Four Facts about the Resurrection

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But if you would, turn with me tonight to 1 Corinthians chapter 15. And we may refer to some verses through this presentation, but for the most part, we’re really just going to look at one verse tonight and then talk about these four facts about the resurrection. And that verse really starts us off and gives us a view we can talk about.

I’ve written down at various times four big reasons why the resurrection should matter to Christians, why we should be concerned about it, but we’re not going to go into all those tonight because we just wouldn’t have time. Suffice it to say, 1 Corinthians chapter 15, and you can read around this verse, and it tells more about the resurrection, but in verse 17 it says, and if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain, ye are yet in your sins. And that really is the biggest reason to me why the resurrection should matter, why we should care about what I’m talking about tonight, is that if the resurrection didn’t really happen, and there are some people out there, some churches out there, who claim to be Christians, claim to follow Christ, but think, well, we’re too reasonable, we’re too enlightened to believe the resurrection really happened.

What is the point of being a Christian or following Christ if there’s no resurrection? If he did not rise again as the Bible said he did, then what else is the Bible lying about? How do we really have any proof that he was able to forgive the sins he claimed to forgive on the cross.

Anybody just about could get himself executed, but it took God in human flesh to be executed on the cross and then to rise again on the third day. So if we want to know with assurance that Jesus Christ, that his death was able to atone for our sins, the resurrection is the proof of that. And if we surrender, if we capitulate on the story of the resurrection, we really have no basis for our faith.

But the fact is, if the resurrection occurred as the Bible says that it did, if the resurrection occurred as the Bible says it did, then we should have, there is no doubt in my mind who Jesus Christ is, that he was who he said he was. For him to say that he was going to die and rise again in three days, and then actually to do it, that is completely unique in all of recorded history. It’s completely unique.

And so we have to go and ask ourselves then the question, is the resurrection based on fact? And I believe it is. We’re going to talk tonight about four facts that I believe are backed up by evidence.

But if these four facts are true, then the resurrection happened as the Bible claims that it did, and then Jesus Christ is exactly who he claims to be. And I’ve said many times before that Christianity, you know, the resurrection is sort of the hill that Christianity fights and dies on. It either stands or falls on the resurrection, And it’s just our luck that the resurrection is the best attested fact of all of ancient history, the best attested event of all of ancient history.

And so we start with fact one. And the first fact is that Jesus’ existence and death are historically verifiable. There was a man named Jesus of Nazareth, and he did die on the cross the way the Bible says he did.

Now, I’ve heard at times people say, and these are usually people who like to fancy themselves historians, but really they’re not. On the internet today, everybody’s an expert on everything, don’t you know? There are people who will say, well, Jesus was a myth.

His whole existence was a myth. Everything the Bible says about him was a myth. Now, we, of course, don’t believe this.

We believe what John chapter 1 says, that the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory as the glory of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. That we’ve seen Jesus Christ, God in human flesh, that he walked the earth. And what we need to understand, first of all, is that modern scholarship admits that Jesus Christ was a historical figure.

If you hear people among your friends and family say, you know, begin to criticize your faith because they say, well, Jesus Christ, he may never have even existed. I have not watched it, but I’ve seen that there’s a documentary out there called The God Who Wasn’t There, and supposedly is about the whole premise that Jesus Christ never even existed. That’s not the case.

D. James Kennedy, some of you may remember him. Before he died, he was on TV and radio.

And I won’t say that he’s a non-biased observer, very solid evangelical Christian, but he wrote in a book called Why I Believe, he said, the evidence for the historicity of Christ, that means Christ being historical, is so great that I know of no historian in the free world who would dare place his or her reputation on the chopping block by denying that Jesus Christ ever existed. And this first part, there are going to be quite a few quotes because we’re looking at some of the historical evidence. But he said, basically, there’s nobody in the free world, no serious historian, who would be willing to make a laughingstock of themselves by claiming that Jesus Christ never existed.

