The Resurrection of Jesus Christ
I know of no fact in the history of mankind
which is proved by better evidence of every sort, to the mind of the fair inquirer,
then that Christ died and rose again from the dead.
– Thomas Arnold
The
resurrection of Jesus Christ is the most important aspect in the entirety of
the Christian faith. Christianity is not based upon the miracles that Jesus
performed, nor his teaching while here on earth. Christianity is not based on
the life of Jesus, nor the church body. Christianity is based solely on the
fact of the resurrection of Christ. The knowledge that Jesus Christ died and
then rose again defines the Christian faith and it is the only religion in the
world to be founded on a man who returned from death. It is also, perhaps one
of the most contentious points amongst skeptics and atheists. Over the years
they have created a slew of incredulous and preposterous accusations leveled at
the church concerning this topic of the resurrection of Christ. Throughout the
course of this paper I will show the absolute importance of the resurrection to
the Christian faith. In addition, I will show that the resurrection was God’s
intention for the plan of salvation all along and that the inevitable death of
Christ came as no surprise to any serious scholar of the Bible; least of all to
Christ, himself. I will attempt to show proofs concerning the death of Jesus
and his triumphant return. I will also bring up claims that have been brought
against the church concerning the resurrection and I will categorically address
them. I firmly believe that the claim for the resurrection of Christ can be
addressed from a logical standpoint as long as one will concede that the Bible
is a book of important historical facts and that, while someone does not have
to believe in its inerrancy, they do have to take into account its validity as
a collection of historical documents. I think that the case for the
resurrection is one that has been extremely well documented and discussed and
while I make no claims to offer anything original in the presentation of its
defense, it is my hope that I will provide a comprehensive and conclusive
series of arguments that even the most ardent skeptic will not be able to
easily dismiss.
The first
topic to address is the importance of the resurrection to the Christian
religion. While those who remain largely ignorant of the inner workings of
Christianity may say that the most important aspect of our faith are the
teachings of Jesus, it pales in comparison to his coming back from death. First
off, we can look to the Bible and see that the death and resurrection of Jesus
was something prophesied about centuries prior to the coming of Jesus. Isaiah
said in chapter 53 verse 5, “But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was
crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us
peace, and with his wounds we are healed.” This passage spells out the death of
the coming messiah. Other verses in this chapter intimate other aspects of
prophecy that would be fulfilled upon the day of the death of Christ. Jesus,
himself, told his disciples that it was in his future to die and be raised
again. There are several instances of this in the book of Mark. Mark 8:31 says,
“And [Jesus] began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things
and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be
killed, and after three days rise again.” In Mark 9:31, Jesus tells his
disciples, “The Son of Man is going to be delivered into the hands of men, and
they will kill him. And when he is killed, after three days he will rise.”
Again in Mark, 10:33-34, Jesus tells his disciples a third time about his
inevitable death and resurrection saying, “See, we are going up to Jerusalem,
and the Son of Man will be delivered over to the chief priests and the scribes,
and they will condemn him to death and deliver him over to the Gentiles. And
they will mock him and spit on him, and flog him and kill him. And after three
days he will rise.” Christ was trying to make it as clear as possible to his
disciples that a time was fast approaching during which he was to die and then
rise again.
It would be
all too convenient for a person to examine the teaching of Jesus and to look at
all that he said and to then only focus on his teachings, especially the ones
that have deeply humanitarian undertones. We all like the notion of doing unto
others as others do unto you, but the problem is that there is more to the
teachings of Christ and to simply ignore his other teachings is to invalidate
all of his teaching put together. C.S. Lewis, a famous Christian author and theologian,
addresses this notion directly when he wrote in his book Mere Christianity:
“I am trying
here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say
about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t
accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who
was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great
moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who
says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make
your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or
something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill
him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let
us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human
teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”
To believe anything that Jesus
says about any topic, person, or situation, we have to take in the whole
picture of the man called Christ. Jesus, himself, was convinced that not only
would he die, but that after three literal days he was going to rise again. So,
now it can be understood that the resurrection is important to the Christian
faith because without Christ raising from the dead it makes him out to be a
liar and cancels out the prophecies foretold about him. This would make the
foundation of our faith null and void. Therefore, the resurrection is essential
to the foundational make-up of the Christian faith.
