Message Information
- Key Scriptures: 1 Corinthians 15:1-4, 14, KJV
- Series: Four Facts about the Resurrection (2016), no. 2
- Date: Sunday, March 20, 2016 (Morning)
- Venue: Trinity Baptist Church — Seminole, Oklahoma
- Speaker: Jared Byrns
- Audio File: Open/Download
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The Resurrection as the Foundation of Faith
This morning we are going to be in 1 Corinthians chapter 15 again, as we were last week. Last week I began sharing with you four facts about the resurrection. Some of this is going to be history, some of it is going to be science, some of it is going to be Bible, and they all fit together.
The point of this is to show you that the Bible is trustworthy, and that there are historical and scientific reasons to believe what the Bible says. For me, I believe what the Bible says. I was raised in church. I was raised on the Bible. I learned how to read out of the Bible—not merely how to read the Bible, but this is the book I used in learning how to read.
So I was raised on this from a very early age, but there came a time in college when I realized I needed to know why I believed these things, whether they were true, and to find that out for myself. If you were not here last week, I shared that a professor asked us, whatever our view was, whether there was anything that could disprove it to us. If there is not anything that could disprove it to you, then you really do not have a belief so much as you have blind faith.
The question was asked, “Is there any evidence that could be presented to you that would change your mind?” At first my thought was, “No. There is nothing that could change my mind about Christianity.” But then I got to thinking, that is the kind of blind faith that cults, honestly, expect you to have.
The Bible spells it out here in 1 Corinthians chapter 15: “If Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins.” The Bible answers that question and says, absolutely, if the resurrection is not true, then Christianity is not true.
I had to come to realize that if evidence was presented to me that the resurrection never happened, then there is no point to any of this. But the more I studied it out, the more I read books, and the more I looked at arguments from people who believed in the resurrection and people who disbelieved the resurrection, the more I came to the conclusion that the resurrection is rooted in historical fact. It is true.
There are four facts that, if they are true, mean the resurrection is true as the Bible presents it. If the resurrection is true as the Bible presents it, then Jesus Christ is the Son of God as he claimed to be. If Jesus Christ is the Son of God, as he claimed, then the Bible is true because the Son of God taught from it and championed its authority.
If the resurrection is true, folks, it is the foundation everything else is built on. If the resurrection is true, then our faith is as solid as a rock. If the resurrection is untrue, then we need to board up the doors and go home. The resurrection is that central to everything we believe. That is not me saying it. That is the Apostle Paul speaking under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit of God, saying that if Christ is not raised, your faith is vain.
The First Fact Reviewed
I started talking to you about these four facts last week. We only got through fact number one, and I want to word it exactly right if you are following along in those notes: Jesus’ existence and death are historically verifiable.
We talked about that last week. I shared with you what modern scholars say, that there are very few reputable historians who say, “No, Jesus did not exist at all.” Most of them, even atheist scholars—and I am talking about scholars, not people you read on Facebook or in the comments section of YouTube—most reputable historians say, yes, Jesus Christ was a real person. Whether they believe he was the Son of God or not, they believe he was a real person.
We talked about what modern scholars say. I took you through seven or eight quotes from ancient documents from around Jesus’ own time. Folks, we did not even really get into the Gospels. These were people who did not believe he was the Son of God, but still admitted that he lived and he died. He was a real person.
Why is that important? Fact number one is important because if Jesus Christ did not really exist, then he could not have died and he could not have risen again. So it is important to establish that he was a real person, that he lived, that he did the things the Bible said he did, and that he died.
We went through that. What did the historians from his own time say? We also talked about some of the medical evidence, the scientific evidence, and the historical evidence for his death.
The Bible says that he was crucified. Some people have said, “No, crucifixion was pretty rare.” But we know that crucifixion took place. We know that these beatings took place routinely, especially for somebody who, like Jesus, was not a Roman citizen and who, like Jesus, was considered one of the worst criminal offenders against the Roman Empire, somebody who would have been considered a rebel against Rome’s authority. It is not as though he jaywalked or something. They considered him to be a rebel, somebody who was opposing their authority.
