Message Information
- Key Scriptures: 1 Corinthians 15:17, KJV
- Series: Individual Messages (2014), no. 14
- Date: Sunday, April 13, 2014 (Evening)
- Venue: Lindsay Missionary Baptist Church — Lindsay, Oklahoma
- Speaker: Jared Byrns
- Audio File: Open/Download
Listen Online
Text
Why the Resurrection Matters
Tonight we are in 1 Corinthians chapter 15. We may refer to some verses through this message, but for the most part, we are going to look at one verse and then talk about these four facts about the resurrection. That verse really starts us off and gives us a view of what we need to talk about.
I have written down at various times four big reasons why the resurrection should matter to Christians and why we should be concerned about it, but we are not going to go into all of those tonight because we would not have time. Suffice it to say, 1 Corinthians 15 tells us 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.” That really is the biggest reason to me why the resurrection should matter and why we should care about what I am talking about tonight.
If the resurrection did not really happen—and there are some people and some churches out there who claim to be Christians and claim to follow Christ, but think they are too reasonable or too enlightened to believe the resurrection really happened—then what is the point of being a Christian or following Christ? 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 the death of Jesus Christ was able to atone for our sins, the resurrection is the proof of that. 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, then there is no doubt in my mind who Jesus Christ is. 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, is completely unique in all of recorded history. It is completely unique.
So we have to ask ourselves the question, is the resurrection based on fact? I believe it is. Tonight we are going to talk about four facts that I believe are backed up by evidence. If these four facts are true, then the resurrection happened as the Bible claims that it did, and Jesus Christ is exactly who He claims to be.
I have said many times before that the resurrection is sort of the hill that Christianity fights and dies on. It either stands or falls on the resurrection. And it is just our luck that the resurrection is the best-attested event of all of ancient history.
Jesus Lived and Died in History
We start with fact one: 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.
I have heard people say at times—and these are usually people who like to fancy themselves historians, but really they are not—that Jesus was a myth. On the internet today, everybody is an expert on everything, don’t you know? There are people who will say, “Jesus was a myth. His whole existence was a myth. Everything the Bible says about Him was a myth.”
We, of course, do not believe this. We believe what John chapter 1 says, that “the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.” We believe that we have seen Jesus Christ, God in human flesh, and that He walked the earth.
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 begin to criticize your faith because they say, “Jesus Christ may never have even existed,” that is not the case. I have not watched it, but I have seen that there is a documentary out there called _The God Who Wasn’t There_, and supposedly the whole premise is that Jesus Christ never even existed. That is not the case.
D. James Kennedy, some of you may remember. Before he died, he was on TV and radio. I will not say that he was an unbiased observer—he was a very solid evangelical Christian—but he wrote in a book called _Why I Believe_, “The evidence for the historicity of Christ,” which 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.”
In this first part, there are going to be quite a few quotes because we are looking at some of the historical evidence. But what he said, basically, is that there is no serious historian in the free world who would be willing to make a laughingstock of himself or herself by claiming that Jesus Christ never existed.
Then there is a man named F. F. Bruce, who was a professor of biblical criticism at the University of Manchester in England. He said, “Whatever else may be thought of the evidence from early Jewish and Gentile writers, as summarized in this chapter and the preceding one, it does at least establish for those who refuse the witness of Christian writings the historical character of Jesus Himself.”
He says, and this is what is 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.”
What he is saying there is that 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 Jesus Christ was just a myth based on what evidence there is, then Julius Caesar, ladies and gentlemen, was also a myth. When we hear people say, “Jesus Christ didn’t really exist,” it is not the historians who say that. Serious historians do not dispute the fact that Jesus Christ existed, that He lived in Galilee and Jerusalem in that area in the first century, that He had a following, and that He died the way the Bible said.
Ancient Sources and the Historical Jesus
It is easy for historians to say that now, but we can go back a little further. Ancient sources document Jesus’ life and death. There are people who wrote within a hundred years or so of Jesus’ death who say this is exactly how it happened.
You may say, “A hundred years is a long time.” Not so in ancient history. They did not have CNN and the internet and people writing about things as they happened, with all of those things surviving today. Historians usually worked at the behest of the government, did their work later on, and recorded things. So within a hundred years is pretty good for any ancient figure.
We have Pliny the Younger, who was a Roman judge. He writes about Jesus Christ and those who followed Him. He says, “Those who denied that they either were or had been Christians, upon their calling on of the gods after me, and upon their offering wine and incense before your statue, 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 such as are really and truly Christians can be compelled to do, these I deemed it proper to dismiss.”