There are
proofs that can be used to help support the validity of the resurrection of
Christ, with the first among them being the execution of Jesus. This is, by far
and away, one of the most undisputed facts in history. There are no serious
academic scholars who can disagree on this point, either Christian or secular.
The Romans were masters of death and when they ended a life, that person was
incontrovertibly dead. Christ, the man, was executed in front of a jeering
crowd, hung on a cross for at least nine hours and this was after being
whipped, beaten, and attacked by his fellow countrymen. When the spear pierced
his side, blood and water gushed out. This was a sign that his lungs had filled
up with water and that he had drowned while hanging on that cross. Also when
the spear went into his side it would have pierced the heart, so even if he was
somehow alive at that point, piercing his heart would have finished the job.
The centurions who stood watch had seen the face of death a multitude of times
and knew, with certitude that the man hanging on the cross before them was
indeed, dead.
The next
arena of proof comes from the fact that the tomb was empty on the third day,
after his death. There are a number of factors that support this truth, both logical
and historical. First is something that Lee Strobel calls the Jerusalem Factor.
This is the fact that sight of the empty tomb would have been instantaneously
recognizable to all the people in the region of Jerusalem. The sight of this
empty tomb helped to spur the growth of Christianity. Had that tomb not been
empty, then the opponents of this burgeoning religion would have simply been
able to point to the tomb that still encased the body of Christ dissuaded
believers. Also, the tomb itself did not become enshrined nor marked as a
resting place of a wise teacher and miracle worker. The reason that this did
not happen was because Jesus came out of that tomb. The location itself no longer
held anything of value, Jesus has risen and walked away, leaving the tomb just
a hole in the ground and no longer the final resting place of a respected
teacher. Lee Strobel also identifies something called the Criterion of
Embarrassment. This simply means that if someone were to fabricate history then
they would do it in such a way that it did not cause embarrassment for the
writer. In every single one of the Gospel accounts the tomb was first
discovered by women. Women, in the culture of this time, were not considered
credible witnesses. In fact women were not even permitted to be witnesses in a
court case because their testimony would have been considered unreliable. The
male authors of the Gospel accounts certainly would not have credited the
initial discovery to women if this had simply not been the case. Women were
reported as being the ones to make that first discovery because the discovery
of the empty tomb was true; and for no other reason. One can also look at the
reaction of the disciples when they were told about the empty tomb. They ran to
it to confirm for themselves, and they marveled at what they saw. This is not
the attitude of devious body thieves. The last bit of proof that points to the
fact that the tomb was empty is that the Roman government said it was empty.
They tried, in vain, to blame the disciples for stealing the body. The problem
was that the governor had put guards in front of the tomb to prevent this very
issue. The probability that the body would be stolen was brought to the
Governor’s attention after the death of Christ by the Pharisees. It is not
logical to assume that a bunch of blue collar fishermen could have somehow
overcome Roman centurions, knocked them senseless, rolled away a massive stone
covering the tomb, and made off with a heavy body through the streets of
Jerusalem, unseen. That position is illogical in the extreme. The issue then,
is not whether or not the tomb was actually empty; the issue is how the tomb
got to be that way.