We know that he would have said things like, “I thirst.” We know he would have known that the end was coming, based on his heart rate and these things. Everything medical science says to expect about somebody undergoing crucifixion, we see in these little details thrown into the story by the Gospel writers.
That is important because these are not men who would have known, “We need to make up these details and put them in here so that 2,000 years later, once there are advances in medical science that we have never heard of, people will think it is true.” No, they were recording it as it happened. Everything medical science tells us to expect, we see—from the blood loss, to the shock, to the ability to sweat blood. All of those things back up this first fact that Jesus’ existence and death are historically verifiable.
Today we are going to go through facts two, three, and four. Fact one was a lot longer than any of these. So starting today, fact two is this: Jesus was buried, but his tomb was empty after three days.
The Burial and the Empty Tomb
Jesus was buried, but his tomb was empty after three days. It is only fairly recently that I have heard any kind of discussion about whether or not he was buried, but it makes sense, does it not? We know the story that is always talked about on Easter: the women went to his tomb, and it was empty. Then they went and got the disciples, and the disciples came and ran to the tomb, and it was empty.
We hear this story, but the empty tomb is not all that impressive if he was not actually buried, is it? It is not proof of anything if he was not actually buried, except that the tomb is empty because it always was empty.
But 1 Corinthians chapter 15, which we have already started looking at, has Paul lay out the historical basis of the gospel message. He says in verse 3, “For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; and that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures.”
The burial itself is important. If he was not buried, then the empty tomb means nothing. His body was somewhere else, dead.
Some people say the whole story has to be made up because somebody who was killed like Jesus would not have been buried. When you think about crucifixion being reserved for the worst of the worst criminals, the most vile, and when you think about the fact that not even Roman citizens could undergo crucifixion, somebody with no rights who did not matter at all in society would be crucified. Surely, then, they would not be allowed a burial. Surely, they would be thrown to the dogs, thrown into a trash heap where the dogs and birds and other things could pick them apart.
So some people say, “This is clearly a made-up story because in history we know that crucified people were not buried.” But, as usually happens, archaeology steps in and sets the record straight.
In 1968, there was a Greek archaeologist named Vassilios Tzaferis. He was digging in Jerusalem in the tomb of a wealthy first-century Jewish man named Yehohanan ben Hagkol. If you want the spelling of that to look it up later, I can give it to you. This man had been crucified and then buried.
They know this because in the tomb they found a heel bone with the Roman spike still stuck through it. The man had been crucified, and he had been taken off the cross. Because of a hook that hit a knot in the wood, some of the wood was still attached. Normally, those nails would have been expensive, so they would take them out. That is one reason we do not see a whole lot of evidence of crucifixion and burial.
But this particular nail, if memory serves, had hit a knot in the wood and curved. They could not get it all out, so they put his body in the tomb with that little piece of wood and the nail still attached. Two thousand years later, his body was found with the nail, with the Roman spike, still going through his heel bone and into the wood. This was somebody who had been executed by crucifixion and was still afforded a proper burial.
Now, it was rare. For somebody like this Yehohanan, or like Jesus, to be crucified as the worst of the worst and then to be given a dignified burial would have been very rare. But we know from archaeology, from this one case, that it did happen sometimes. It is not impossible. So the idea that it is impossible because Jesus was this terrible criminal on the cross and would have had to be thrown into the garbage heap is not true. We know it was not impossible.
Early Testimony to the Burial
We also know about the burial and the empty tomb because the earliest Christian sources testify that Jesus Christ was buried. The earliest Christian sources testify that Jesus was buried.
What we are reading today in 1 Corinthians chapter 15, Paul wrote to the church at Corinth about the year A.D. 56. He said Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and he was buried. Some people will look at that and say, “That is something Christians made up.” Fine. He wrote that in A.D. 56.