What that means is he is writing to the emperor and saying there are people who will refuse to bow down to your statue. He says that if they are accused of being Christians, and if they will bow down to your statue and revile Christ, then we know they really were not Christians. He said this because the people who really are Christians are absolutely convinced that Jesus Christ was real and that Jesus Christ was God.
Now, he disagreed with their belief that Jesus was God, but he did not dispute the fact that Jesus Christ was real. He writes shortly after the fact and does not dispute their claim that Jesus Christ was real. He also talks about these earliest Christians being so convinced that they were willing to die for what they professed to believe.
Then there is a man named Suetonius, who was a Roman historian. As part of a longer quote, he said, “Since the Jews constantly made disturbances at the instigation of Christus, he expelled them from Rome,” speaking of the emperor. What he says here is that there was a man named Christus who got the Jews so stirred up that the emperor had to intervene and deal with the Christians. He writes about the existence of this man, Christus. He does not say He was a myth. He says He was a real person whose teachings had the people 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 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. He instead decided to blame and torture the Christians.
Tacitus said, “Christus,” again, they called Him that in Latin, “the founder of that name, was put to death as a criminal by Pontius Pilate.” Notice here that 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.”
That is 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.” That kind of goes to what we were talking about this morning: try as they might, they could not stop the word of Christ from spreading. That malicious superstition broke out again from time to time.
Then there is Josephus. Notice that none of these people I am quoting are Christians. These are Roman, Jewish, and Greek sources who were not friends of Jesus Christ, but they still record that He existed. He was a real person. He is a historical figure.
Josephus, who was a Jewish military leader and a Roman historian, wrote—and we think parts of this quote were probably tampered with later by well-intentioned but wrong Christians—but I am going to explain what is 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 receive 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 ten thousand other wonderful things concerning Him, and the tribe of Christians so named for Him are not extinct at this day.”
That does not sound like a Jewish perspective. We know Josephus never converted to Christ, and there are some things in there that, as I am reading it, I think do not sound like Josephus. That sounds like it was messed with later. I went through and started underlining things that I thought did not sound like Josephus, and then later found that other historians had dug through the records and gotten to the originals of what Josephus probably said, and it matched up with what I was assuming. So I was proud of that.
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.”
You may say, “Well, you took out the stuff about Him being Christ or about the resurrection.” Yes, Josephus did not 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 and really was crucified under Pilate.
We are getting to the end of our quotes here. There is a man named Mara bar Sarapion. I have no idea if I am pronouncing that right, but he would not be able to pronounce my name either. He was a Syrian historian during that time. He says, “For what benefit did the Athenians obtain by putting Socrates to death, seeing that they received as retribution for it famine and pestilence? Or the people of Samos by the burning of Pythagoras, seeing that in one hour the whole of their country was covered with sand?”
So he is talking about how societies at different times had put wise men to death. Then 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 Athenians died by famine, and the people of Samos were covered by the sea without remedy, and the Jews, brought to desolation and expelled from their kingdom, are driven away into every land.”
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.
Any one of these quotes on its own may not 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, such as their Talmud, which they used to interpret the Scriptures and sometimes record history, say the same.
The Babylonian Talmud says, “On the eve of the Passover, Yeshua was hanged.” That is very similar to the Hebrew term for Jesus, which is Yeshua. That would have been His Hebrew name. “For forty days before the execution took place, a herald went forth and cried, ‘He is going forth to be stoned because he has 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.”
That does not exactly match up with what the Bible says. But we see in there that they affirm there was a man named Yeshua who was accused of false teaching and who ended up being, as even the Bible says, hanged on the cross or hanged on the tree on the eve of Passover. That matches up with the crucifixion story pretty well.
Then there is one more quote. This is the last of the long quotes I have on Him being a historical figure. Lucian of Samosata, 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.”
He refers to a crucified philosopher who became a lawgiver to the Christians by teaching that they were all brothers. He is writing about this as a historical person. Who could he be talking about, if anybody would like to hazard a guess there?
We see all sorts of historians writing things that indicate Jesus Christ was a real historical figure. If you think, “Well, that’s it, just those few quotes,” I do not remember how many I gave you—six, seven, eight, somewhere in there—but for a historical figure, like I mentioned this morning, for a person in ancient history who never wrote a book, never commanded an army, and never held political office, that is pretty incredible that all of those ancient sources would write about Him.
In our day and time, you can write a book much more easily than you could back then. If you cannot get published, you can write things on the internet. People write all the time. They did not write as much or record as much in ancient history. For this much to have been written about Him is a pretty good indication that He was a historical figure.