And then there’s a man named F. F. Bruce, who was a professor of biblical criticism at the University of Manchester in England, who said, whatever else may be thought of the evidence from early Jewish and Gentile writers, as summarized in this chapter in the preceding one, it does at least establish for those who refuse the witness of Christian writings, the historical character of Jesus himself.

And he says, this is what’s important. Some writers may toy with the fancy of a Christ myth. They may play around with the idea that Jesus Christ was just a myth, but they do not do so on the ground of historical evidence.

The historicity of Christ is as axiomatic for the unbiased historian as the historicity of Julius Caesar. It is not historians who propagate the Christ myth theories. And what he’s saying there is the existence of Jesus Christ, his life and his death are just as rooted in historical fact as that of Julius Caesar.

If we are going to say, well, Jesus Christ was just a myth based on what evidence there is, Julius Caesar, ladies and gentlemen, was also a myth. And when we hear people say, well, Jesus Christ didn’t really exist, it’s not the historians who say that. Serious historians do not dispute the fact that Jesus Christ existed and that he lived in Galilee, he lived in Jerusalem in that area in the first century, and that he had a following and that he died the way the Bible said.

It’s easy for historians to say that now, but we go back a little further and ancient sources document Jesus’ life and death. There are people who wrote within a hundred years of Jesus’ death or so who say this is exactly how it happened. And you may say, well, a hundred years is a long time.

Well, not so in ancient history. We didn’t have CNN and the internet and people writing about things as they happened and all of those things surviving today. Historians usually worked at the behest of the government, did their work later on, and recorded things.

So for a hundred years, I mean, that’s pretty good for any ancient figure. But we’ve got Pliny the Younger, who was a Roman judge, and he says, he writes about Jesus Christ and those who followed him, said, those who denied that they either were or had been Christians upon their calling, excuse me, upon their calling on of the gods after me, and upon their offering wine and incense before your statute, which for this purpose I had ordered to be introduced in company with the images of the gods, moreover, upon their reviling Christ, none of which things it can be said as are really and truly Christians be compelled to do, these I deemed it proper to dismiss. And what that means is he’s writing to the emperor and saying there are people who will refuse to bow down to your statute.

And we know that if they’re accused of being Christians, if they will bow down to your statue and they will revile Christ, then we know they really weren’t Christians. He said, because the Christians are, the people who really are Christians are absolutely convinced that Jesus Christ was real and Jesus Christ was God. And he doesn’t, he’s writing shortly after the fact and doesn’t dispute their claim that Jesus Christ was real. Now he disagreed with their, with their belief that he was God, but he didn’t dispute the fact that Jesus Christ was real. And he talks about these earliest Christians being so convinced that they were willing to die for what they professed to believe.

Then there’s a man named Suetonius, who was a Roman historian. And he said, as part of a longer quote, said, since the Jews constantly made disturbances at the instigation of Christus, he expelled them from Rome, speaking of the emperor. And what he says here is he records that there was a man named Christus who got the Jews so stirred up that the emperor had to intervene and had to deal with the Christians.

And so he writes about the existence of this man, Christus. He doesn’t say he was a myth. He says he was a real person whose teachings had the people so stirred up.

Tacitus, who was a Roman senator and historian, said hence to suppress the rumor that he had burned Rome, Nero falsely charged with guilt, with the guilt, and punished with the most exquisite tortures, the persons commonly called Christians who were hated for their enormities. They had grown to be so big that Nero hated them and used them as a scapegoat when he was accused of burning Rome, and he instead decided to blame and torture the Christians. He said, Christus, here again, Christus, they called him that in Latin, Christus, the founder of that name, was put to death as a criminal by Pontius Pilate.

Notice here he does not say he was alleged to have been put to death. This Roman historian records it and says, Christus was put to death as a criminal by Pontius Pilate, procurator of Judea, in the reign of Tiberius. Now that’s exactly what the Bible says.