It is believed by experts that this is part of an early creed that they would recount and repeat. We are not as familiar with creeds in Baptist churches, but you might have heard things like the Nicene Creed or the Apostles’ Creed: “I believe in God the Father, the Almighty, Maker of heaven…” A creed is basically a summary of what is believed by a group of people, something memorized and repeated, something you test things against.
As an early creed, this passage in verses 3 and 4 of 1 Corinthians chapter 15 is something Paul had learned from the apostles in Jerusalem. He records in Galatians that he met the apostles in Jerusalem three years after his conversion, which would have been around A.D. 37. I know I am throwing a lot of dates and things at you here.
Even though he wrote this in the 50s A.D., he would have learned this in the 30s A.D. What else happened in the 30s A.D. that we are talking about? What did Jesus do in the 30s A.D.? He died and rose again. The traditional dating of the resurrection is around A.D. 33.
Within four years of Jesus’ resurrection—or, if we are being skeptical, his alleged resurrection—there was already this creed where the Christians were saying, “This is the bedrock of our faith.” It was so much the bedrock of their faith that they had set it out, committed it to memory, and repeated it. This little part of this passage is something Paul would have learned from them as an early creed within four years.
So within four years they are already saying, and probably earlier, “No, he rose again from the dead. He was buried, and he rose again from the dead.” This means that as early as four years after the fact, Christians who watched these events unfold, the eyewitnesses themselves, believed that he had been buried and that he had risen again.
All four of the Gospels agree on this. People want to talk about contradictions in the Gospels. I do not think the contradictions they point to actually are contradictions. They can be explained. But even if there were contradictions, there are so many more points of agreement among the four Gospels than there are alleged contradictions.
One thing all four Gospel accounts agree on is that Jesus Christ was buried. All four agree on it, and they were all written down within 25 years. If you were not here last week, you may be thinking, “Twenty-five years? Big deal.” In ancient history, that is a small span. We do not have anything about almost anybody of any significance written in shorter amounts of time. Things about Julius Caesar were written hundreds of years afterward, and nobody questions those.
That really is the point of all of this evidence for the resurrection. Do I have videotape? No. Do I have forensic and DNA evidence? Do I have something they would find on CSI that would prove to you beyond a shadow of a doubt that Jesus Christ rose again from the dead? No.
But by ancient standards, we have very good evidence. We have more evidence of the resurrection than almost any other event in ancient history. And yet we do not question Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon. We do not question the invasion of Gaul. We do not question these things. So why do we question the resurrection? We have better evidence for that.
Too Early and Too Inconvenient to Be a Legend
Belief in the empty tomb came too early to be a legend. This ties into what we have just been saying. Sometimes you hear, “Christianity is just a legend. Jesus did not really even claim to be the Son of God. He did not really rise from the dead. These are just legends that people made up later.”
I am sorry, but they came too early. There are eyewitness accounts in the Bible, in several books: Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Romans, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, and 1 Thessalonians. They all talk about the burial and the resurrection. All of these were written within 30 years of the events they describe.
The books of the New Testament were not written down hundreds of years later. They were not written down and then changed hundreds of years later to reflect these things. We have, in some cases, copies of New Testament manuscripts going back to within a generation of the originals. There have not been changes over time, and at some point I may spend more time talking to you about that.
These things were written down within 30 years of the crucifixion and the resurrection. That was not enough time for a legend to develop. There are all sorts of legends that have developed about George Washington over 200 years. I am not sure that people who knew him believed the cherry tree story. I hated to find out that that was probably not true because I was taught that in school. It illustrates the character of the man pretty well, but it probably did not happen.
I believed that growing up in school in the 1990s. I am not so sure people in the 1790s believed the cherry tree story. It was too early for a legend to have grown up around it. In the same way, when all of these books were written down within 30 years, it was too early for a legend to have grown up around the resurrection.
This is one of my favorite parts of the evidence: the story of the empty tomb is way too inconvenient to be a lie. You have heard of the global warming book, An Inconvenient Truth. The resurrection story, if it were false, would be an inconvenient lie.