The next bit
of proof that helps to solidify the fact of the resurrection is usually how
early we have the writings of this event. If a legend is going to be founded it
takes time for it to gain a solid foundation and following. However, although
the first scholars note that the first time the apostle’s creed was formally
written down was in the late third century, it is acknowledged that this creed
had been a verbal tradition of the early Christian community. Aspects of the creed
appear in writings just 25 years after the death of Jesus. Evidence points to
the fact that the creed was created and in existence in the early church within
a one-to-six year period of the purported resurrection of Jesus. This is not
indicative of how legends begin and the gap from event to tradition is far less
than in any classic mythos. There is also a large number of accounts written by
people who were contemporaries of Jesus; not documents that were written far
after the fact by third parties. The Gospel of Mark was the first of the
Gospels to be written. Mark is widely believed to have been John Mark, a friend
of Peter, and his book is full of personal stories taken from the apostle Peter,
himself. Matthew came next onto the scene and some believe that the Gospel of
Matthew was written by the disciple of Jesus of the same name. Although some
dispute this claim, there is no doubt that when the book was written it was
done at the time where many of the contemporaries of Jesus were still alive and
had many unique stories and accounts that are indicative of personal knowledge
of Jesus.
Luke’s Gospel
was next, chronologically, and written by a companion of the Apostle Paul. Luke
was a medical doctor and a man of science. He personally interviewed men and
women who knew Jesus directly. He wrote his books based somewhat off the
account of Mark while the rest of the content comes from firsthand
eyewitnesses. The last of the four synoptic gospels to be written was John’s.
No one really doubts the authorship of the Gospel of John; he was best friends
with Jesus and someone who knew Christ intimately. This last gospel appears a
mere 65 years after the death of Christ and by any historian’s standards, this is
a credible period of time for a work to be considered valid. Dr. Gary Habermas stated
that if you were to go forward 65 years after the death of Christ you could
find over 13 non-Biblical sources that speak of the resurrection of Christ. By
comparison, the very first literary work of history to write about the life and
times of Alexander the Great appears about 350 years after his death. The
resurrection of Christ was recorded so early in history and by such a wide variety
of people who were alive at the same time of Jesus that it seems acceptable to
say that the resurrection was remarkably well documented by a series of
trustworthy sources.
This brings
me to the last arena of proof that lends integrity to the argument in favor of
the resurrection – the abundant source of eyewitnesses. The sheer number of men
and women who observed the physical reappearance of Jesus Christ is staggering.
The documentation of the Apostle’s Creed, mentioned above, also points to a
group of people who personally encountered the risen Christ. There is also the
account of the Apostle Paul who wrote about the resurrection of Jesus after
spending copious amounts of time with those that walked with Jesus. The Book of
Acts depicts the disciples preaching about the resurrection to crowds of people,
just months after the ascension of Jesus into heaven. The aforementioned Gospels,
themselves, were written either by those who were eyewitnesses or were written
based on the testimony of eyewitnesses. Then, there is the testimony of those
that sat under the teachings of the apostles who verified that they had
witnessed the resurrection. Often times in history there will be one source of
a particular event, or works of history, that was written by people who did not
observe it firsthand. With the resurrection, there is an overabundance of men
and women, around 515 of them, who saw these events transpire with their own
eyes and who then wrote credible accounts of what they saw. There seems very
little doubt that Jesus Christ was walking and talking with his followers after
he was crucified and buried for three days.
Now that I’ve
offered both historical and logical proofs, I am going to address some of the
more popular objections to the historicity of the resurrection of Christ. The
first one is perhaps one of the easiest to dismiss, and that is that Christ
never really died; he simply passed out. As I mentioned before, the Romans knew
what they were doing when it came to executions and killings. To say that a
centurion did not know what a corpse looked like is akin to saying that a
doctor does not know what a sick person looks like. It is a weak argument at best.