But the pernicious superstition, that evil superstition, those wicked beliefs of the Christians, broke out again, not only through Judea where the mischief originated, but through the city of Rome also. Now that kind of goes to what we were talking about this morning, that try as they might, they couldn’t stop the word of Christ from spreading. that malicious superstition broke out again from time to time.

Then there’s Josephus. You notice that none of these people I’m quoting are Christians. These are Roman and Jewish and Greek sources who were not friends of Jesus Christ, but still record that he existed.

He was a real person. He’s a historical figure. Josephus, who was a Jewish military leader and a Roman historian, wrote, and now parts of this quote are, we think Christians probably well-intentioned, but wrong Christians messed with it later, but I’m going to explain to you what’s involved here.

The quote we have from the ancient sources says, Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man, for he was a doer of many wonderful works, a teacher of such men as received the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews and many of the Gentiles. He was the Christ. And when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him, for he appeared to them alive again the third day, as the divine prophets had foretold these, and 10,000 other wonderful things concerning him, and the tribe of Christians so named for him are not extinct at this day.

Now that doesn’t sound like a Jewish perspective. We know Josephus never converted to Christ, and so there are some things in there that as I’m reading it, I’m thinking some things in there don’t sound like Josephus. And I went through, excuse me, and started underlining things that I think that doesn’t sound like Josephus.

That sounds like it was messed with later. And then come to find out later on, Other historians have dug through the records and gotten to the originals of what Josephus says, and it matches up with what I was assuming. So I was proud of that.

But let me read to you out of that what he probably actually said. Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, he drew over to him both many of the Jews and many of the Gentiles. And when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men among us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him.

And the tribe of Christians so named from him are not extinct at this day. And you may say, well, you take out the stuff about him being Christ or about the resurrection. Well, yeah, Josephus didn’t believe those things.

And my belief in the resurrection is not based solely on Josephus anyway. But this tells us Josephus, who was the foremost historian of the Jews in that day, records that Jesus Christ was a real person. He really was crucified under Pilate.

And we’re getting to the end of our quotes here. There’s a man named Marabar Sarapayan. I have no idea if I’m pronouncing that right, but he wouldn’t be able to pronounce my name either.

He was an Assyrian historian during that time and says, For what benefit did the Athenians obtain by putting Socrates to death, seeing that they received as retribution for it, excuse me, famine and pestilence? Or the people of Samus by the burning of Pythagoras, seeing that in one hour the whole of their country was covered with sand? So he’s talking about how societies at different times had put wise men to death.

And he says, Or the Jews by the murder of their wise king, seeing that from the very time their kingdom was driven away from them. For with justice did God grant a recompense to the wisdom of all three of them. For the Athenian died by famine, and the people of Samus were covered by the sea without remedy, and the Jews brought to desolation and expelled from their kingdom are driven away into every land.

Now there were a lot of people who claimed to be the Messiah. There were a lot of people who had something of a following. There were a lot of people who were even killed for claiming to be the Messiah.

but Jesus Christ is the only one, I think, with a significant enough following that he would have been recorded as the wise king of the Jews by outside sources, and it says they killed him. Now, any one of these quotes on their own, I don’t think would be enough to establish that Jesus Christ was a historical figure, but you put them all together, and it becomes too much evidence to ignore that he really existed in history. Some of the early Jewish writings, some of their Talmud, which they use to interpret the scriptures and sometimes record history.

The Babylonian Talmud says on the eve of the Passover, Yeshua was hanged. Now that’s very similar to the Hebrew term for Jesus, which is Yeshua, would have been his Hebrew name. Yeshua was hanged.

For 40 days before the execution took place, a herald went forth and cried. He is going forth to be stoned because he’s practiced sorcery and enticed Israel to apostasy. anyone who can say anything in his favor, let him come forward and plead on his behalf.

But since nothing was brought forward in his favor, he was hanged on the eve of the Passover. Now that doesn’t exactly match up with what the Bible says, but we see in there, they affirm there was a man named Yeshu who was accused of false teachings and who ended up being, even the Bible says that he was hung on the cross or hanged on the tree on the eve of Passover. Now that matches up with the crucifixion story pretty well.