The Cross Fits History and Medical Reality
So we have historians today saying that He is a real figure. We have historians in ancient times saying He was a real figure. When we talk about His death, the biblical accounts of His death are consistent with what we know about history.
People have tried to argue that crucifixion did not really happen. But the Bible says He was beaten. The Bible says He was scourged. 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, the Romans were known to have engaged in a practice of scourging or flogging their prisoners before they would execute them. Because you do not want to just kill them. You want to make sure they suffer very badly beforehand.
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. A lot of times this leather whip would have things embedded in it that would grab hold of the flesh of the back and rip it open. That is exactly the kind of thing the Bible describes.
What I have discovered is that the one doing the whipping, called the lictor, would inflict as many blows as possible without killing the prisoner. 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 to the verge of death without actually killing them.
This is consistent with what we see the Bible describing. The Bible does not give us the sense of fairy-tale kinds of things. It describes it as it actually would have happened for a man to be crucified under the Romans.
There is the scourging, and then there is the crucifixion itself. One of the charges that was leveled against Jesus is that they accused Him of saying He was the king of the Jews. 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.
This would not have only offended the Jews because, as we have talked about before, the Pharisees hated Him. It would have made Him an enemy of Rome. When Rome is in charge, you are only in charge under Rome if Rome says you are. 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.
Crucifixion 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. That would include someone like Jesus, who was considered the potential leader of a revolt. They would have had no problem saying, “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.”
So the scourging and the crucifixion are consistent with what we know about Jesus and consistent with what we know about history. The biblical accounts of His death fit in with what we know about history. The biblical accounts of His death are also consistent with what we know about medical science.
First, the issue of Him sweating blood is consistent with medical science. I have never seen that happen, and it sounds so bizarre that someone might ask, “How could that really have happened?” But when Jesus prayed in the garden right before He was arrested to be taken and crucified, He sweat drops of blood. Folks, this is not a fairy tale. This is an actual medical condition called hematidrosis.
There is a man named Alexander Metherell, 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 in the sweat glands. As a result, there is a small amount of bleeding into these glands, and the sweat comes out tinged with blood. It would be similar to what happens if you get hit hard and have a bruise. The impact breaks down the cell walls in those capillaries, and blood is released. Here it is happening chemically because of the stress you are under, and that chemical breaks down the tissue so blood seeps into the sweat glands.
It only happens during severe, severe anxiety, such as Jesus knowing what He was about to go through. But it is a documented medical condition called hematidrosis. I am sure they did not know about hematidrosis and probably had not studied it a great deal when the Gospel writers wrote about it, but it is 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 is the blood loss. 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 is called hypovolemic shock. Hypovolemic shock means the shock your body goes through when you experience a great deal of blood loss.
There is extremely low blood pressure involved in that. Because of that, your heart begins to race very rapidly to try to keep up with pumping enough blood when there is not enough blood there. Of course, you are going to be extremely thirsty as a result of your body trying to replenish the fluids that have been lost.
This would explain why Jesus collapsed on the way up to Calvary, why they had to call Simon of Cyrene to carry the cross for Him the rest of the way, and why He would cry out from the cross, “I thirst.” He was obviously going through hypovolemic shock before He ever got to the cross. So the fact of Him stumbling on the road and someone else having to carry His cross is not just an incidental detail to the story. It is consistent with what we know from medical science would be happening to somebody going through this.
Then there is the time of death. How on earth would Jesus know to cry out from the cross that “it is finished” the instant before He died? The Bible says He cried out, “It is finished,” and then He gave up the ghost. He was gone after that.
He had hung on the cross for about six hours, and that only includes the actual time on the cross. That does not include everything He went through up to that point. All the suffering He had gone through, all the blood loss He had gone through in the scourging, and all the struggling to breathe on the cross—the asphyxiation He went through on the cross—make it seem unlikely that through all that He would have known exactly when the time of His death was.
Yet we know from medical science that when a person is hung on a cross, he does not actually die from blood loss. I was surprised years ago when I first started studying this to find this out. You do not die from blood loss. You die from suffocation because you are being hung in that position.
He was hung in that position with His arms raised and stretched out. It is hard for me even to breathe in that position. I cannot imagine being held there by nails for six hours. Every breath He took, with the lungs being held in that position, would have put stress on the lungs. To breathe, He would have had to push against the nails in His feet and pull up on the nails in His hands for every breath.
