Video 1 - Is Jesus Christ an actual historical person?
Video 2 - Did Jesus Christ rise from the dead?
Why is it that you should believe in the resurrection of Jesus?
The first problem that one has
to get around is the idea of miracles are impossible. Everybody believes in something whether
they have seen it or not. When you ask the atheist or skeptic have you ever
seen life evolve from a primordial soup? They will say no. When you ask them
have you ever seen a Big Bang that began the universe? They will say no. There
are things the skeptic believes that the skeptic has never seen. There are
things the follower of Christ believes they have never seen. Was anyone present
at the creation and formation of the world? No. Just because we have never seen
God create the universe does that mean God could never do that? Certainly not.
Once the skeptic denies the existence of God, then he says miracles are
impossible. But denying the existence of God is honestly
impossible and illogical if you look at all the historical evidence we have
today. If you can prove that God exists and we can, then you would understand
that God would use miracles on occasion to communicate a message to people that
He wanted them to understand. If God exists and he wanted to show the world
that Jesus Christ was the Messiah, what would you expect Him to use? Miracles.
Why are we dealing with the resurrection? How important is it that Jesus came
back from the dead? What would be the best way for God to show the message was
coming from something to provide supernatural, superhuman intervention so that
you could see this isn't a human message? That is, a message from God and not
fellow humans? A miracle. So then if you can prove God exists then miracles
make perfect sense.
1 Corinthians 15:14-17 "And if Christ is not risen, then our
preaching is empty and your faith is also empty. Yes, and we are found false
witnesses of God, because we have testified of God that He raised up Christ,
whom He did not raise up—if in fact the dead do not rise. For if the dead do
not rise, then Christ is not risen. And if Christ is not risen, your faith is
futile; you are still in your sins!"
Paul said if Christ didn't
come back from the dead, everything you Christians do is useless! But if Christ
did come back from the dead and you are following Christ, you will come back
from the dead.
Some of the Historical Facts:
FACT #1: After his
crucifixion, Jesus was buried in a tomb by Joseph of Arimathea. This fact is
highly significant because it means, contrary to radical critics like John
Dominic Crossan of the Jesus Seminar, that the location of Jesus’ burial site
was known to Jews and Christians alike. In that case, the disciples could never
have proclaimed his resurrection in Jerusalem if the tomb had not been empty.
New Testament researchers have established this first fact on the basis of
evidence such as the following:
1. Jesus’ burial is attested in
the very old tradition quoted by Paul in I Cor. 15:3-5:
"For I delivered to you as of
first importance what I also received: . . . that Christ died for our
sins in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the
third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to
Cephas, then to the Twelve.
Paul not only uses the typical
rabbinical terms “received” and “delivered” with regard to the information he
is passing on to the Corinthians, but vv. 3-5 are a highly stylized four-line
formula filled with non-Pauline characteristics. This has convinced all
scholars that Paul is, as he says, quoting from an old tradition which he
himself received after becoming a Christian. This tradition probably goes back
at least to Paul’s fact-finding visit to Jerusalem around AD 36, when he spent
two weeks with Cephas and James (Gal. 1:18). It thus dates to within five years
after Jesus’ death. So short a time span and such personal contact make it idle
to talk of legend in this case.
2. The burial story is part of
very old source material used by Mark in writing his gospel. The gospels tend
to consist of brief snapshots of Jesus’ life which are loosely connected and
not always chronologically arranged. But when we come to the passion story we
do have one, smooth, continuously-running narrative. This suggests that the
passion story was one of Mark’s sources of information in writing his gospel.
Now most scholars think Mark is already the earliest gospel, and Mark’s source
for Jesus’ passion is, of course, even older. Comparison of the narratives of
the four gospels shows that their accounts do not diverge from one another
until after the burial. This implies that the burial account was part of the
passion story. Again, its great age militates against its being legendary.
3. As a member of the Jewish
court that condemned Jesus, Joseph of Arimathea is unlikely to be a Christian
invention. There was strong resentment against the Jewish leadership for their
role in the condemnation of Jesus (I Thess. 21:5). It is therefore highly
improbable that Christians would invent a member of the court that condemned
Jesus who honors Jesus by giving him a proper burial instead of allowing him to
be dispatched as a common criminal.
4. No other competing burial
story exists. If the burial by Joseph were fictitious, then we would expect to
find either some historical trace of what actually happened to Jesus’ corpse or
at least some competing legends. But all our sources are unanimous on Jesus’
honorable interment by Joseph.
For these and other reasons,
the majority of New Testament critics concur that Jesus was buried in a tomb by
Joseph of Arimathea. According to the late John A. T. Robinson of Cambridge
University, the burial of Jesus in the tomb is “one of the earliest and
best-attested facts about Jesus.”
FACT #2: On the Sunday
following the crucifixion, Jesus’ tomb was found empty by a group of his women
followers. Among the reasons which have led most scholars to this conclusion
are the following:
1. The empty tomb story is
also part of the old passion source used by Mark. The passion source used by
Mark did not end in death and defeat, but with the empty tomb story, which is
grammatically of one piece with the burial story.