Then there’s one more quote here. This is the last of the long quotes I have on him being a historical figure. Lucian of Samosota, who was a Greek writer, said, Furthermore, their first lawgiver persuaded the Christians that they are all brothers of one another after they have transgressed once, for all by denying the Greek gods and by worshiping that crucified sophist himself and living under his laws.

So he refers to a crucified philosopher who became a lawgiver to the Christians by teaching that they were all brothers. And he’s writing about this as a historical person. Who could he be talking about if anybody would like to hazard a guess there?

So we see all sorts of historians writing things that indicate Jesus Christ was a real historical figure. And if you think, well, that’s it, just those few quotes, I don’t remember how many I gave you, six, seven, eight, somewhere in there. For a historical figure, like I mentioned this morning, For a person in ancient history who never wrote a book, never commanded an army, never held political office, that’s pretty incredible that all of those ancient sources would write about him.

In our day and time, you can go write a book much easier than you could back then. If you can’t get published, you can write things on the internet. People write all the time.

They didn’t write as much. They didn’t record as much in ancient history. And for this amount to have been written about him, pretty good indication he was a historical figure.

So we’ve got that historians today say that he’s a real figure. We’ve got historians in ancient times saying he was a real figure. We talk about his death, and the biblical accounts of his death are consistent with what we know about history.

And people have tried to argue crucifixion. Yeah, that didn’t really happen. Well, the Bible says he was beaten.

The Bible says that he was scourged. And as I said, Isaiah prophesied that he would be beaten beyond recognition. And this certainly falls in line with what the Romans did.

There was the scourging. The Bible says Jesus was severely beaten by the Romans. Well, Romans were known to have engaged in a practice of scourging or flogging their prisoners before they would execute them.

Because you don’t want to just kill them. You want to make sure they suffer really, really badly beforehand. And under Roman law, non-citizens could be subjected to this practice where a man would be tied to a post and beaten with a leather whip.

And a lot of times this leather whip would have things embedded in it where it would grab hold of the flesh of the back, and rip it open. And that’s exactly the kind of thing that the Bible describes. And what I have discovered is the one doing the whipping called the lictor would inflict as many blows as possible without killing the prisoner.

And the Romans were very, very good at this, or very, very bad, depending on how you want to look at it. They were good at being bad. They were very effective at beating people as much as they possibly could just to the verge of death, but without actually killing them.

And this is really consistent with what we see the Bible describing. The Bible doesn’t give us the sense of fairy tale kind of things. It describes it as it actually would have happened for a man to be crucified under the Romans.

So there’s the scourging and then there’s the crucifixion itself. One of the charges that has been leveled against Jesus is that they accused him of saying that he was the king of the Jews. And the Bible tells us in three different places that this was actually inscribed over his head when he was crucified.

Jesus of Nazareth, king of the Jews. So this wouldn’t have only offended the Jews because they were upset, as we’ve talked about before, the Pharisees hated him, but it would have made him an enemy of Rome. You know, when Rome is in charge, you’re only in charge under Rome if Rome says you are.

And for somebody to come along and make the claim of being king of the Jews, which is actually a claim somebody else made for him, that would have made Rome and Jesus enemies. and crucifixion was a, you all know about crucifixion. It was a horrific, painful, humiliating method of execution.

It was basically the worst thing they could think of to do to somebody and it was generally reserved for the most despised, the most hated of Rome’s enemies and that would include someone like Jesus who was considered the potential leader of a revolt. They would have had no problem saying, you know, we don’t really care what you do as long as you respect Roman authority, but when you start having a following and people saying you’re king of the Jews, you’re going down. And so the crucifixion, the scourging and the crucifixion are consistent with what we know about Jesus and consistent with what we know about history.

And so the biblical accounts of his death even fit in with what we know about history. And the biblical accounts of his death are consistent with what we know about medical science. And we’ve got here the issues surrounding him sweating blood, first of all, is consistent with medical science.