As He was held in that position and was not getting enough oxygen, Dr. Metherell says it was an agonizing, slow death by asphyxiation. As He went through it, the person would slow down his breathing and go into something called respiratory acidosis, where the carbon dioxide in the blood would dissolve and the blood would get more acidic. This would cause the heart to beat irregularly, and you would end up dying of cardiac arrest. So Jesus would know it was finished. It is 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. Modern historians do not really dispute it. Ancient historians record it. What we know about His death on the cross is consistent with medical science and with history.
That is the first thing we have to prove. If Jesus Christ was not a real historical figure, He could not very well die and rise again from the dead, could He? So we have Jesus established by history and corroborated by science. We have Him living and dying on the cross. We come to the point in the story where He has lived, He has now been on the cross the way the Bible says, and He is dead.
Jesus Was Buried and the Tomb Was Empty
What happens from there? A lot of times we skip the next part and just go to the empty tomb. But 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. A big problem with demonstrating the resurrection is that some people are going to want proof. There are people you could say “good morning” to, and if you do not prove it, they are not going to believe it.
We do not 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 would probably say the film was doctored—but nobody in the Bible claims, “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 we have.
The first fact is that Jesus lived and died as the Bible said He did. Fact number two is that Jesus was buried, and then His tomb was empty after three days. One reason we believe He was buried is that the earliest Christian sources affirm that Jesus was buried.
Just because somebody was a Christian does not mean we automatically have to discount everything that person says about the resurrection. There is this idea that, because the source is a Christian, obviously they have an agenda. You know what? Everybody who writes about anything has an agenda. That does not mean it is a bad agenda. When I say good morning to you when you come in, I have an agenda. My agenda is that I like you and want to greet you. Everybody has an agenda for everything they do. If we can just get past that, it does not mean everybody is automatically lying.
The earliest Christians did not just say Jesus was buried. They were convinced that Jesus Christ was buried. If He was not buried, the empty tomb means nothing. 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 for the birds to feed on and as a warning to other people, or they were taken out and thrown in the trash heap. So if early Christians said He was buried, and if we think crucified criminals were always discarded, it does not make sense. People have said they were never, ever buried.
Well, it was rare for crucifixion victims to be buried, but it was not impossible. It was not that it never happened. We know this because in 1968, a Greek archaeologist named Vasilios Tzaferis was excavating in Jerusalem and discovered the tomb of a wealthy first-century Jew named Yehohanan ben Ha’galgol. I can spell that for you later if you want it, because I probably did not pronounce it right.
He had been crucified and then buried, and his bones were discovered in the tomb in an ossuary, a funeral box, with the Roman spike still embedded in his foot. The spike was still there in the bones. You can actually 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. When he died, they could not get the spike out of the wood or out of his bones, so they put him in there. 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. It is not inconceivable that Jesus would have been buried. Paul even recorded in the first letter to the church at Corinth, around AD 56, “Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures,” and “he was buried.”
AD 56 is roughly 23 years after the crucifixion, somewhere around that time. That is not a long time as far as ancient history is concerned. But we can do better than that because this was part of one of the earliest Christian creeds that was recorded.
First Corinthians 15, where it talks about the gospel in verses 3 through 7, was an early Christian creed. For Paul to have learned that, he records in Galatians that it was, I think, three years after his conversion when he met with the Jerusalem apostles. That is when he would have been given the creed.
So already around AD 36 or 37, people were committing to fact and memory, and teaching and expecting other Christians to learn this statement that Jesus was buried, and that Jesus Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, was buried, and rose again the third day according to the Scriptures. Within three or four years of the crucifixion and the resurrection, they were teaching that He was buried and rose again. To be able to date the story or teaching in ancient history to within three or four years is unheard of.
That is not enough time for a legend to develop. We can look back and see legends that developed over time. The whole George Washington and the cherry tree thing—I was so disappointed when I grew up and was no longer in kindergarten and found out that probably never happened. But that has been 200-some-odd years. With Jesus Christ, three or four years after these things, if it had not happened the way that creed said it did, there were still people around to disprove it.
So the earliest Christians believed it by AD 36 or 37, somewhere in there. They were already teaching this as part of their creed, something you believe in order to be part of the churches. In addition, all four Gospels agree on the detail of the burial. People get really hung up on details where they say, “The Gospels disagree.” No, the Gospels do not disagree. But there is not even an apparent disagreement on the detail of the burial.
So the earliest Christian sources affirm that Jesus Christ was buried. Then there is the fact that belief in the empty tomb was too early to be legendary. We have already hit on this a little bit, but we have references in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John to Him being buried in the tomb. We also have Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, and 1 Thessalonians. All of these books were written within 30 years of the crucifixion and resurrection.