2. The old tradition cited by
Paul in I Cor. 15:3-5 implies the fact of the empty tomb. For any first century
Jew, to say that of a dead man “that he was buried and that he was raised” is
to imply that a vacant grave was left behind. Moreover, the expression “on the
third day” probably derives from the women’s visit to the tomb on the third
day, in Jewish reckoning, after the crucifixion. The four-line tradition cited
by Paul summarizes both the gospel accounts and the early apostolic preaching
(Acts 13: 28-31); significantly, the third line of the tradition corresponds to
the empty tomb story.
3. The story is simple and
lacks signs of legendary embellishment. All one has to do to appreciate this
point is to compare Mark’s account with the wild legendary stories found in the
second-century apocryphal gospels, in which Jesus is seen coming out of the
tomb with his head reaching up above the clouds and followed by a talking
cross!
4. The fact that women’s
testimony was discounted in first century Palestine stands in favor of the
women’s role in discovering the empty tomb. According to Josephus, the
testimony of women was regarded as so worthless that it could not even be
admitted into a Jewish court of law. Any later legendary story would certainly
have made male disciples discover the empty tomb.
5. The earliest Jewish Sanhedrin allegation that the disciples had stolen Jesus’ body (Matt: 28:15) shows that
the body was in fact missing from the tomb. The earliest Jewish response to the
disciples’ proclamation, “He is risen from the dead!” was not to point to his
occupied tomb and to laugh them off as fanatics, but to claim that they had
taken away Jesus’ body. Thus, we have evidence of the empty tomb from the very
opponents of the early Christians.
Matthew 28:11-15, Now while they were going, behold, some of the guard came into the city and reported to the chief priests all the things that had happened. When they had assembled with the elders and consulted together, they gave a large sum of money to the soldiers, saying, “Tell them, ‘His disciples came at night and stole Him away while we slept.’ And if this comes to the governor’s ears, we will appease him and make you secure.” So they took the money and did as they were instructed; and this saying is commonly reported among the Jews until this day.
Matthew 28:11-15, Now while they were going, behold, some of the guard came into the city and reported to the chief priests all the things that had happened. When they had assembled with the elders and consulted together, they gave a large sum of money to the soldiers, saying, “Tell them, ‘His disciples came at night and stole Him away while we slept.’ And if this comes to the governor’s ears, we will appease him and make you secure.” So they took the money and did as they were instructed; and this saying is commonly reported among the Jews until this day.
One could go on, but I think
that enough has been said to indicate why, in the words of Jacob Kremer, an
Austrian specialist in the resurrection, “By far most exegetes hold firmly to
the reliability of the biblical statements concerning the empty tomb.”
FACT #3: On multiple occasions
and under various circumstances, different individuals and groups of people
experienced appearances of Jesus alive from the dead.
This is a fact which is almost
universally acknowledged among Christian and secular New Testament scholars, for the following
reasons:
1. The list of eyewitnesses to
Jesus’ resurrection appearances which is quoted by Paul in I Cor. 15: 5-7
guarantees that such appearances occurred. These included appearances to Peter
(Cephas), the Twelve, the 500 brethren, and James.
2. The appearance traditions
in the gospels provide multiple, independent attestation of these appearances.
This is one of the most important marks of historicity. The appearance to Peter
is independently attested by Luke, and the appearance to the Twelve by Luke and
John. We also have independent witness to Galilean appearances in Mark,
Matthew, and John, as well as to the women in Matthew and John.
3. Certain appearances have
earmarks of historicity. For example, we have good evidence from the gospels
that neither James nor any of Jesus’ younger brothers believed in him during
his lifetime. There is no reason to think that the early church would generate
fictitious stories concerning the unbelief of Jesus’ family had they been
faithful followers all along. But it is indisputable that James and his
brothers did become active Christian believers following Jesus’ death. James
was considered an apostle and eventually rose to the position of leadership of
the Jerusalem church. According to the first century Jewish historian Josephus,
James was martyred for his faith in Christ in the late AD 60's. Now most of us
have brothers. What would it take to convince you that your brother is the
Lord, such that you would be ready to die for that belief? Can there be any
doubt that this remarkable transformation in Jesus’ younger brother took place
because, in Paul’s words, “then he appeared to James?”
Even Gerd Ludemann, the leading
German critic of the resurrection, himself admits, “It may be taken as
historically certain that Peter and the disciples had experiences after Jesus’
death in which Jesus appeared to them as the risen Christ.”
FACT #4: The original
disciples believed that Jesus was risen from the dead despite their having
every predisposition to the contrary. Think of the situation the disciples
faced after Jesus’ crucifixion:
1. Their leader was dead. And
Jews had no belief in a dying, much less rising, Messiah. The Messiah was
supposed to throw off Israel’s enemies (= Rome) and re-establish a Davidic
reign—not suffer the ignominious death of a criminal.
