Introducing the Case for the Resurrection

Before he became a Christian, Chuck Colson played the role of special counsel to President Richard Nixon. He would serve time in prison for his role in covering up the Watergate scandal that would take down his president. Years later he would say this:

“I know the resurrection is a fact, and Watergate proved it to me. How? Because twelve men testified they had seen Jesus raised from the dead, then they proclaimed that truth for forty years, never once denying it. Every one was beaten, tortured, stoned, and put in prison. They would not have endured if it weren’t true. Watergate embroiled twelve of the most powerful men in the world, and they couldn’t keep a lie for three weeks. You’re telling me twelve apostles could keep a lie for forty years? Absolutely impossible.”1

Now that might seem like a typical statement suitable only for memes on social media. A false analogy, for sure! But, actually, I think Colson was on to something there.

Here I will only give an introductory sketch of the evidence for the resurrection of Christ. In doing so, I present to the reader (1) five indisputable facts, (2) the parties and possibilities, and (3) an evaluation of alternative explanations. I think we can all agree that there is a difference between facts and the interpretation of those facts.

This distinction is at least worth making because many will be unaware that the basic facts are denied only by the uninformed or the dishonest. Reputable students and teachers of history cannot get away with denying such things. At best they can only hide them. They can make sure such things are not covered in any treatment of ancient history. In fact, that is exactly what has happened. Consequently such a simple beginning is necessary.

Five Indisputable Facts

The first indisputable fact is that the historic claims of the Christian movement became crystalized in the middle of that first century. This is usually not listed as one of the indisputable facts in popular apologetics. That is a grave mistake because at the end of reading off any of the other indisputable facts, a good skeptic will naturally respond: “But how do we know that?” That might be a great question unless it were universally recognized among scholars that the central claims of the Christian faith (cross and resurrection) reached as far as Rome, as high as Caesar, as early as the 50s. Now this will take several forms, including the dating of the NT books and a few extra-biblical statements from Jewish and Roman writers, from the first century; but that will be the formula: as far as Rome, as high as Caesar, as early as the 50s.

Where do we derive this fact from? In the first place, the letters of the New Testament that are universally accepted as Pauline are those that are clearest about the resurrection—specifically Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, in which he writes this:

“he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep” (1 Cor. 15:4-6).

Clearly one thing Paul is doing here is daring anyone who wanted to falsify his claim to come down to Jerusalem and try. Secondly, we may consult the hostile Roman witnesses: Tacitus, Seutonius, Pliny the Younger.

“Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judaea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome.”2

“Since the Jews constantly made disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus, he  [Claudius] expelled them from Rome.”3

“They were in the habit of meeting on a certain fixed day before it was light, when they sang in alternate verses a hymn to Christ, as to a god.”4

The reason that these sources will be important becomes clearer when we come to the so-called “Developing Legend Theory” later on. This first fact doesn’t prove that Jesus rose from the dead. Not in itself. But if we can show that Christians were everywhere claiming that that Jesus rose, and that this claim at least was known as far as Rome, as high as Caesar, as early as the 50s, then all objections against the other four indisputable facts melt away. The days of 19th century higher criticism are over. The days when skeptics could get away with saying that the NT documents weren’t “really the New Testament” until Nicea have been blown apart by the past hundred years of real scholarship.

The second indisputable fact is Jesus of Nazareth suffered and died and was buried under Pontius Pilate. The governor even required verification of his death. The Scriptures are very specific here, as the “blood and water” (Jn. 19:34) from his side, when pierced by the spear, adds medical confirmation to his death. Then there was the tomb.

The third indisputable fact is that He was buried in the tomb of this Joseph of Arimathea. First, look at the language in Matthew’s account:

“When it was evening, there came a rich man from Arimathea, named Joseph, who also was a disciple of Jesus. He went to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus. Then Pilate ordered it to be given to him. And Joseph took the body and wrapped it in a clean linen shroud and laid it in his own new tomb, which he had cut in the rock. And he rolled a great stone to the entrance of the tomb and went away” (Mat. 27:57-60).

The Gospel writer really sticks his neck out here because Joseph wasn’t just any rich man. He was a member of the Sanhedrin. If we attempt to be really skeptical and challenge even that, we come to the punchline. If Joseph were not really a member of the Sanhedrin, this would be one of the simplest things in the world to refute for a hostile first century author. We don’t have such a writing. And we don’t have one because there was none. Hold that thought.

