Lines of Evidence to Support the Resurrection
I have
recently done a series on an intro to apologetics, and in that series I took a
look at some of the objections to the resurrection, but not necessarily
evidences for the resurrection itself. I had left that to the people who have
laid out some awesome evidences for the resurrection, such as Dr. Gary
Habermas, Lee Strobel, and others. Recently, I saw a YouTube story, those short
little snippets, pop up in my feed from Godless Engineer. He had a ten second
clip of himself railing against Christian apologists saying that we have very
weak lines of evidence to support the resurrection and that we would be laughed
at to use them anywhere else, and cited the principle of embarrassment of the
gospel authors as an example. For those who haven’t heard of this, the
principle of embarrassment has been used by apologists to demonstrate the
validity of scriptures, because the gospel authors wrote themselves as bumbling
fools in the face of Jesus, and they reported other events that would make them
look silly, like the women finding the empty tomb first. The idea is that, if
the disciples made it up, that they would write the gospels with themselves
coming out looking as good as possible. Since they do not, it gives us an idea
that they were telling the whole, slightly embarrassing at times, truth.
This a sort of response to Godless
Engineer, on the fact that we have plenty more evidences to support the
resurrection than that. I’m sure he knows this, but Godless Engineer took
advantage of this little sound byte to deploy some great rhetoric and make
apologists look silly because most people getting their theological and philosophical
information from YouTube stories have the attention span of squirrels. I am
going to put as large of a list as I can find, while making this a
semi-efficient post, to show that we can build an overwhelming case in favor of
the resurrection of Jesus as a historical fact. I want to try and start with
some extra-Biblical ideas, and then work my way into the claims of the gospels,
since we have previously demonstrated that they are reliable sources on details
of Jesus’ ministry, death, and resurrection.
One of the first things we could do
is to demonstrate that Jesus existed, since if he did not exist, my discussion
about the topic, and my faith in general, are nothing but useless fantasy
anyway as Paul wrote later on in the New Testament. Extra-biblical sources from
non-Christian authors that declare Jesus divine and the Messiah are not to be
found, but the fact that Jesus existed in history and was crucified on the
orders of Pontius Pilate is supported by ancient historians like Flavius Josephus
and Tacitus, and confirmed by modern historians with no faith incentive like
Bart Ehrman. I have done a much more in depth look at these details about
ancient writings about Jesus in a previous blog post in my Intro to Apologetics
series, that I will link below. It should also be noted that Christian historians
like Mike Licona and Gary Habermas have done tremendous work to show a
tremendous evidential case for the existence of Jesus, the event of the crucifixion,
and the reality of the resurrection.
To look specifically at the
resurrection of Jesus, the first line of evidence that I want to use is
actually one of the newer ones that I have heard. It is cutely titled the
Chick-fil-a argument for the resurrection. I will link the original article in
my references section, but the summary of this post shows that tradition can be
an interesting line of evidence for a historical event. The fact that
Christians met on Sundays to worship Jesus, even in the early church, helps to
mark the resurrection Sunday. It is much like how we mark events in American
history, like the 4th of July, we have specific days in mind to
celebrate events of our past. In the article (linked below) describing the early
documentation of the first Christians worshipping on Sundays, the reasons are
detailed, which include marking that Jesus rose on Sunday.
We can also look at the manuscripts
that have been recovered, such as the dead sea scrolls. These manuscripts have
been carbon dated to before and after Jesus’ time on earth, depending on the manuscript.
We find consistency with these manuscripts, with minor variations between
certain manuscripts, but nothing that contradicts major accepted doctrines of Christianity,
including the prophecies about Jesus in the Old Testament, and the idea that
Jesus physically rose from the grave in the New Testament. I mention
physically, because the so-called “Lost gospels” were circulated later in the church’s
history, that claimed that Jesus only spiritually rose from the grave, but left
his body behind. This consistency over the ages also helps to defeat the idea
that the resurrection is a legendary development, meaning that it was added in
to the scriptures after the original authors penned their gospels.
Other Christian theologians have
noted that nothing short of the resurrection would have restored the original disciples
to faith. They saw their Messiah beaten and brutally killed in the most painful
way imaginable. Crucifixion was so painful that the word excruciating was
invented to describe what the victims of this execution method felt. The
disciples would have been distraught and terrified of Roman and Jewish authorities,
and only seeing their Messiah alive again would have brought about the world
changing faith that they displayed.
We also have no authoritative
refutation of the empty tomb, rather different authorities push different
stories (such as the body being stolen by the disciples), and I have written on
this in a previous post. I also recommend Lee Strobel’s and J. Warner Wallace’s
works on this topic. There are a couple of details that we have not discussed
here on this blog about the empty tomb, Joseph of Arimathea, and culture’s tendencies
to mark gravesites of important figures. Joseph of Arimathea was a member of
the Sanhedrin, so he would be contacted for verification or denial of the
details since he was mentioned by name in for the gospel accounts. Since the church
is still here, we can assume that Joseph of Arimathea confirmed his role in
offering his family tomb for laying Jesus to rest. All parties involved also
probably knew where the tomb was, so the resurrection could not be explained by
simply forgetting where they left Jesus. If the tomb still contained the body,
Christianity would be dead, but we would probably have a shrine to Jesus built
there, as there are for figures such as Buddha and Muhammed. If the body was found,
then Christianity would be dead. Instead, we have a marked empty tomb that Mary,
Mary Magdalene, and the disciples found empty and a great evidence for a risen
Messiah.
This took me a little longer to put
together than some of my other posts, but as Paul says, if Christ has not been
raised, then we are to be pitied among all others. The resurrection of Christ
is the cornerstone of our faith, and we need to give a reasonable case for it, so
I wanted to take this seriously. I hope this is a useful resource for those of
you having these conversations with your non-Christian friends and family. May
God bless you and have a good rest of your day!
References
Extra References I didn’t necessarily use in this writing,
but are fun reading/watching
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