Take into consideration that prior to his crucifixion, Jesus was scourged with
a whip 39 times as a precursor of him being brought to trial. Not everyone
survived this brutal form of torture; it alone killed many. After that he was
beaten, forced to carry a heavy cross on his bloodied back, and then nailed and
left to die, for nine hours. Crucifixion is an effective death sentence due to
the fact that a victim’s arms are raised at that angle for prolonged periods of
time, filling the lungs up with water, thus drowning the victim on dry land. If
the Roman guard on duty wanted to speed up the process and ensure the swift
death of a person hanging on the cross, he would have broken the legs of said
person. This was done in order to make sure that the person hanging there could
not use their legs to push themselves up in order to take a breath, prolonging
the inevitable. When they came to Jesus to break his legs and expedite the
process the guards discovered that he was already dead. To confirm this, they
pierced his side with a spear which would have reached into his heart. Out came
both blood and water, blood from nicking the heart, and water from the inside
of the lungs. To the guards on duty this meant, beyond a shadow of a doubt,
that the victim was indeed dead. Suppose for a moment, however, that somehow a
person was able to survive up until this point. They were able to survive the
flogging, the beating, and the time on the cross, in addition to the spear
piercing his side. Then let us examine the fact that Jesus was taken down off
of the cross, wrapped in roughly 100 pounds of linens, and then placed in a
dark cave with no food or water for three days. It strains credulity to think
that a person could simply walk out of that tomb on his own power and manifest
himself to his followers just days later. That person would, at the very best,
spend months recovering if they had survived at all, which is so unlikely as to
simply not even be a respected theory. The idea that Jesus somehow faked his
own death does not imply a conspiracy theory, because if Jesus never died in
the first place, he then must have been supernatural to survive all of that
torment.
Another
objection to the resurrection is that Jesus did not come back bodily, but
rather his resurrection was one of a spiritual nature. This is disproved by the
very accounts of the return of Christ. In Luke 24 Jesus eats food before the
disciples, a feat not easily accomplished by a spirit. Thomas said that he
would not believe unless he actually put his finger in the holes in Jesus’ hand
and feel the wound in Jesus’ side where he was pierced by the spear. Thomas,
much to his shame, got his wish and touched the physical body of Christ and
then he proclaimed Jesus as Lord. This, again, is not something that is
indicative of a purely spiritual being. Jesus physically embraced his followers
and sat with them at meals. If Jesus were a ghost then at some point his
disciples would have known it and recorded it, thus putting to bed the notion
of anything shy of a physical resurrection.
Some have
claimed that the disciples just hallucinated about seeing the resurrected Lord
and that this vision was brought on by grief and despair. This, however, is
simply not indicative of how hallucinations work. By its very nature a
hallucination is something that is private and personal to the individual
experiencing it. The thought that a shared vision could be had by over 515
people over the course of 40 days is ridiculous. From what we know about
hallucinations there is no possible way that that many people could have shared
the same psychotic episode. One psychologist was noted as saying that 500
people sharing the same hallucination would, in in of itself, be a bigger
miracle that the resurrection itself.
There are a
few more ludicrous opinions that people have tossed about over the years to
which I will not give special attention on the basis that they are absurd in
the extreme. One says that Jesus had a twin brother that took his place after
the death of Jesus. Some claim that the disciples simply went to the wrong tomb
and found the imposter tomb empty, which merely means that if that were the
case then Jesus just resurrected out of another tomb. One idea which has gained
some credence is the notion that Christians borrowed the idea of a resurrected
Lord from other works of literature. This is not a sound idea because outside
of Judaism at that time, there was virtually no concept of a resurrection at
all. The idea that someone could physically die and then come back to life was
outright rejected and there is no literature that gives stock to that concept.
What I
perceive to be the single largest objection to the resurrection is that it was
simply a hoax that the disciples fabricated in order to create a religion in
which they were the leaders and to trick the populace into falsely believing.