That is too early for legend to develop in the scope of ancient history. Think about the lifetimes of the people who were there when the crucifixion and resurrection happened. All it took was for one person to say, “No, I was there, and that’s not the way it happened,” and the story was dead. Yet we have all of these records within 30 years. That is too early to be legend.
An Inconvenient Story to Invent
I think this is the most compelling part: the whole story of the tomb, the burial, and the empty tomb is too inconvenient to be a lie. It is too inconvenient. If the disciples, the Gospel writers, or the early Christians were going to make up lies about what happened, it would not be the story that we have in the Gospels.
First of all, there are the female witnesses. The first witnesses to discover the empty tomb were women, and the fact that they were women points to these accounts not being fabricated, not being made-up lies by agenda-driven writers who were trying to prove their case, but written by people who faithfully recorded the events as they happened.
That is important because, in the first century, women were not considered equal to men. William Lane Craig, who is a great Christian theologian, says that women were on a very low rung of the social ladder in first-century Palestine. Women’s testimony was regarded as so worthless that they were not even allowed to serve as legal witnesses in a Jewish court of law.
So if we are making up the story of the empty tomb, why would we have the people who discovered it, the first ones to see it, and the first ones to bear witness be the people who were considered so unreliable they could not testify in court? No offense to women, because I do not agree with the way the Jews believed about women, but it would be like me trying to make up a lie and saying it was the town drunk who witnessed what I am saying happened. Why would I pick him to be the lead character in my story? Certainly, if I were going to make up something and say, “This happened, and so-and-so saw it,” I would pick somebody more reputable. To them, women were not reputable.
So the fact that they had the women being the ones to discover the tomb and being the first ones to say, “We saw Him alive,” points to the fact that they were not making up lies to prove their case. They were recording what really happened.
Then there is Joseph of Arimathea. We do not know a lot about him from the Bible, but I am fascinated by this man and always have been. It is unlikely that, if they were making up the whole story about the burial and the empty tomb, a made-up story about that would have had Joseph of Arimathea there as one of the heroes of the story.
Joseph, we know from the Bible, was a member of the Jewish ruling council that was responsible for condemning Jesus. We also know from the Bible that he was not there or did not participate in the vote. We do not know if he was absent or just said no, but he was not part of the decision to condemn Jesus. Yet this man, who was part of the council that condemned Jesus, and would have been hated by the disciples, was the only one bold enough to approach the Romans and say, “Yes, I’m a follower. Can I have the body?”
Jesus’ own disciples ran and hid. When they had run and hidden or denied knowing Him, Joseph was the one who put his neck out there and said, “Can I have His body to give Him an honorable burial?” If they were making up stories about what happened, why cast the member of the Jewish council who condemned Jesus as the hero who collected the body and gave Him an honorable burial while the disciples were off doing who knows what?
Certainly, if it were a made-up story, Peter would have been front and center asking for the body and putting his neck on the line. So the whole idea of Joseph of Arimathea tells me this is not a made-up story. It is too inconvenient for the disciples.
Then we have the disciples’ failures. If they had simply fabricated their accounts of Christ’s death and resurrection, do you not think they would have left out the details that made them look bad? There were quite a few details that made them look bad, were there not?
There was the fact that Peter denied Jesus three times. There was the fact that they all ran and hid after the crucifixion. And there was Thomas, who, when he was told by the other ten about the resurrection, did not believe it. He said, “I’m not going to believe it until I see the nail prints in His hands.” And suddenly there was Jesus showing them. Thomas had to feel about this big.
The stories after the crucifixion really do not paint the disciples in the best light. If they were making up the stories later on, I am sorry, but if I am making up the story, I am making myself look better. That is just human nature. So that tells me it is too inconvenient to be something they made up.
Then we have the fact that the accounts of the empty tomb leave no plausible suspects to fake it. Not to sound too _Law & Order_ for you, but you talk about who had motive, means, and opportunity. There was nobody. There is nobody in the story.
The Roman soldiers had no motive to hide or steal the body or to allow anybody else to do the same. If they were found derelict of duty in the Roman legions, they were sent to a punishment called the fustuarium, where their fellow guards would carry out a kind of mob execution and beat them to death for falling down on the job. So if they had fallen asleep, stolen the body themselves, or let someone else steal it, they would have been subjected to this. They had no motive for this.
The disciples had already admitted to all the embarrassing facts of everything they had done. On top of that, there is no reason to think they would have been martyred for something they knew to be a lie. If they had stolen the body, run off with the body, hidden the body, and come back and said, “Hey, look, He’s alive, the tomb’s empty,” then when people put them on the cross or put them to the sword and said, “What really happened?” I do not know about you, but I am going to come clean. They are getting me to talk. Can I just say, they are getting me to talk.