The fourth indisputable fact is that the body went missing from the tomb. The tomb was empty and remained that way. The earliest Jewish writings against the resurrection presuppose the empty tomb, just as Matthew records in Chapter 28:

“and when they had assembled with the elders and taken counsel, they gave a sufficient sum of money to the soldiers and said, ‘Tell people, ‘His disciples came by night and stole him away while we were asleep.’ And if this comes to the governor's ears, we will satisfy him and keep you out of trouble.’ So they took the money and did as they were directed. And this story has been spread among the Jews to this day” (vv. 12-15).

The empty tomb becomes an instant defeater later on.

The fifth indisputable fact is that the church preached this as central to the gospel from the start, and in the very city where the events took place. I mentioned the more than 500 new converts to this movement claimed to have witnessed his bodily appearance from the Corinthian passage. And the crucial words in Peter’s sermon at Pentecost to the Jerusalem crowds were these:

“Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs that God did through him in your midst, as you yourselves know— this Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men. God raised him up” (Acts 2:22-24).

Acts is dated prior to the Neronian persecutions of 64 because, you’ll notice, the book ends with the fate of Peter and Paul is still up in the air. From this final fact, others, equally undeniable, multiply. There was the changed lives and explosive growth of the Christian movement as a result. James is a really special case, being the brother of the Lord and not believing at first. But Paul is especially useful as evidence. Again the NT authors put their necks out. It is claimed that he sat under the famous Gamaliel (Acts 22:3), the grandson of Hillel, one of two leading first century Jewish authorities. Just as in the case of Joseph of Arimethea, so here, if this was false it was easily falsifiable. And yet we hear only silence. Even Bart Ehrman agrees that, “It is indisputable that some of the followers of Jesus came to think that he had been raised from the dead, and something had to have happened to make them think so.”5

The Parties and Possibilities

The idea here is to set forth our only logical possibilities for explaining these facts, and then doing some process of elimination. What is left is one explanation alone that is rationally credible. The parties to the empty tomb were of course (1) the disciples of Jesus, (2) the Jewish authorities, and (3) the Roman authorities. And as with any crime being committed, a jury will be asked to consider two main things: (a) ability and (b) motive.

So let us ask first: Could the disciples have stolen the body? All we need to do is consider their ability and motive. You may not know this, but the “guard” (Mat. 27:65)—the one that Pilate granted, was not a “single guard” as we might use that term. A Roman guard consisted of sixteen centurions. Also the imperial seal was placed at the entryway, and anyone breaking such a seal was to be executed immediately. Any guard falling asleep on the job would likewise receive the death penalty. In fact, the entire sixteen-man guard unit was executed if only one of the members fell asleep while on duty. That is why in Matthew 28:12 the Jewish leaders are able to bribe the guards and give their assurance. The guard needed it. That settled the ability question.

So why would motive even matter anymore! The answer is that elaborate conspiracy theories have come in to explain things. Could the disciples of Jesus have lived the rest of their lives the way they did if they knew that the resurrection wasn’t true? Think about this for a moment. You heard the opening statement by Colson. That only scratches the surface. Paul was beaten, stoned, shipwrecked, and finally beheaded. Peter was crucified upside down. John was lowered into boiling oil. And in forty years between these events and the destruction of Jerusalem, not one recantation. Not one defection. Not one shred of evidence of any of them taking it back, changing his story. That is a remarkable fact. So, yes, it is true that many people throughout history have died for a lost cause. But no one dies for something they know to be false. And the testimony about the risen Lord is as vivid years later as when it happened,

“That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life” (1 Jn. 1:1).

There are other parties involved that lend even more credibility to the New Testament accounts. For the sake of time we will just mention one: the women. Apologists will often say that the testimony of a woman was not admissible in a Roman court. That is not quite accurate, but it was given significantly less weight. That being the case, it was implausible, if the New Testament authors were any good at pulling off a hoax, to report that the first witnesses to the empty tomb and the risen Lord were women! Yet this is what we find:

“Then Jesus said to [the women], ‘Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee, and there they will see me’” (Mat. 28:10; cf. Lk. 24:10).

Evaluating Alternative Explanations

There are two “wrong tomb theories” — one in which the women went to the wrong tomb on that “first day,” and the other claiming that Jesus was buried in a shallow grave, his body being consumed by wild animals. In fact the Gospels are clear that Jesus was buried “in [as in very near to] the place where he was crucified … in the garden” (Jn. 19:41). So the answer to the women going to the wrong tomb is to take them to the right tomb. It was easily falsifiable. And as to the shallow grave theory, this still does not answer all of the claims of the eyewitnesses about Joseph’s tomb, nor the leading Jewish claim that the disciples stole the body.

