I spoke recently at a major Canadian university on the existence
of God. After my talk, one slightly irate co-ed wrote on her comment
card, “I was with you until you got to the stuff about Jesus. God is
not the Christian God!”
This attitude is all too typical today.
Most people are happy to agree that God exists; but in our pluralistic
society it has become politically incorrect to claim that God has
revealed Himself decisively in Jesus. What justification can Christians
offer, in contrast to Hindus, Jews, and Muslims, for thinking that the
Christian God is real?
The answer of the New Testament is: the
resurrection of Jesus. “God will judge the world with justice by the
man He has appointed. He has given proof of this to all men by raising
him from the dead” (
Acts 17.31). The resurrection is God’s vindication of Jesus’ radical personal claims to divine authority.
So
how do we know that Jesus is risen from the dead? The Easter
hymnwriter says, “You ask me how I know he lives? He lives within my
heart!” This answer is perfectly appropriate on an individual level.
But when Christians engage unbelievers in the public square—such as in
“Letters to the Editor” of a local newspaper, on call-in programs on
talk-radio, at PTA meetings, or even just in conversation with
co-workers—, then it’s crucial that we be able to present objective
evidence in support of our beliefs. Otherwise our claims hold no more
water than the assertions of anyone else claiming to have a private
experience of God.
Fortunately, Christianity, as a religion
rooted in history, makes claims that can in important measure be
investigated historically. Suppose, then, that we approach the New
Testament writings, not as inspired Scripture, but merely as a
collection of Greek documents coming down to us out of the first
century, without any assumption as to their reliability other than the
way we normally regard other sources of ancient history. We may be
surprised to learn that the majority of New Testament critics
investigating the gospels in this way accept the central facts
undergirding the resurrection of Jesus. I want to emphasize that I am
not talking about evangelical or conservative scholars only, but about
the broad spectrum of New Testament critics who teach at secular
universities and non-evangelical seminaries. Amazing as it may seem,
most of them have come to regard as historical the basic facts which
support the resurrection of Jesus. These facts are as follows:
F
ACT #1: After his crucifixion, Jesus was buried in a tomb by Joseph of Arimathea. This
fact is highly significant because it means, contrary to radical
critics like John Dominic Crossan of the Jesus Seminar, that the
location of Jesus’ burial site was known to Jew and Christian alike.
In that case, the disciples could never have proclaimed his resurrection
in Jerusalem if the tomb had not been empty. New Testament researchers
have established this first fact on the basis of evidence such as the
following:
1. Jesus’ burial is attested in the very old tradition quoted by Paul in
I Cor. 15.3-5:
For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received:
. . . that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures,
and that he was buried,
and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures,
and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the Twelve.
Paul
not only uses the typical rabbinical terms “received” and “delivered”
with regard to the information he is passing on to the Corinthians, but
vv. 3-5 are a highly stylized four-line formula filled with non-Pauline
characteristics. This has convinced all scholars that Paul is, as he
says, quoting from an old tradition which he himself received after
becoming a Christian. This tradition probably goes back at least to
Paul’s fact-finding visit to Jerusalem around AD 36, when he spent two
weeks with Cephas and James (
Gal. 1.18).
It thus dates to within five years after Jesus’ death. So short a
time span and such personal contact make it idle to talk of legend in
this case.
2. The burial story is part of very old source material
used by Mark in writing his gospel. The gospels tend to consist of
brief snapshots of Jesus’ life which are loosely connected and not
always chronologically arranged. But when we come to the passion story
we do have one, smooth, continuously-running narrative. This suggests
that the passion story was one of Mark’s sources of information in
writing his gospel. Now most scholars think Mark is already the
earliest gospel, and Mark’s source for Jesus’ passion is, of course,
even older. Comparison of the narratives of the four gospels shows that
their accounts do not diverge from one another until
after the
burial. This implies that the burial account was part of the passion
story. Again, its great age militates against its being legendary.
3.
As a member of the Jewish court that condemned Jesus, Joseph of
Arimathea is unlikely to be a Christian invention. There was strong
resentment against the Jewish leadership for their role in the
condemnation of Jesus (
I Thess. 2.15).
It is therefore highly improbable that Christians would invent a member
of the court that condemned Jesus who honors Jesus by giving him a
proper burial instead of allowing him to be dispatched as a common
criminal.
4. No other competing burial story exists. If the
burial by Joseph were fictitious, then we would expect to find either
some historical trace of what actually happened to Jesus’ corpse or at
least some competing legends. But all our sources are unanimous on
Jesus’ honorable interment by Joseph.