This seems to be an incredibly weak argument and I will explain why. First of
all, we know from the gospels that the disciples were not only simple men with
mostly blue collar jobs, but that they were not scholars and not even
particularly courageous men. For example, when Christ was going through the
ordeal of his trail and eventual execution, Peter was confronted by a young
girl who accused him of associating with the condemned man. Peter outright
rejected that he knew Jesus not once, but three separate times because he was
terrified of the consequences of admitting he was friends with him. This is not
indicative of a man willing to die for a lie. After reportedly seeing the risen
Lord, Peter spent the rest of his life preaching the truth of the risen God and
did so with power and authority. He did this until his own crucifixion, where
he was hung upside down because he did not want to be right side up, thinking
this was too close to the death of his savior. Doubting Thomas was someone who
rejected the possibility of a resurrected Lord until Jesus stood physically in
front of him as proof. He does not seem like a man who would travel to the far
corners of the world, to India to preach the news of Christ, yet that is what
most scholars believe he wound up doing. Thomas was eventually martyred for his
faith: Why would he give his life for a lie? John, the friend of Jesus and
author of the gospel by the same name, was exiled to an island to live out the
rest of his life in seclusion, apart from his friends because of his
proclamation of his faith. James refused to recant his faith and was beheaded
by Herod Agrippa. The apostle Andrew was reportedly hung on an olive tree to death.
Matthew was beheaded. Phillip was crucified. Bartholomew was flayed then
crucified. James the Lesser was thrown from the top of a temple. Simon the
Zealot was crucified. Thaddeus was beaten to death. Matthias was stoned to
death while being crucified. These do not seem like deaths that anyone would
envy, especially if they were being put to death for something they knew was a
lie. The Apostle Paul, who had a conversion on the road to Damascus, was
imprisoned for a portion of his life before being beheaded for refusing to
recant. Is it really reasonable to assume that these men were willing to give
their lives to serve a conspiracy?
It is hard to
imagine that if the disciples were not convinced of what they saw, if they did
not wholeheartedly believe that Jesus rose from the dead, that they would have
given their lives in such a fashion. This is not reasonable. This is not sane.
This logic is coupled with the fact that when Jesus appeared to these men, they
bowed down and worshiped him as the Messiah. Not only did the disciples do
this, but so did Jesus’ own mother and brother. In Matthew 12, Jesus’ mother
and brother come to fetch him and bring him home because they believe he was
spreading lies about himself. However, when he returned from the dead, they
fell at his feet and worshiped him. No mother in her right mind would mistake
her son for God, had he not done what Jesus had done. As members of the Jewish
faith, committing this act of blasphemy would have guaranteed them a place in
Hell. One also has only to look at some of the other practices put into effect
after the start of the early church to see that they were not troubled with the
old tenants of their faith. They switched the Sabbath from its traditional day
on Saturday to Sunday. The law is clear when it comes to the Sabbath, but they
did this because it was on Sunday that Christ rose from the dead. The institutions
of communion and baptism only make sense if one accepts that Jesus first died
and then rose again. All told, these actions are not suggestive of men who
placed their loyalty in a fabrication, rather these seem to be the actions of
men convinced of the truth and persuaded to do something about this new-found
knowledge.
Taking all of
the above into consideration, the historical veracity of the resurrection, its
crucial place in the center of the Christian faith, its abundance of witnesses,
its primacy of documentation, and its impact on the lives of the men and women
who were willing to die for the truth, it seems clear that there is more to the
story of the resurrection then just an elaborate lie. It would be easier to
discredit the presidency of George Washington on the basis of proof then it
would be to outright discount the proof in favor of the resurrection.
Christians should not be duped or fooled, so while it is true that it takes faith
to believe in the Bible, faith is not the only standard that we must adopt.
Having stated that, the Christian faith is founded solidly upon the same sort
of proof that we look to when we believe in anything that has happened in the
past, and it is far better documented than most incidences in history. As
Christ had no intention of leaving his faithful followers in the lurch and
consigning them to a lifetime of uneasy uncertainty, Jesus provided us with
ample proof and expects us to take that proof into consideration and to
strengthen our faith based upon that truth and knowledge. All of Christianity
hinges on the resurrection of Christ; all of his life’s work was fulfilled in
his returning from death in bodily form. Christians should be vigilant and
knowledgeable on all aspects of this tremendous event and we should not be
daunted nor intimidated into not offering up substantial evidence that backs up
what the Bible says.