There are two levels of a “conspiracy theory,” the first being the garden variety “disciples stole the body” and the other sometimes called “the Swoon Theory.” In both, the disciples are willfully deceiving both themselves and everyone else by their own level of participation. We have already dismissed the first as the most improbable. And this second theory — which I call the “Weekend at Bernie’s Theory” is equally ignorant of Roman practice. There was the aforementioned Roman guard and seal, but as to Jesus surviving the crucifixion, this ignores everything we know about it. Cicero records it as a drawn out, gruesome thing. The Roman butchers knew their business. They were well-trained executioners and would themselves be punished for failing.

Beyond that, if someone charged with insurrection in Judea survived his death sentence, the governor himself would be summoned to Rome. Even the arch-liberal theologian Adolf Harnack concluded, “The firm confidence of the disciples in Jesus was rooted in the belief that he did not abide in death, but was raised by God.”6 Modern liberal theology talked a lot about the myth in Scripture. Maybe the resurrection was something like that, they said: spiritually valuable but not real history. But this ignores how clearly the Jews knew the difference between history and myth:

“For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty” (2 Pet. 1:16).

There is also the “hallucination objection.” This theory recognizes the New Testament claims of multiple mass sightings claimed, and reasons: “Ah, but maybe these ‘sightings’ were really hallucinations!” Some have even cited an ancient form of drug use. However this defies everything we know from modern psychological study: (1) hallucinations typically don’t happen en mass; (2) they don’t originate in multiple locations as these sightings did; and (3) they are usually broken at some point. And besides all that, produced corpses tend to break hallucinations.

So we are right back to the central problem with alternative theories: Where’s the body? The empty tomb, for the Jews and Romans, was like a busted lid on Pandora’s Box. With that stone rolled away, there was no way to put the lid back on the Christian movement and so it exploded across the Empire over the next few decades in spite of intense persecution.

Finally there is the more sophisticated “developing legend” hypothesis. This one recognizes that the internal logic of the case for the resurrection is air tight — if that great cloud of witnesses from the first century is really authentic and if hostile witnesses really were silent. But what if the church suppressed those writings and records? This is the one that, I must admit, kept my own belief in suspense as I considered the question between the ages of 18 and 22. Can we really know if opposing evidence was not lost? The trouble with me is I always loved history, and as I learned more of it, I came across some basic problems. Could the Church have buried the opposition? Could the church have suppressed opposing writings?

Again, What church? It was illegal until the Edict of Milan in 312. It was split shortly after that: into five main areas on three continents. It was under invasion throughout the fifth century by the Huns, the Goths, and other barbarian tribes; and then finally by the spread of Islam by the seventh century. We are far too easily impressed by Spielberg movies and well-produced but light-on-citation YouTube videos. When it comes to real scholarship, it has to be confessed that there never was a time when “Christendom” had control over the territory that housed all the potential documents. The Roman Empire, which was teeming with writers hostile to the growing religion, spanned 2.2 million square miles from Britannia to the Indus Valley. The basic uncontested facts were, as we have seen, of the falsifiable kind. If there were writings that could refute those facts being known about in the first century, we would have those writings. We don’t—because there were none.

As one Christian apologist said,

“it would have been impossible for Christianity to come into being in Jerusalem if Jesus’ body were still in the grave. The Jewish authorities would have certainly produced it as the shortest and completest answer to the whole affair.”7

Concluding Thoughts

It is often objected after all this evidence, “Well, so what if he did rise from the dead — there are many claims to miracles among the world religions! Why does this make the rest of the Bible true? Or why does it mean Jesus is the only way?” The answer has to do with a fundamental rule which I will paraphrase from John Warwick Montgomery:

He who rises from the dead is in a unique position to tell us what it means.

And so to skeptic I say: The next time you pull off a resurrection, then I will be ready to listen to your explanation. But until then, Jesus has told us what the resurrection means for us all.

One of the greatest of English philosophers, John Locke, put it like this,

“Our Savior’s resurrection … is of so great [importance] that his being or not being the Messiah stands or falls with it: so that these two important articles are inseparable and in effect make one. For since that time, believe one and you believe both; deny one of them, and you can believe neither.”8

__________

1. Charles Colson, at Columbia Baptist Church Crusade: Reported in Washington Post article, September 28, 1983.

2. Tacitus. Annals of Imperial Rome. 15.44 — Note the context of Nero reacting to these events; ca. 64 A.D.

3. Suetonius. Lives of the Twelve Caesars.Claudius.25 — Note that Claudius expelled the Jews in 49 A.D.

4. Pliny the Younger. Letter to Trajan. x.96

5. Bart Ehrman, How Jesus Became God (New York: HaperOne, 2014), 182-83.

6. Adolf von Harnack, History of Dogma, II.13.3

7. William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith (Wheaton: Crossway, 1991), 260

8. John Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity, 60.