If the apostles were going to make up the story of the empty tomb, they went about it in a very foolish way. If we are honest, they went about it in a very bad way. If you are going to lie and make up a story about what happened, are you not going to make yourself look good? People generally lie to make themselves look better.
The apostles, in the story they told about the empty tomb, made themselves look pretty bad. They do not come off as the heroes of the story. We see that in three ways.
First, the earliest witnesses to the empty tomb were women. Now, I am not saying this as my own belief. This was the ancient mindset 2,000 years ago: women were considered inferior to men. I do not believe this. I want to make that clear so nobody jumps on me at the door. But women were considered inferior. Their testimony was not considered valid in court. Under most circumstances, you could not have a woman witness in a trial, and when you did, you needed multiple women even to counteract the testimony of a man.
Yet the earliest witnesses of the empty tomb were women. If you were making up a story 2,000 years ago and wanted it to be credible, those who discovered the empty tomb would have been Peter, James, and John—not Mary, Mary, Mary, Mary, Mary, and Mary. As you read through the Gospel accounts, you see that there were a lot of Marys at the empty tomb.
If they were going to make it up and try to make it sound credible, and say, “We are going to invent a lie here and try to convince everybody,” saying that women discovered the empty tomb was not the way to go. It would be like me saying something miraculous happened, and by the way, the town drunk who sees UFOs all the time saw this. I would not make that up and use him as the credible witness. I would say it was me, or the mayor, or somebody people might listen to. I assume you might listen to me because you are here listening to me now.
But in first-century Palestine, women were considered the lowest rung. So if you were going to make this up, you would not use women as the first witnesses. The fact that women were the first witnesses is too inconvenient to support the idea that the apostles lied about this.
Second, a Jewish leader stepped up for Jesus. The early Christians did not have warm, fuzzy feelings about the Jewish leaders. I am not saying they hated the Jewish people, but they did not have warm, fuzzy feelings about the Jewish leaders. Who was it who met in secret? Who was it who broke their own laws to hold a trial and hold him overnight? Who was it who got people to lie and make up accusations against Jesus? Who was it who went through all of this to get the Romans to condemn him to death? It was the Jewish leaders.
Yet one of the heroes of the story of the empty tomb is a man named Joseph of Arimathea. We talk about the tomb Jesus was buried in. That tomb was borrowed from a wealthy Jewish leader named Joseph of Arimathea. He was a member of the ruling council that condemned Jesus to death. He simply was not there when the vote was taken.
He was a member of this ruling council that condemned Jesus to death, and yet when Jesus died and it was time to decide what to do with the body, the disciples ran. The disciples hid. They denied knowing him, fled, and hid. It was Joseph of Arimathea, this member of the hated Jewish ruling council, who stepped up and went to Pontius Pilate and said, “Can I have the body so that I can bury him?”
One of the heroes of the burial part of the story and the empty tomb part of the story is Joseph of Arimathea. Why, if you were going to make up a lie, would you make one of the heroes of the story part of this group you would have despised? You would not do it.
Third, the disciples themselves fell apart. The disciples were not the heroes of the story in any way, shape, or form. The women were the first to go and see the empty tomb. They were the first to talk about his resurrection. Joseph of Arimathea took care of the Lord and loved the Lord and took care of his body after he died. The disciples ran.
Peter denied him three times. The others ran and hid. Thomas—and we may be too hard on Thomas, but we know that Thomas doubted—said, “I am not going to believe it.” Even though Jesus had said, “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days,” Thomas said, “I am not going to believe it until I see the nail prints.”
When you read the story, the disciples do not come off well. Again, we may be too hard on them, because many of us probably would have done the same things they did. But they do not look good in their own account. Why on earth would they make up a lie that makes them look so bad?
I will admit to you, I am not an expert. I am not a scientist. I am not a psychologist. But everything I know about human behavior says the only reason they would have written it down this way is because this is the way it actually happened. This story is far too inconvenient for them to be a lie about the empty tomb and the burial.
No Plausible Suspects
The accounts of the empty tomb leave no plausible suspects to fake it. Think about it like a crime. Who took the body? Who got the body out of the tomb? What suspects are there who could have possibly done it?
