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Let us examine this general class of theories, that postulate a near-total interdependence in the evidence against them. What kind of theories are they? What are their properties? Is it fair to characterize them as "crackpot" theories?

Now, note that such theories requires a conspiracy of some kind, almost by definition. Near-total interdependence means that what appeared to be many pieces of evidence was really just controlled by a singular false entity, which manufactured all the other pieces of evidence. Whether this source was a group of disciples or an elite Roman secret society or some space aliens or whatnot doesn't particularly matter - All such theories share the following traits.

The first thing to note about such theories is that they have very low priors probabilities to begin with. Indeed, among those skeptical of Christ's resurrection, a theory of this type is almost never their first choice. Few people want to be labeled a conspiracy theorist, after all. The skeptics want the resurrection testimonies to have been produced "naturally". They'll invoke known social phenomena such as myth generation over a long time, or religious fervor or delusion. They want such ordinary explanations to be a plausible way to generate the resurrection testimonies. Of course, what we've demonstrated thus far is that such explanations are in fact not plausible - that they're faced against a Bayes' factor of more than 1e54.

Maybe some people will say that they'd rather be a conspiracy theorist than believe in the resurrection. But even so, such people only say this as a backup, while still trying to argue for a more ordinary explanation.

So, conspiracy theories and other similar hypothesis have low prior probabilities, even in the mind of skeptics. This is appropriate, as conspiracies are in fact very rare.

Secondly, these 'near-total interdependence of evidence' theories are designed to ignore the evidence. They are chosen precisely because they allow their adherents to say "but that's exactly what they want you to think!" to any evidence you bring against them. It's important to note that this is not an accidental, fortuitous property of these theories. 'Near-total interdependence of evidence' is the defining feature of such theories, and it's precisely that feature which allows them to dismiss all the evidence which would weigh against more likely theories.

In combination, the above two facts mean that such theories cannot really hope to win the day. Since they start with a low prior, and are designed for ignoring the evidence, they cannot really hope to prevail - they need evidence to increase that low prior probability, but they're designed mostly to ignore evidence.

Note that, when a conspiracy theorist ignores evidence by saying "that's exactly what they want you to think!", this doesn't actually help the theory. It merely turns a piece of evidence against the theory into no evidence. Yes, the conspiracy theory has "explained" the evidence, but only about as well as the rival theory. The Bayes' factor therefore stays around 1, meaning nothing has changed on that front, and the probability for the conspiracy theory remains at its low prior value.

But, such evidence does still hurt they conspiracy theory, because the prior probability itself is now a lower value. A greater conspiracy that explains more - one that is more vast and has planted more evidence and covered it up better - is a priori less likely to have come about than a lesser conspiracy. So a piece of evidence that the conspiracy has to dismiss does still hurt the theory. The hope of the conspiracy theorist is that this harm in the prior probability will be less than the exponential rate of harm that a fully independent piece of evidence would normally cause.

So the most such a theory can realistically hope for is a kind of non-total loss, where they lose less quickly and hope to say "at least it's not impossible!" at the end.

Now, there are very particular kinds of evidence that does help them - the ones that specifically demonstrates a conspiracy. Something like a document from a secret meeting that lays out the nefarious master plan would work. But, of course, for a vast majority of these theories, such evidence does not exist.

So, given all these traits - given that they are highly unlikely theories that are designed to ignore the evidence, with little chance at any positive evidence for them - I think it's fair to call them crackpot theories.

In fact, in the specific case of Christ's resurrection, the situation is even worse for these theories - for there are many factors within the resurrection testimonies that are highly effective in working against them. We will examine these in the next post.