The fact that, of the 11 remaining disciples, ten died as martyrs and one spent his life being persecuted until he died of natural causes, and not one of them would recant his story about seeing the resurrected Christ, tells me they did not have the body stashed somewhere. So the disciples, as far as I am concerned, are out.
Then we have the Jews. They had no motive to steal the body because they would have been playing into the disciples’ hands. If they had moved the body somewhere, and the disciples came out and told all of Jerusalem, “The tomb’s empty. He’s alive. He’s alive,” all the Jews had to do was show everybody the body, and the story was dead.
The Roman authorities had no motive to steal the body because that would have just created more chaos and disorder in Judea, and that is the last thing they wanted. Then there are the women. It is hard for me to believe that the women would have overpowered the guards and stolen the body. I have seen some women in some church business meetings before, and I guess anything is possible, but it is really hard for me to believe that they overcame this band of Roman soldiers and stole the body.
On top of overcoming this contingent of Roman soldiers who were there to guard it, they would have had to unseal the stone before the door of the tomb and roll the thing back. It took several men to roll this thing down into a rut where it would sit. They would have had to roll this thing uphill and over a hump in order to get the door open. For them to do all of that gives them more credit than the situation allows.
Then there are people who say they were simply mistaken and went to the wrong tomb. Really? When is the last time the woman got lost when she was on a trip? It is usually the man. But if the women had gone to the wrong tomb, it would be very easy for the Jews to say, “No, no, here’s the right one, and there’s the body still in it.” The women were not confused.
Finally, there is Jesus. Jesus was the other character in this story, and there is no reason to believe that He faked it. People have said He sort of swooned and then revived, slipped away from the tomb in the dead of night, faking His own resurrection.
He had been beaten so severely that He lost huge quantities of blood before He even went to the cross. The resulting hypovolemic shock would have critically weakened, if not killed Him, especially without medical attention. This so-called swoon theory, which became popular in the 1800s and early 1900s, says He just passed out and then woke up in the tomb and slipped out.
It denies that Jesus was God enough to rise from the dead, but this is what I do not understand: it has no problem assuming that He was God enough to survive hypovolemic shock, suffocation, and cardiac arrest, merely passing out and waking up in a dark, damp cave alone without medical attention, and yet having the strength to single-handedly roll back the massive boulder from the doorway to the tomb, overpower a detachment of Roman soldiers, and then present such a triumphant appearance that He convinced His followers He had risen again and conquered death. I do not think that is very likely.
For Him to go through all of that, you would have to agree with the Roman centurion: “Surely this man was the Son of God.” And besides that, there is the point of the Romans piercing His side with the spear. That would have proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that He was dead. When the Bible says the blood and water came out, that is because they pierced the pericardium, the sac around the heart, and the heart itself, and the pericardial fluid and the blood would have come out of the heart. There is no chance of surviving that.
The authorities could not deny the empty tomb. The tomb was empty, and they could not deny it. There was no body to produce. The location of His tomb was well known both to the authorities and to the other people of Jerusalem. If Jesus’ followers claimed He had risen while His body remained in the tomb, it would have been all too easy for the authorities to produce the dead body and kill the rumors.
But we have no hint in ancient literature, from the Bible or elsewhere, that the Jews ever said, “No, no, here’s the body.” There was no body to produce. When they were presented with the story of the empty tomb, they did not actually deny it. They just tried to cover it up. I believe the book of Matthew tells us that when the story began to circulate, Jesus’ opponents admitted the tomb was empty. The Jewish leaders bribed the soldiers and said, “Say ye, His disciples came by night and stole Him away while we slept.”
So they did not say, “No, no, that’s not possible. The tomb can’t be empty.” They said, “Oh dear. Okay, just say the disciples stole the body.” They could not refute the empty tomb because there was no body to produce. Instead, they tried to cover it up.
So we have fact one: Jesus Christ lived and died. Fact two: He was buried, and then the tomb He had been buried in was empty. There was no one who had the motive, means, and opportunity to empty it for Him.
Eyewitnesses Saw Him Alive
Fact number three is that Jesus was seen alive again by numerous eyewitnesses. Most of these were people who had seen Him during His first life, if we can call it that, before the crucifixion, and would have recognized Him.
The resurrection was physical, not spiritual. Some people who do not want to believe in miracles and do not want to believe in the resurrection have tried to explain it away and say it was a spiritual resurrection. He came back spiritually, but His body did not actually rise. There are a few problems with that.
