The popular
axiom of modern secular thought is that an extraordinary claim requires
extraordinary evidence. In no area is this more evident than in the skeptics’
claims that the resurrection of Jesus Christ is incapable of providing such a
weight of evidence to justify its truthfulness. However, critics of this axiom
are right to point out that it is not extraordinary evidence that is necessary,
but rather sufficient evidence to support the claim. In examining the
resurrection we must then be careful to ask of, and then examine the evidence
to see if it is sufficient to justify the belief that Jesus was raised from the
dead. Doing so requires that we examine the historical evidence in a twofold
manner. First, we must examine it for its weight and historical reliability.
Second, we must examine it to see if it could have been falsified in the
context and culture of 1st century Judaism. Our final task will then
be to discern how best to use this evidence in the best manner when confronted
with contrary explanations of what could have caused the belief of that Jesus
had been resurrected.
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| The Descent from the Cross Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669) |
Affirming
that the resurrection occurred first requires that it be verified that Jesus
was actually crucified. Flavius Josephus, writing in A.D. 94, reports of Jesus’
death that “Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had
condemned him to the cross…”[1]
Scholars are of a general agreement that this passage has possible
interpolations inserted by early Christians concerning the deity of Christ, his
status as Messiah, and his resurrection. However, it is also agreed that if the
“questionable components are removed, there are good reasons for maintaining
that Josephus wrote the remaining text”[2]
which includes the mention of Christ’s death by crucifixion at Pilate’s hands. The
satirist Lucian of Samosata provides another attestation of Jesus’ crucifixion
in Passing of Peregrinus written in
the latter half of the second century. Peregrinus, the focus of the satire, is
taken in by Christians who end up worshipping him “next after that other, to be
sure, whom they still worship, the man who was crucified in Palestine because
he introduced this new cult into the world.”[3]
While Lucian is mocking Christ and early Christian beliefs it should be noted
that he never treats the historical fact of Christ’s death as something that
was not true. It can be readily affirmed that “Lucian…tells us what educated
pagans of the second century knew or believed about Jesus.”[4]
Finally, the historian Tacitus reports that Nero attempted to attach the blame
for the fire of Rome on Christians whose founder Christus “had undergone the
death penalty in the reign of Tiberius, by sentence of the procurator Pontius
Pilatus.”[5]
The misspelling of Christ as Christus “was a common error made by pagan
writers”[6]
and Tacitus’ mention of him provides us “with testimony by the leading Roman
historian of his day”[7]
that Christ lived and was crucified.
Jesus’
death by crucifixion is also recorded in all four of the canonical gospels.
Subsequently, the question must be asked if early Jewish converts to
Christianity would have portrayed their Messiah as dying by crucifixion. Old
Testament case law prohibited leaving a man who had been hung on a tree from
overnight exposure as “a hanged man is cursed by God” and such an act would
bring defilement on the land.[8]
Disgust at executing a man by hanging from a tree was further exacerbated under
the Seleucids and Romans by their extensive use of crucifixion. Josephus
records that those who resisted Antiochus Epiphanies in 167 B.C. “were whipped
with rods, and their bodies torn to pieces, and were crucified.”[9]
Mass crucifixions were also the means by which Rome crushed rebellions and
Josephus recounts several such episodes including the crucifixion of 2,000 Jews
by Varus to stop a revolt in 4 B.C[10]
and the crucifixion of a multitude of Jews during Titus’ campaign in A.D. 70.[11]
These reports from Josephus and
other sources, such as the seven brothers in 2 Maccabees, provide a picture a
Jews resisting their conquerors in the face of torture and execution. The
contrast with Jesus as portrayed in the Gospels is quite striking. Jesus in no
account defies his executioners, but instead goes meekly to the crucifixion.
This contrast, as well as the curse placed upon those who die by hanging on a
tree, provides a criterion of embarrassment that helps to solidify that the
crucifixion would not have been an invented belief. In first century Palestine
“the differences between Jesus in the Passion Narratives and the seven brothers
and Eleazar must have stood out immediately to the early readers and would most
likely have been quite embarrassing for Christians…the embarrassing elements in
the Passion Narratives weigh in favor of the presence of historical kernels.”[12]
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| The Resurrection of Christ Giovanni Bellini (1430-1516) |
The first proclaimed evidence of
the resurrection is the reports by the women of the empty tomb. All four
gospels record in some fashion that when the women and Peter and John went to
the tomb “they did not find the Lord Jesus.”[13]
While it could be claimed that this is insufficient evidence that the tomb was
actually empty, several factors can lead us to believe it is true. First, the
gospels record this as a piece of common knowledge known to both early
Christians and their opponents. Matthew records that the story that Christ’s body
had been stolen from the tomb was propagated by chief priests and had “spread
among the Jews to this day.”[14]
Such a statement invited direct investigation by the readers of the gospel and
predicted that the story, though false, could be verified and would testify to
the empty tomb. Similarly, Luke records Paul’s statement to Agrippa of his
conversion in which he proclaims it was necessary that “the Christ must suffer
and…[be] the first to rise from the dead…”[15]
While the statement does not directly mention the empty tomb, it does imply it
by speaking of the resurrection from the dead. Paul declares these events to be
widely known by Agrippa for “none of these things [had] escaped his notice, for
this has not been done in a corner.”[16]
Again, such statements invited scrutiny and were not denied by those to whom
they were given.
