think, too of Frank Hurley’s composite photograph made from three original negatives of a First World War battle underway in Belgium, or the five Cottingley Fairy photographs taken by Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths in 1917. However, these examples were, relatively speaking rare and certainly still very frowned upon. It also helped that to achieve convincing enough results a person needed access to some expensive kit and have great technical skills. All this meant that most photographs taken remained relatively untampered with.
But, today, photoshop and AI image manipulation — both of still and moving images — is now with us and can be used by anyone with the most minimal of skills, including, of course, the Princess of Wales. However, when used less naively and with more skills and the right, increasingly inexpensive and available kit, the kinds of pictures or films that can be manipulated or produced from scratch are of a kind that are capable of fooling millions upon millions of people — including you and me. In short Lessing’s once narrowing ditch has suddenly, and shockingly broadened, and become really, really ugly.
Holding all the foregoing in mind, to conclude today, let me ask you to carry out an Easter Day thought experiment. Imagine that this morning you had woken up to a news report containing a photo or film showing the resurrection of a person which was being presented to you as incontrovertible proof that this same person was the new messiah, whose teachings should be followed without question. Would you, could you, believe that to be true?
I suspect that most people listening to or reading my words will immediately answer with a resounding “No!” And, if this is the case, then I hope you can see that you must also answer with a resounding “No!” this Easter morning to anyone claiming that the accounts of the resurrection are incontrovertible proof of some religious truth.
So, if this is the case for you, where can you, this Easter morning, have any hope of finding some kind of religious or spiritual truth? Well, Lessing would reply that it can be only found in the “necessary truths of reason,” i.e. in those truths that reason tells us could not have been otherwise, no matter what the context. Consequently, the question I want to leave deliberately unanswered for you to ponder yourself, not only on this Easter Sunday, but for the rest of your life, is this:
When you contemplate the mythopoetic stories of the resurrection can you truly see in them anything that reason tells us could not have been otherwise, no matter what the context?
On your answer to this, a great many important, personal philosophical, religious and spiritual consequences are likely to depend . . .
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