For these and other reasons,
the majority of New Testament critics concur that Jesus was buried in a
tomb by Joseph of Arimathea. According to the late John A. T. Robinson
of Cambridge University, the burial of Jesus in the tomb is “one of the
earliest and best-attested facts about Jesus.”
1
FACT #2: On the Sunday following the crucifixion, Jesus’ tomb was found empty by a group of his women followers. Among the reasons which have led most scholars to this conclusion are the following:
1.
The empty tomb story is also part of the old passion source used by
Mark. The passion source used by Mark did not end in death and defeat,
but with the empty tomb story, which is grammatically of one piece with
the burial story.
2. The old tradition cited by Paul in I Cor. 15.3-5
implies the fact of the empty tomb. For any first century Jew, to say
that of a dead man “that he was buried and that he was raised” is to
imply that a vacant grave was left behind. Moreover, the expression “on
the third day” probably derives from the women’s visit to the tomb on
the third day, in Jewish reckoning, after the crucifixion. The
four-line tradition cited by Paul summarizes both the gospel accounts
and the early apostolic preaching (Acts 13. 28-31); significantly, the third line of the tradition corresponds to the empty tomb story.
3.
The story is simple and lacks signs of legendary embellishment. All
one has to do to appreciate this point is to compare Mark’s account with
the wild legendary stories found in the second-century apocryphal
gospels, in which Jesus is seen coming out of the tomb with his head
reaching up above the clouds and followed by a talking cross!
4.
The fact that women’s testimony was discounted in first century
Palestine stands in favor of the women’s role in discovering the empty
tomb. According to Josephus, the testimony of women was regarded as so
worthless that it could not even be admitted into a Jewish court of law.
Any later legendary story would certainly have made male disciples
discover the empty tomb.
5. The earliest Jewish allegation that the disciples had stolen Jesus’ body (Matt. 28.15)
shows that the body was in fact missing from the tomb. The earliest
Jewish response to the disciples’ proclamation, “He is risen from the
dead!” was not to point to his occupied tomb and to laugh them off as
fanatics, but to claim that they had taken away Jesus’ body. Thus, we
have evidence of the empty tomb from the very opponents of the early
Christians.
One could go on, but I think that enough has
been said to indicate why, in the words of Jacob Kremer, an Austrian
specialist in the resurrection, “By far most exegetes hold firmly to
the reliability of the biblical statements concerning the empty tomb.”
2
FACT #3: On
multiple occasions and under various circumstances, different
individuals and groups of people experienced appearances of Jesus alive
from the dead.
This is a fact which is almost universally acknowledged among New Testament scholars, for the following reasons:
1. The list of eyewitnesses to Jesus’ resurrection appearances which is quoted by Paul in I Cor. 15. 5-7
guarantees that such appearances occurred. These included appearances
to Peter (Cephas), the Twelve, the 500 brethren, and James.
2.
The appearance traditions in the gospels provide multiple, independent
attestation of these appearances. This is one of the most important
marks of historicity. The appearance to Peter is independently attested
by Luke, and the appearance to the Twelve by Luke and John. We also
have independent witness to Galilean appearances in Mark, Matthew, and
John, as well as to the women in Matthew and John.
3. Certain
appearances have earmarks of historicity. For example, we have good
evidence from the gospels that neither James nor any of Jesus’ younger
brothers believed in him during his lifetime. There is no reason to
think that the early church would generate fictitious stories concerning
the unbelief of Jesus’ family had they been faithful followers all
along. But it is indisputable that James and his brothers did become
active Christian believers following Jesus’ death. James was considered
an apostle and eventually rose to the position of leadership of the
Jerusalem church. According to the first century Jewish historian
Josephus, James was martyred for his faith in Christ in the late AD 60s.
Now most of us have brothers. What would it take to convince you that
your brother is the Lord, such that you would be ready to die for that
belief? Can there be any doubt that this remarkable transformation in
Jesus’ younger brother took place because, in Paul’s words, “then he
appeared to James”?
Even Gert L¸demann, the leading German
critic of the resurrection, himself admits, “It may be taken as
historically certain that Peter and the disciples had experiences after
Jesus’ death in which Jesus appeared to them as the risen Christ.”
3
FACT #4: The original disciples believed that Jesus was risen from the dead despite their having every predisposition to the contrary. Think of the situation the disciples faced after Jesus’ crucifixion:
1.
Their leader was dead. And Jews had no belief in a dying, much less
rising, Messiah. The Messiah was supposed to throw off Israel’s enemies
(= Rome) and re-establish a Davidic reign—not suffer the ignominious
death of criminal.
2. According to Jewish law, Jesus’ execution
as a criminal showed him out to be a heretic, a man literally under the
curse of God (Deut. 21.23). The
catastrophe of the crucifixion for the disciples was not simply that
their Master was gone, but that the crucifixion showed, in effect, that
the Pharisees had been right all along, that for three years they had
been following a heretic, a man accursed by God!