2. According to Jewish law,
Jesus’ execution as a criminal showed him out to be a heretic, a man literally
under the curse of God (Deut. 21:23). The catastrophe of the crucifixion for
the disciples was not simply that their Master was gone, but that the
crucifixion showed, in effect, that the Pharisees had been right all along,
that for three years they had been following a heretic, a man accursed by God!
3. Jewish beliefs about the
afterlife precluded anyone’s rising from the dead to glory and immortality
before the general resurrection at the end of the world. All the disciples
could do was to preserve their Master’s tomb as a shrine where his bones could
reside until that day when all of Israel’s righteous dead would be raised by
God to glory.
Despite all this, the original
disciples believed in and were willing to go to their deaths for the fact of
Jesus’ resurrection. Luke Johnson, a New Testament scholar from Emory
University, muses, “some sort of powerful, transformative experience is
required to generate the sort of movement earliest Christianity was . . . .” N.T. Wright, an eminent British scholar, concludes, “that is why, as a
historian, I cannot explain the rise of early Christianity unless Jesus rose
again, leaving an empty tomb behind him.”
In summary, there are four
facts agreed upon by the majority of secular scholars who have written on these
subjects which any adequate historical hypothesis must account for: Jesus’
entombment by Joseph of Arimathea, the discovery of his empty tomb, his
post-mortem appearances, and the origin of the disciples’ belief in his
resurrection.
Now the question is: what is
the best explanation of these four facts? Most scholars probably remain agnostic
about this question. But the Christian can maintain that the hypothesis that
best explains these facts is “God raised Jesus from the dead.”
In his book Justifying
Historical Descriptions, historian C.B. McCullagh lists six tests which
historians use in determining what is the best explanation for given historical
facts. The hypothesis “God raised Jesus from the dead” passes all these tests:
1. It has great explanatory
scope: it explains why the tomb was found empty, why the disciples saw
post-mortem appearances of Jesus, and why the Christian faith came into being.
2. It has great explanatory
power: it explains why the body of Jesus was gone, why people repeatedly saw
Jesus alive despite his earlier public execution, and so forth.
3. It is plausible: given the
historical context of Jesus’ own unparalleled life and claims, the resurrection
serves as divine confirmation of those radical claims.
4. It is not ad hoc or
contrived: it requires only one additional hypothesis: that God exists. And
even that needn’t be an additional hypothesis if one already believes that God
exists.
5. It is in accord with
accepted beliefs. The hypothesis: “God raised Jesus from the dead” doesn’t in
any way conflict with the accepted belief that people don’t rise naturally from
the dead. The Christian accepts that belief as wholeheartedly as he accepts the
hypothesis that God raised Jesus from the dead.
6. It far outstrips any of its
rival hypotheses in meeting conditions (1)-(5). Down through history various
alternative explanations of the facts have been offered, for example, the
conspiracy hypothesis, the apparent death hypothesis, the hallucination
hypothesis, and so forth. Such hypotheses have been almost universally rejected
by contemporary scholarship. None of these naturalistic hypotheses succeeds in
meeting the conditions as well as the resurrection hypothesis.
Now this puts the skeptical
critic in a rather desperate situation. A few years ago I participated in a
debate on the resurrection of Jesus with a professor at the University of
California, Irvine. He had written his doctoral dissertation on the
resurrection, and he was thoroughly familiar with the evidence. He could not
deny the facts of Jesus’ honorable burial, empty tomb, post-mortem appearances,
and the origin of the disciples’ belief in the resurrection. So his only
recourse was to come up with some alternate explanation of those facts. And so
he argued that Jesus of Nazareth had an unknown, identical twin brother, who
was separated from him as an infant and grew up independently, but who came
back to Jerusalem at the time of the crucifixion, stole Jesus’ body out of the
tomb, and presented himself to the disciples, who mistakenly inferred that
Jesus was risen from the dead! Now I won’t bother to go into how I went about
refuting this theory. But I think the example is illustrative of the desperate
lengths to which skepticism must go in order to refute the evidence for the
resurrection of Jesus. Indeed, the evidence is so powerful that one of the
world’s leading Jewish theologians, the late Pinchas Lapide, who taught at
Hebrew University in Israel, declared himself convinced on the basis of the
evidence that the God of Israel raised Jesus of Nazareth from the dead!
The significance of the
resurrection of Jesus lies in the fact that it is not just any old Joe Blow who
has been raised from the dead, but Jesus of Nazareth, whose crucifixion was
instigated by the Jewish leadership because of his blasphemous claims to divine
authority. If this man has been raised from the dead, then the God whom he
allegedly blasphemed has clearly vindicated his claims. Thus, in an age of
religious relativism and pluralism, the resurrection of Jesus constitutes a
solid rock on which Christians can take their stand for God’s decisive
self-revelation in Jesus.
by William Lane Craig