I have never seen that happen. And it sounds like it’s so bizarre that how could that really have happened? But it’s actually a, when Jesus prayed in the garden right before he was arrested to be taken and crucified, he prayed in the garden and he sweat drops of blood.

Now folks, this is not a fairy tale. This is an actual medical condition called hematidrosis. And there’s a man named Alexander Metherill who is a doctor and a consultant to the National Institutes of Health who said that severe anxiety causes the release of chemicals that break down the capillaries and the sweat glands.

As a result, there’s a small amount of bleeding into these glands and the sweat comes out tinged with blood. It would be the same thing happening, say, if you got hit really hard and had a bruise. Well, the impact breaks down the cell walls into those capillaries and blood is released.

Well, here it’s happening chemically because of the stress you’re under and that chemical breaks down the tissue and blood seeps into the sweat glands. It only happens during severe, severe anxiety like Jesus knowing what he was about to go through, but it is a documented medical condition called hematidrosis. And I’m sure they didn’t know about hematidrosis.

Certainly probably hadn’t studied it a whole lot when the gospel writers wrote about it, but it’s consistent with what we now know about medical science. So many times the Bible has been ahead of where history and science have been at the time. Then there’s the blood loss.

Now, of course, he would have lost massive amounts of blood through the scourging before he even got to the cross. He would have been suffering from what was called hypovolemic shock. And hypovolemic shock just means the shock that your body goes through when you experience a great deal of blood loss.

And there’s extremely low blood pressure that’s involved in that. And because of that, your heart begins to race very rapidly to try to keep up with pumping enough blood when there’s not enough blood there. And of course, you’re going to be extremely, extremely thirsty as a result of your body trying to replenish the fluids that have been lost. Now this would explain why Jesus would have collapsed on the way up to Calvary, why they would have had to call Simon of Cyrene up to carry the cross for him the rest of the way, and it would explain why he would cry out from the cross, I thirst. He was obviously going through hypovolemic shock before he ever got to the cross.

And so the fact of him stumbling on the road and someone else having to carry his cross, That’s not just an incidental detail to the story. That’s consistent with what we know from medical science would be happening to somebody going through this. And then there’s the time of death.

How on earth would Jesus know to cry out that it’s finished? From the cross the instant before he died. I mean, the Bible says he cried out, it is finished, and then he gave up the ghost. He was gone after that.

So he’s hung on the cross for about six hours. And that only includes the actual time on the cross. That doesn’t include everything he went through up to that point.

And yet all the suffering he’d gone through, all of the blood loss that he’d gone through, through the scourging, all the struggling to breathe on the cross, which is another thing we’ll talk about, the asphyxiation he went through on the cross, it seems unlikely that through all that he would have known exactly what the time of his death was. And yet we know from medical science that to be hung on the cross, you don’t actually die from blood loss. I was surprised years ago when I first started studying this to find this out.

You don’t die from blood loss, you die from suffocation because you’re being hung in this position. I can’t even do it with a suit jacket on, but you’re hung in this position with your arms behind you and raised above you. And it’s hard for me to even breathe in that position.

I can’t imagine being held there by nails for six hours. And every breath he would take, the lungs being held in that position would fill up with fluid and it puts stress on the lungs. And to breathe, he would have to push against the nails in his feet and pull up on the nails on his hands and pull up for every breath.

And as he was held in that position and he wasn’t getting enough oxygen, this Dr. Methrol says that it was an agonizing slow death by asphyxiation. And as he went through it, the person would slow down his breathing and would go into something called respiratory acidosis where the carbon dioxide in the blood would dissolve.

The blood would get more acidic. This would cause the heart to beat irregularly and you would end up dying of cardiac arrest. And and then stop it, Jesus would know it’s finished. It’s not inconceivable based on the way someone dies in crucifixion that Jesus Christ would have known the exact moment of his death.