3. Jewish
beliefs about the afterlife precluded anyone’s rising from the dead to
glory and immortality before the general resurrection at the end of the
world. All the disciples could do was to preserve their Master’s tomb
as a shrine where his bones could reside until that day when all of
Israel’s righteous dead would be raised by God to glory.
Despite
all this, the original disciples believed in and were willing to go to
their deaths for the fact of Jesus’ resurrection. Luke Johnson, a New
Testament scholar from Emory University, muses, “some sort of powerful,
transformative experience is required to generate the sort of movement
earliest Christianity was . . . .”
4
N. T. Wright, an eminent British scholar, concludes, “that is why, as a
historian, I cannot explain the rise of early Christianity unless Jesus
rose again, leaving an empty tomb behind him.”
5
In
summary, there are four facts agreed upon by the majority of scholars
who have written on these subjects which any adequate historical
hypothesis must account for: Jesus’ entombment by Joseph of Arimathea,
the discovery of his empty tomb, his post-mortem appearances, and the
origin of the disciples’ belief in his resurrection.
Now the
question is: what is the best explanation of these four facts? Most
sholars probably remain agnostic about this question. But the Christian
can maintain that the hypothesis that best explains these facts is “God
raised Jesus from the dead.”
In his book
Justifying Historical Descriptions,
historian C. B. McCullagh lists six tests which historians use in
determining what is the best explanation for given historical facts.
6 The hypothesis “God raised Jesus from the dead” passes all these tests:
1. It has great
explanatory scope:
it explains why the tomb was found empty, why the disciples saw
post-mortem appearances of Jesus, and why the Christian faith came into
being.
2. It has great
explanatory power: it explains
why the body of Jesus was gone, why people repeatedly saw Jesus alive
despite his earlier public execution, and so forth.
3. It is
plausible:
given the historical context of Jesus’ own unparalleled life and
claims, the resurrection serves as divine confirmation of those radical
claims.
4. It is
not ad hoc or
contrived: it
requires only one additional hypothesis: that God exists. And even
that needn’t be an additional hypothesis if one already believes that
God exists.
5. It is
in accord with accepted beliefs.
The hypothesis: “God raised Jesus from the dead” doesn’t in any way
conflict with the accepted belief that people don’t rise
naturally from the dead. The Christian accepts
that belief as wholeheartedly as he accepts the hypothesis that God raised Jesus from the dead.
6. It
far outstrips any of its rival hypotheses in meeting conditions (1)-(5).
Down through history various alternative explanations of the facts
have been offered, for example, the conspiracy hypothesis, the apparent
death hypothesis, the hallucination hypothesis, and so forth. Such
hypotheses have been almost universally rejected by contemporary
scholarship. None of these naturalistic hypotheses succeeds in meeting
the conditions as well as the resurrection hypothesis.
Now this
puts the skeptical critic in a rather desperate situation. A few years
ago I participated in a debate on the resurrection of Jesus with a
professor at the University of California, Irvine. He had written his
doctoral dissertation on the resurrection, and he was thoroughly
familiar with the evidence. He could not deny the facts of Jesus’
honorable burial, empty tomb, post-mortem appearances, and the origin of
the disciples’ belief in the resurrection. So his only recourse was to
come up with some alternate explanation of those facts.
And so he
argued that
Jesus of Nazareth had an unknown, identical twin brother,
who was separated from him as an infant and grew up independently, but
who came back to Jerusalem at the time of the crucifixion, stole Jesus’
body out of the tomb, and presented himself to the disciples, who
mistakenly inferred that Jesus was risen from the dead! Now I won’t
bother to go into how I went about refuting this theory. But I think
the example is illustrative of the desperate lengths to which scepticism
must go in order to refute the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus.
Indeed, the evidence is so powerful that one of the world’s leading
Jewish
theologians, the late Pinchas Lapide, who taught at Hebrew University
in Israel, declared himself convinced on the basis of the evidence that
the God of Israel raised Jesus of Nazareth from the dead!
7
The
significance of the resurrection of Jesus lies in the fact that it is
not just any old Joe Blow who has been raised from the dead, but Jesus
of Nazareth, whose crucifixion was instigated by the Jewish leadership
because of his blasphemous claims to divine authority. If this man has
been raised from the dead, then the God whom he allegedly blasphemed has
clearly vindicated his claims. Thus, in an age of religious relativism
and pluralism, the resurrection of Jesus constitutes a solid rock on
which Christians can take their stand for God’s decisive self-revelation
in Jesus.
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