From the very beginning, they said they were worried about the disciples coming and stealing the body. People today who claim that the resurrection never happened say, “Somebody came in and stole the body. The disciples stole the body and made it up.” But there is no explanation that makes sense. There is no suspect who could have stolen the body where this story makes sense.
The Roman soldiers would not fake it. They had no reason to. Their purpose was to keep the body secure and to keep order. The Romans did not like disorder. If the body left that tomb, then there was going to be a religious uproar in Jerusalem between the followers of Jesus and the opponents of Jesus. The Romans did not want that.
The Roman soldiers had no motive to steal the body. They would not have faked it. Quite honestly, Roman soldiers who were derelict in their duty could have been put to death. They had no reason to fake this and say, “We fell asleep.”
The disciples did not fake it. They are the suspects most frequently accused, but they did not fake it. The reason I know that is because people will die for a lie, but they will not usually die for what they know to be a lie.
The disciples all died as martyrs, except for John and Judas. Ten of the eleven died as martyrs rather than deny the empty tomb. How do you put that together with followers of other religions who die as martyrs? Well, they were not there at the founding of the religion. They were not eyewitnesses.
Somebody straps a bomb to their chest and blows himself up in a marketplace in Jerusalem as a martyr; that does not impress me about his faith. He may be willing to die for it, but he was not there when Muhammad wrote things down. He did not see the beginning. He was not an eyewitness. He does not know based on his own eyewitness account whether it is true or not.
These men were there. They said they saw Jesus alive again. They said they saw the empty tomb. They said they knew this firsthand, and yet they were killed rather than deny it.
If there were some grand conspiracy where they all got together and said, “Let’s steal the body and make up the greatest story anybody has ever heard, and we will be famous,” you would think that under the kind of torture the Romans and the Jews and others would have put them through, somebody would break. Somebody would talk. Somebody would deny it.
But none of them ever did. Judas went and killed himself before this ever took place, and ten of the remaining eleven, except for John, died as martyrs. John spent the rest of his life in persecution rather than deny it.
There is a man named J. P. Moreland, who is a seminary professor. He wrote that Muslims might be willing to die for their belief that Allah revealed himself to Muhammad, but this revelation was not done in a publicly observable way. So they could be wrong about it. They may sincerely think it is true, but they cannot know for a fact because they did not witness it themselves.
However, the apostles were willing to die for something they had seen with their own eyes and touched with their own hands. That is the difference. There was not fame or money in it. You might think that if they had a strong enough motivation, they would endure it, but I do not know that there is anything strong enough to motivate me against the kind of torment we talked about last week.
Moreland writes, “It’s not as though there were a mansion awaiting them on the Mediterranean. They faced a life of hardship. They often went without food, slept exposed to the elements, were ridiculed, beaten, imprisoned, and finally most of them were executed in torturous ways.” For what? Good intentions? No. Because they were convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that they had seen Jesus Christ alive from the dead.
There is no other adequate explanation. I agree with that. There is no other explanation for them dying the way they did for what they saw. So the disciples did not fake it. It is not even a question. They did not fake it.
The Jews would not fake it. Why would the Jews steal the body? They wanted to prove that he was still dead. It makes no sense for them to steal the body and start the rumor. Even if they had, they could simply produce the body and say, “See, he is still dead.” That explanation makes no sense.
The Roman authorities, just like the Roman soldiers, would not fake it. They had no motive. It would have caused an uproar, and they wanted to keep that from happening.
The women could not fake it. This idea that the women overpowered the Roman guards and rolled that big rock away from the entrance is not plausible. They were not Charlie’s Angels. These were regular women. They could not fake it.
Why the Swoon Theory Fails
Believing Jesus faked it takes even more faith than the resurrection. There is an idea that grew up in the late 1800s and early 1900s called the swoon theory. The idea was that Jesus did not really die on the cross. He went into a comatose state, they put him in the tomb, and he revived in the peace and quiet of the tomb. His condition improved, and he walked out three days later.
