It's been rightly said that the scandal and the greatness of the Christian
religion is that it claims that God has revealed himself through the medium of
historical facts.
And what distinguishes Christianity, what sets it apart from other world views, is
that there's actually a test by which we can know whether it's true, and that's
the resurrection of Jesus.
A person can go and investigate Christianity
especially the question of the resurrection of Jesus. If they think it happened,
they have excellent reason to embrace the entire Christian faith. If Jesus did not come
back, there's not really a solid shred of evidence pointing to that, then you're
well within your rights according to the apostle to reject Christianity. So
Christianity's testable in that respect. You can investigate it because at its core
it has a certain question that's investable.
When we look at historical case
for Jesus' resurrection I think one of the best ways of going
about this is to take and start off with facts that are so strongly evidenced
that they have compelled even the majority of skeptical scholars who study
the subject to grant them as historical. And that kind of suggests that it's not
just because a Christian has bias that these things are accepted as true. It means
that the historical evidence is true even beyond a person's bias.
Let's look at the widely accepted historical facts and see where the
evidence points. In order for Jesus to have risen from the dead, three things
need to be true: he would need to be alive at point A dead at point B and alive
again at point C. And it turns out that the record in history of the existence
and the execution of Jesus is incredibly strong.
Well it's become kind of a fad on
the Internet to claim that Jesus never existed but this isn't something that is
typically held by scholars today. In fact, the number of scholars that would even
hold this position, I'm talking about
bona fide scholars who have PHD's in relevant fields like history or
biblical studies or religious studies,
you wouldn't find more than a handful of them living on earth right now who would
deny the existence of Jesus. I mean probably just as many as you would deny
the Holocaust.
In the ancient world, if you have two sources for something, two
independent sources, that's usually excellent and a lot of events rest on
two sources. A lot of events rest on one, but two is great.
Bart Ehrman lists 11 ancient sources for the crucifixion of Jesus. And to the
guys who say he never existed he goes, how do you deal with 11 sources? If
you just do normal history you can't disprove the fact that Jesus died.
It's called multiple attestation. We have too many sources, documents,
people, and not all of them Christian.
Virtually every scholar,
believer or non-believer, skeptic, concedes that Jesus was executed in the
first century 30-33 AD. You get laughed out of a major academic institution if you
claimed otherwise. In fact, the atheist
New Testament scholar gerd Ludeman says Jesus execution is an indisputable fact. John
Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg, probably next to Bart Ehrman, are the best known
skeptics in America. They both say in their own way in their own works Borg and Crossan,
that the fact that Jesus died by crucifixion is probably the best
supported fact in the ancient world. Now why would they concede that if they're
skeptics and they'd like to get a foothold and say the Christian
message isn't true? Why they say it's the best attested? Because it just is.
Now in order to determine whether Jesus was really alive at point C we need to look
at four essential facts and it's important to understand that the
following facts can be established without presupposing that the Bible is
God's Word. They're a matter of history. They're established by the records of both
Christian and non-Christian sources from the ancient world and they agreed upon
by both Christian and non-christian historians today.
The majority of New Testament
historians have come to accept as factual that his body was then interred in
a tomb by a member of the Jewish Sanhedrin whose name we actually
know, his name was Joseph of Arimathea. He was the man who buried Jesus of Nazareth.
Secondly, that that tomb was found empty by a group of
Jesus' women disciples on the Sunday morning following the crucifixion. And
again the name of Mary Magdalene is always attached to that account of the
discovery of the empty tomb. Thirdly, that thereafter various individuals and
groups of people experienced appearances of Jesus alive after his death. And
finally, that the original disciples suddenly and sincerely came to believe,
despite every predisposition to the contrary, that God raised Jesus of
Nazareth from the dead.
Now, some people say, well sure anyone could make that
claim. But what we're saying is that they really believed that they saw Jesus.
Whether these were hallucinations or not, that's a separate question, but the
historical fact is that this wide spectrum of historians acknowledge that
the disciples really believed that they were appeared to by Jesus. So from there
we have to account for what led the disciples and Paul to believe that Jesus
had been raised from the dead and had appeared to them. What were these
experiences they were having. Now of course we can't get into a time machine
and return to the past and see what they actually saw to experience what they
experienced. But we can look at various options.
Some will argue that Jesus' body was stolen.
Why would the disciples have genuinely believed he appeared to them if they'd stole the body?
Bigger question yet, why would Paul believe Jesus had appeared to him if the body was
just stolen? What explanation is there?
How do we interpret the conversion of Paul and
James? How we interpret those four facts that the wide majority of scholars take
for granted? How do we interpret that? Do we interpret that naturally or do we interpret
that supernaturally?
The next theory that you often hear is that they hallucinated. That disciples who had been
with Jesus for so long, spent so much time with him, they really wanted to see
Jesus alive. So they hallucinated. It's a common psychological phenomena, which is true.
People who love others will sometimes see them after they're dead. But 500 at once?
And all the disciples, to the point where they were willing to die? It doesn't quite fit. And once again,
Paul, what we do with Paul? Why did Paul hallucinate
the risen Jesus? It doesn't make sense. So there are no naturalistic explanations for
the resurrection that fit nearly as well as the resurrection itself. There's a lot
of problems with hallucinations. Probably no theory has more refutations than hallucinations.
For example, the majority of scholars today believe the tomb is empty, but
hallucination is a full-tomb-theory not an empty-tomb-theory. If the disciples saw
hallucinations, there should have been somebody inside the tomb. Now the problem is you've gotta argue
for two theories. And the more theories you have to string together to
explain these facts the less plausible it is, the less weight it should carry
in causing you to believe one way or the other.
Why do many scholars today not conclude in the resurrection is because they
unfortunately preclude supernaturalism before they even look at the evidence. If you
look at the evidence without precluding supernaturalism then the best explanation
for the events is the resurrection. All the theories about what happened to the
body but one have fatal problems. The only problem with the one theory that
actually explains it is you have to believe a miracle. But
this isn't some random dude in some miscellaneous place that we're saying
rose from the dead. It's a person who's coming had been prepared for by
Providence and predicted by prophecy for two thousand years. A person whose
friends kept asking themselves what manner of man is this
and being forced to answer it in theistic terms. It's the reassertion
of the life of someone who had already shown himself to be sovereign over life
and death. If there's ever anybody of whom we could believe that miracle
happened, it is this man, it is Jesus of Nazareth.