So his life and death are historical fact. We know this. I mean, modern historians don’t really dispute this.

Ancient historians record it. What we know about his death on the cross is consistent with medical science and with history. But that’s the first thing that we’ve got to prove if Jesus Christ wasn’t a real historical figure, he couldn’t very well die and rise again from the dead, could he?

So we’ve got Jesus established by history and corroborated by science. We’ve got him living and dying on the cross. So we come to the point in the story where he’s lived and he’s now been on the cross the way the Bible says, and he’s dead.

So what happens from there? Well, a lot of times we skip the part and we just go to the empty tomb. There are all sorts of things that could have happened in the meantime.

He could have not really been put in the tomb, and they could have faked the resurrection. So fact number two is that Jesus was buried, and his tomb was empty after three days. Now, a big problem with demonstrating the resurrection, some people are going to want proof.

There are people who you could say good morning to, and if you don’t prove it, they’re not going to believe it. We don’t have the record of anybody actually seeing Jesus rise from the dead. Not only is there not a video camera in the tomb, which seems to be the only way some people would believe it, And even then they’d probably say the film was doctor.

But there was not a video camera in the tomb. And nobody, not even in the Bible, did they claim, yeah, Mary was there and saw him actually step up off the slab and put the grave clothes aside. Nobody saw the actual resurrection.

So we have to infer from the facts that we have. And so we have first fact Jesus lived and died, as the Bible said he did. Fact number two, Jesus was buried and then his tomb was empty after three days.

And some of the reason we think that he’s buried is that the earliest Christian sources affirm that Jesus was buried. And folks, just because somebody was a Christian does not mean we automatically have to discount everything that they say about the resurrection. There’s this idea that, oh, because the source is a Christian, well, obviously they’re going to have an agenda.

You know what? Everybody who writes about anything has an agenda. Doesn’t mean it’s a bad agenda.

When I say good morning to you when you come in here, I have an agenda. Now, it’s that I like you and I want to greet you. That’s my agenda.

Everybody has an agenda for everything they do, and if we can just get past that, it doesn’t mean everybody’s automatically lying. And the earliest Christians, they didn’t just say it. They were convinced that Jesus Christ was buried.

If he wasn’t buried, the empty tomb means nothing. And so some people have questioned this because they say crucified criminals were never given proper burials. A lot of times, crucified criminals were either left on the cross there for the birds to feed and as a warning to other people, or they were taken out and thrown in the trash heap.

And so for early Christians to say, well, he was buried, if we think that always they were just discarded, it doesn’t make sense. And people have said, well, they are never, ever buried. Well, it was rare for crucifixion victims to be buried, but it wasn’t impossible.

It wasn’t that it never happened. And we know this because in 1968, a Greek archaeologist named Vasilios Tsapharos was excavating in Jerusalem and discovered the tomb of a wealthy first century Jew named Yehohanan ben Hakko. And I can spell that for you later if you want it, because I probably didn’t pronounce it right.

But he had been crucified and then buried, and his bones were discovered in the tomb in an ossuary, in a funeral box, discovered with the Roman spike still embedded in his foot. The spike was still there in the bones. And you can actually see, you can see pictures of it online.

Apparently when they nailed him onto whatever cross he was crucified on, the spike hit a knot in the wood and bent, so they couldn’t get the, when he died, they couldn’t get the spike out of the wood or out of his bones, so they just put him in there and evidently the wood rotted away and just left the bent spike and the bones. So here we see evidence that somebody was crucified and then given a proper burial, so it’s not inconceivable that Jesus would have been buried. And so it did happen, and Paul even recorded in the first letter the church at Corinth, around AD 56, he says in 1 Corinthians 15, Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, and he was buried.

Now, this AD 56, that’s what, 23 years after the crucifixion around that time? That’s really not a long time as far as ancient history was concerned, but we can do better than that, because that was part of one of the earliest Christian creeds that was recorded. First Corinthians chapter 15, where it talks about the gospel in verses three through, really