That is insane. I know that is not much of an argument, simply to call it a name, but to me that is insane. Yet brilliant people from a hundred years ago believed this. Here is the problem: we know that he was beaten so severely that he had lost huge quantities of blood. You do not simply get better from that on your own without medical attention. Huge quantities of blood loss and hypovolemic shock would have left him incredibly weak, if not killed him from the lack of blood alone. Without medical attention, it would have killed him.
Plus, we know that he was stabbed through the heart with a spear. We are going to talk about that later. This swoon theory says that Jesus was not God enough to rise from the dead. He was not powerful enough to rise from the dead. But it has no problem assuming that he was strong enough to survive the shock, the suffocation, and the cardiac arrest, simply pass out, and then wake up in a dark, damp cave alone without medical attention.
Then it assumes that he was strong enough to single-handedly roll back the massive boulder from the doorway, overpower the detachment of Roman soldiers, and present such a triumphant appearance that he convinced his followers he was actually alive again from the dead.
I am sorry, is there a gas leak in the universities in this country that people actually believed this idea? That takes more faith than believing he rose again from the dead. You have to be more impressed with the power and might of Jesus Christ with that story than with believing he rose again from the dead. At that point, no wonder the centurion said, “Surely this is the Son of God.”
That did not happen. I do not have enough faith to believe that Jesus did not actually rise from the dead. It takes more faith to believe that story than to believe the actual resurrection.
The authorities could not deny the empty tomb. Everybody knew where Jesus had been buried. When something like that happens, everybody is going to know where it took place. They knew where he was buried. But they never even tried to deny the empty tomb. They never came out and said, “No, the tomb is not empty.”
That would have been easy. If everybody got confused and the story went around that Jesus rose again from the dead, and he really did not, could the authorities not simply have shown everybody the right tomb? “Here is the tomb. Here is the body.” That would have shut all of this down.
But the problem for them was that there was no body to produce. There was no body to produce. That is why they never produced one. The tomb was empty. There was no body. Do you hear me on this? There was no body in the tomb.
We see that there was a cover-up instead of a denial. They never denied it. They never said, “The tomb is not empty.” They said, “Let’s come up with another story about it.” In Matthew chapter 28 verse 13, the Jewish leaders bribed the Roman guards and said, “Say ye, His disciples came by night, and stole him away while we slept.”
The Jews and Romans tried to cover it up. They tried to come up with another explanation for the empty tomb, but they never tried to deny it. The Jewish leaders said, “Here is some hush money. Tell everybody that these disciples came and stole the body.” By the way, I think it is kind of funny to imagine that the disciples came and beat up the Roman soldiers and took the body. Come on. That is another one of those stories that takes more faith than the actual resurrection.
There is no alternative theory that fits the evidence. What we do know from the evidence is that Jesus was buried, and his tomb was empty three days later.
Eyewitnesses of the Risen Christ
We are running short of time, but I want to start fact three with you, and then we will do fact four next week for Easter. Fact three is that Jesus was seen alive again by numerous eyewitnesses.
So, first, his existence and his death are historically verifiable. Second, his body was buried and his tomb was empty three days later. Third, he was seen alive again by numerous eyewitnesses.
He was seen by over 500 eyewitnesses. Think about this. We listen to eyewitness accounts all the time. We have no problem listening to things we hear secondhand and thirdhand. We read something in the newspaper or see something on TV. I do not know about now, but it used to be that we would see something on the news and believe it, even if people were getting the story secondhand or thirdhand.
These people were eyewitnesses to the resurrection of Jesus Christ. They said, “I saw it with my own eyes.” These are usually credible people.
We know from their stories that the resurrection was physical, not spiritual. It was not merely a spiritual resurrection. Some people will say, “His spirit came back to earth.” Yes, his spirit came back to earth in his body. His spirit came back to earth in his body.
A Real and Physical Resurrection
First, Thomas—I keep wanting to say Titus, Timothy, Thomas; I am going through the T’s—Thomas was able to touch the nail scars in Jesus’ hands. They were there. I do not think you can simply touch a spirit.