Not only are there doctrinal problems for us—if He did not really rise bodily from the grave, what does that mean for us and our salvation?—but there are also practical problems. First of all, He showed His wounds to Thomas. Thomas touched the wounds. My understanding of the world and of the Bible is that spirits do not have bodies. Now, we are spirits in bodies, but to be just a spirit is not to have a body. If Jesus were some kind of hologram and Thomas went to try to touch the wounds in His hands, would he not go through Him? It just does not work.
So Jesus invited Thomas to touch His wounds. He could not do this if He did not have a physical body. He also allowed the rest of the disciples to touch Him, and He sat and ate fish and honeycomb with them. Again, I do not know much about ghosts, but I am assuming they do not get hungry. That is something else He could not do if it were merely a spiritual resurrection.
We also have the eyewitness accounts. We do not have to discount these people just because they are Christians. That does not automatically mean they are pathological liars. The eyewitnesses said He did these things.
Then we have the fact that the resurrection was real. It was not imaginary. You have probably heard people at some point say, “Well, they all just hallucinated the idea of the resurrection.” That is ridiculous.
The chairman of the philosophy and theology department at Liberty University made some good points on this. First of all, when people hallucinate, even if they hallucinate at the same time, they are all seeing different things. When people hallucinate, they do not typically have all the same hallucination together. It does not work that way. That is pretty well unknown to psychology.
Then you have the fact that some people are more susceptible to hallucinations and things like that than others. For the disciples to be so fearful and skeptical, and initially hostile toward the idea of Jesus rising again, does not fit that explanation. When Mary comes and tells the disciples He is alive, they do not say, “Oh, really? Great, we’ve been waiting for that.” No, they ran to see for themselves because they did not quite believe her. These were not people who were just going to believe whatever somebody told them. They really thought it was over.
So there is no susceptibility on their part to this hallucination, this wishful thinking, and certainly they would not have all seen the same things. Third, it is very odd and unusual in medical science for people to hallucinate without there being a cause, and we see no apparent cause for hallucinations. Most importantly, if they had all gotten together against all odds and hallucinated these visits from Jesus, the Jews still would have been able to produce the body. They did not. It would be really easy, if they were all hallucinating these appearances, to prove that they were hallucinations.
Then we have the fact that the resurrection was proclaimed but not refuted. If they had evidence the resurrection was false, they would have gladly trotted it out for the people. But they did not. As early as AD 37, the Christian creeds were teaching that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures.
This is taken directly from your Bibles, from 1 Corinthians chapter 15: “Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures,” “he was buried,” “he rose again the third day according to the scriptures,” “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,” though some had fallen asleep. “After that, he was seen of James; then of all the apostles.”
According to this creed, Jesus appeared alive again to Peter and to the other remaining disciples, then to a congregation of 500 believers, then to James, then to all the apostles. In addition, the Gospels say that He was seen by Mary Magdalene and another group of women, and not one of these people ever came forward and said, “I didn’t see that.”
Within two months of the resurrection, in Acts chapter 2, Peter publicly declared among the people of Jerusalem that they had killed Jesus, that Jesus had risen again from the dead, and that His body was no longer in the grave. We see no record of objection from the crowd on that point. We see that they were pricked in their hearts and asking what they must do.
So we have these eyewitness accounts. He lived and He died. He was buried, and then the tomb was empty. Then He was seen alive by eyewitnesses. It is hard to argue with the eyewitnesses.
Lives Changed by the Resurrection
Fact number four is that Jesus’ resurrection led to changes that cannot be otherwise explained. So much was different after the resurrection from before the resurrection, and it cannot be explained without the resurrection.
First of all, the disciples were suddenly bold witnesses in the face of martyrdom. Think about who they were during the arrest, trial, and crucifixion of Jesus: Peter denying Him, saying, “No, I never knew Him,” even cursing; the disciples running and hiding; then being skeptical, not believing, and having to be convinced.
In such a short period of time, you go from Peter being terrified and denying Christ to Peter standing up in front of the people of Jerusalem, not knowing whether they were going to stone him to death or not. You see him eventually going to his martyrdom. You see all the other disciples besides John going to martyrdom.
There is nothing else that happened during this time that could explain the dramatic change in their entire outlook, their entire personality, and the course of their lives and ministry if it was not for the fact that they had seen Jesus Christ alive. Tell me what else explains the drastic change in their lives that would take mice and make them into martyrs. They had seen the resurrected Christ. That is why.
The second change that cannot be otherwise explained is that skeptics and non-believers were drastically converted. People who had not just been on the fence, but had been opposed to the idea of Jesus and His teachings, were converted after they came into contact with the resurrected Christ.