We know that Jesus met with the disciples and they saw him. They thought it was a ghost, and he basically said, and I am paraphrasing, “No, it is me. Do you have anything to eat?” They sat down and ate fish and honeycomb on the beach. I do not know much about ghosts other than what I have seen on TV, but they do not normally eat. You and I have bodies. I get hungry and want to eat. Jesus, after three days in the tomb, was ready to eat.
He came back in a body. A body they could touch. A body they could see. A real body.
Why does that matter? Because it was in his physical resurrection that he showed he conquered death. It was not merely that he came back as a spirit. He came back in his body. He conquered death in every way, shape, and form.
The resurrection was real, not imaginary. Here is another argument people make: “Well, there was a mass hallucination.” I heard that before I even started studying the resurrection. They say, “They all hallucinated.”
But the resurrection was real, not imaginary. I look to psychologists who have written about this because there is a lot I do not know about psychology. The psychologists I have read on this subject say mass hallucinations do not happen. There is really no such thing as a mass hallucination. There may be an isolated case here or there, but in general, they do not happen.
The idea that they all hallucinated the same thing is false. The writer I was reading presented all sorts of psychological surveys. I remember watching Dragnet on Nick at Nite with my parents when I was little. They would have people on LSD or something that they were going to arrest. They were all seeing things, but they were not all seeing the same things in their hallucinations.
When you hallucinate, it is pictures that appear in your mind, not pictures that appear in all of our minds. Mass hallucination does not happen.
The disciples were bad candidates for hallucination also. To hallucinate, you have to be susceptible to the hallucination. According to psychologists, you have to want to believe. You have to want to see these things. But the disciples believed Jesus was dead.
That is evident by their reaction. They believed Jesus was dead and not coming back. That is why they ran. That is why they hid. That is why they denied him. They did not think he was coming back. They thought it was over. They are not exactly the people who got so caught up in their own wishful thinking that they started seeing things they wanted to see.
Third, hallucinations do not happen without a cause. There is usually some known, reasonable cause for hallucination, and without one, it is so rare that it is highly improbable. Those are the words used by the psychologists: highly improbable.
For all 500 people to have had a mass hallucination is highly improbable. For a scientist, I think that is about as close as you get to impossible. Scientists do not typically deal in concrete terms, “This happened,” or, “This could not happen.” They deal on a scale, but highly improbable is about as strong as you are going to get out of a scientist.
There was nothing there to cause them to hallucinate. They either saw him resurrected, or they did not. It is not that they saw his ghost walking around and hallucinated the whole thing.
Proclaimed but Not Refuted
The resurrection was physical, not spiritual. It was real, not imaginary. It was also proclaimed but not refuted.
This early creed that we talked about from 1 Corinthians chapter 15 was being used by A.D. 37, if not before, and surely before. I have read through verse 4 several times: “And that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures.” Then it goes on to say that “he was seen of Cephas, then of the twelve: After that, he was seen of above five hundred brethren at once; of whom the greater part remain unto this present, but some are fallen asleep.”
Then Paul says, “After that, he was seen of James; then of all the apostles. And last of all he was seen of me also, as of one born out of due time.”
Paul talks about all the people Jesus was seen by. He lists names. He tells where they were seen. He says a few of them have died, but most of them are still alive. In other words, most of them are still alive now in the 50s A.D., 20 years later. You can go ask them.
There is not one shred of evidence from history that anybody ever went to any of these eyewitnesses and said, “Paul says you saw Jesus alive again,” and they said, “No, we did not.” In their day, you could go fact-check it. “Did you really see it or not?” And nobody ever said, “No, we did not.”
All the eyewitnesses went to their graves saying, “He was dead, and he was buried, and we saw him alive. We saw him after that. We saw him three days later. We saw him walking around in his physical body.”
Next week, we will talk about the last fact of the resurrection. But when you put all four of these together, they make the case, I believe, that if these things are true, if all of these things are true, then there is no other explanation than that the resurrection really happened.