James was the brother of Jesus, and we know from the Scriptures that during Jesus’ life, he did not accept Jesus’ claims to be the Messiah. But later on, we see him not only as a Christian, but as one of the leaders in the church at Jerusalem. The only explanation for this change is the resurrection. His own family did not believe in Him, but something changed their minds, and it was the resurrection.
Saul of Tarsus was a fanatical Pharisee. He defended traditional Judaism against Christians by terrorizing the earliest Christians. He said he breathed out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples, persecuted the church, and wasted it.
As I see it, it is also not unreasonable to think he might have been among that group of Pharisees who always followed Jesus around and attacked Him on everything He said. He was so opposed to Jesus, and yet Saul of Tarsus became Paul, one of the most prolific writers and successful missionaries in early Christianity. The only thing that explains the drastic change in his life was his experience with the resurrected Christ.
We have once-observant Jews discontinuing their animal sacrifices. If you believed, and if your people had believed for 1,500 years, that animal sacrifices and the shedding of blood were necessary as part of approaching God, you would not be quick to give up the sacrifices without a good reason, would you? Yet we see almost immediately these Jewish converts, the disciples among them, abandoned the animal sacrifices after thousands of years. That is a pretty big change, and it is explained by their belief that Jesus had been the all-sufficient sacrifice and had risen again.
We have once-observant Jews no longer viewing the law as binding in the same way. The Mosaic law had been part of their covenant with God, and suddenly they said it did not apply the same way as it did before. One of the things in that is that the church at Jerusalem even said you no longer had to be circumcised to be one of God’s people. Suddenly, God has made it clear that all people have the ability to have a relationship with God apart from the law. What is there to change that other than the resurrection?
Once-observant Jews abandoned the Sabbath as the central day of gathering. For thousands of years, they had set aside the seventh day of the week as a hallmark of their faith, and it was a commandment of God. Suddenly they decided to start meeting on the first day of the week because it commemorated the resurrection.
The Jews’ understanding of God changed. We do not dispute that there is only one God, but the Jews held to a different view of that. They said there is only one God, but they did not understand a Son and a Holy Spirit. After that, you have these Jewish believers saying it is one God in three persons. Their entire view of God changed. For a Jew who had been raised every day to pray the Shema, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord,” to take that idea and change it would be unthinkable if there were not good reason for it. The resurrection is the only thing powerful enough I can think of to change that.
Their understanding of the Messiah changed. They were looking for a Jewish king to overthrow the Romans and set up a perfect Jewish kingdom. After Jesus came along, so many of the Jewish converts abandoned that idea and said, “No, He came to be a suffering servant on our behalf, a suffering servant who would reconcile us to God.” So they abandoned the idea they had had of the Messiah for many, many years.
Christians adopted a commemoration of Jesus’ death. Think about it. If Jesus Christ had not risen again from the dead, how much sense does the Lord’s Supper make? If you had a relative who was killed on a cross, would you want to have a ceremony where you drink something that looks like blood and partake of something that looks like the broken body? It would be too tragic. It would be too sad. It would be morbid to remember somebody who had died in such a horrific fashion.
But it is not morbid, and it is not horrific for us, because we remember someone who died in such a horrific fashion and then rose again. Continuing the Lord’s Supper that was instituted by Christ makes no sense as a commemoration of a humiliating defeat unless there is the resurrection, which proves that the cross was a victory.
Finally, Christianity inexplicably exploded across the world. There is no possible explanation for why a cult of misfits following a humble carpenter from some remote cultural backwater, who was executed in the most humiliating way possible, and claiming that He was God in human flesh and had risen from the dead, would continue to exist and spread to the corners of the earth if there were not some truth to the story that He really had risen from the dead.
The growth of Christianity does not prove that it is true. Two of the fastest-growing religions in America right now are Mormonism and Islam, and I do not think the fact that they are growing fast means they are true. While the fact that Christianity grew so fast does not prove that it is true, it does lead us to stop and wonder: why on earth would people have followed Him for all these years if there were no truth to the story that He rose again?
The Resurrection Shows Who Jesus Is
You do not have to know all the details of everything from the Bible, but there are four things you can remember and have some things to back up when you talk to friends and family who doubt Christ or doubt all of this. It all hinges on the fact that He lived and died as the Bible says. He was buried, and then the tomb was empty. Eyewitnesses saw Him alive, and then there were changes that cannot be explained without the resurrection.
If all of those things are true, and I think I have given you evidence that they are, there is no doubt in my mind, and hopefully no doubt in yours, that Jesus Christ is exactly who He claimed to be.