Paralleling the lack of denial of
the empty tomb is the fact that at no time did the opponents of Christianity
ever produce the body of Christ to refute the claim of the empty tomb. Matthew’s
record again provides illumination in this area as the chief priests’ efforts
to deny the resurrection were to tell the guards to “[t]ell people, His
disciples came by night and stole him while we were asleep.”[17]
Gary Habermas and Michael Licona note that it would have been much more
effective to exhume Jesus’ body and “publicly display it for the hoax to be
shattered.”[18]
The silence from the early critics of Christianity in this area is telling. No
easier method of destroying the fledgling religion could have been available to
the Romans or the Sanhedrin, and yet no source records the body being produced
or the location of a still occupied tomb. Recent attempts to explain away the
body not being produced are inadequate in their scope or explanatory power as
well. To say that the body was so decomposed as to be unrecognizable ignores
“the arid climate of Jerusalem, [and] a corpse’s hair, stature, and distinctive
wounds” that would have made the corpse “identifiable, even after fifty days.”[19]
Also, no matter how disfigured, the presentation of any corpse that could even
be remotely identified with Christ would have been immensely damaging to the
early church.
Ascertaining whether or not the
account of the empty tomb could arise naturally within the minds of first
century Jews is more difficult. Certainly the religious and philosophical
mindset of Roman and Greek culture denied that anyone could rise from the dead
and leave an empty tomb. The more common belief, as represented in Homer and
religious praxis, was that that “the dead were non-existent; outside Judaism,
nobody believed in resurrection.”[20]
In this view the dead were at most “shades…ghosts…phantoms…They are in no way
fully human being…one cannot grasp them physically.”[21]
In such an environment the idea of a body coming to life and leaving its tomb
went against common observance and was absurd at the least. If such appearance
was appealed to as a vision of the deceased, the common interpretation would be
that it was only a haunting of the recently deceased since “such visions meant
precisely, as people in the ancient and modern worlds have discovered, that the
person was dead, not that they were alive.[22]
Even Jewish belief in resurrection
precluded the type of resurrection that left an empty tomb as portrayed in the
gospels. The resurrection hoped for by the Jews had less to do with individual
resurrection “but on the fate of Israel and her promised land.”[23]
Such a view of the resurrection was more long term, looking ahead to the future
resurrection of the faithful at the Day of Judgment, not on a single individual
resurrected as a sign from God. In this combined atmosphere the spontaneous
creation of a story that presented Jesus as being physically absent from the
tomb through resurrection would have been laughable without direct confirmatory
evidence.
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| Saints Peter and John Healing the Lame Man Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) |
The third line of evidence that
points to the resurrection of Jesus is the testimony of the disciples that the
resurrection occurred and their willingness to die for that testimony. Matthew
and Mark record that prior to the resurrection the disciples lacked the courage
to even stand with Jesus when he was arrested choosing instead to flee in fear.[24]
The change after the resurrection events is startling in its contrast. Acts
records that the disciples were willing to defy the Jewish religious
authorities,[25]
be beaten,[26]
rejoice in that suffering[27],
and suffer martyrdom for their testimony.[28]
The testimony of the early church fathers provides further extra-biblical
support of the willingness of the disciples to suffer and die for what they
believed. Hippolytus, writing in the third century, records that of the
original twelve disciples seven of them suffered martyrdom for their beliefs.[29]
Among the early church fathers Clement records in the first century that “[b]y
reason of jealousy and envy the greatest and most righteous pillars of the
Church [Peter and Paul] were persecuted, and contended even unto death.”[30]
What could have brought about such a radical change of behavior among those who
fled from the fear of persecution and death previously? Licona correctly states
that “[t]he strength of their conviction indicates they were not just claiming
that Jesus had appeared to them after rising from the dead. They really
believed it.”[31]
The specific content of the
testimony that the disciples were willing to suffer for is demonstrative of
their belief that Jesus had been raised from the dead. Peter’s sermon at
Pentecost hinges upon the resurrection of Christ as its central point. It is
because “God raised [Jesus] up, loosing the pangs the pangs of death, because
it was not possible for him to be held by it”[32]
that the disciples were able to testify and perform signs and wonders. Furthermore,
the means of freedom salvation have been made known and demonstrated to be true
in the resurrection of Jesus because “he was not abandoned to Hades, nor did
his flesh see corruption. This Jesus God raised up, and of that we all are
witnesses.”[33] Other
sermons recorded in Acts continue to appeal to the resurrection of Jesus as the
ultimate confirmation that the message being presented is indeed true.[34]
John writes of Jesus that he is the “firstborn of the dead”[35]
and that “every eye will see him, even those who pierced him”[36]
as he returns in his resurrected body. Similarly, Peter addresses persecuted
believers in the name of the Father who gives hope “through the resurrection of
Jesus Christ from the dead.”[37]
It can be unequivocally asserted that the resurrection mattered to those who
had witnessed it, and it made an indelible change in their beliefs and actions.
But we must ask if the disciples
could have been deceived or invented the story, and would they have been
willing to die for what they knew to be false. N.T. Wright argues that
Hellenistic literature provides evidence that the ancients were “aware of
haunting, appearances, and so forth”[38]of
those who had died. However, such visions were by no means the type of events
that would be interpreted as a resurrection from the dead or an event that
would cause such a radical worldview shift as to cause someone to be willing to
be martyred. Rather, such events were “not cases of people ceasing to be dead
and resuming something like normal life, but precisely of the dead remaining
dead and being encountered as visitors from the world of the dead, who have not
and will not resume anything like the kind of life they had before.”[39]
To thus claim that the disciples were deceived by a vision, cognitive
dissonance, or mass hallucinations ignores the cultural milieu in which the
disciples lived. In addition, claims of hallucination or cognitive dissonance
cannot adequately address the willingness to die for the claim that they had
seen the resurrected Christ. Lee Strobel succinctly addresses the point by noting
that “[p]eople will die for their religious beliefs if they sincerely believe
they’re true, but people won’t die for their religious beliefs if they know
their beliefs are false.”[40]
.jpg) |
| Conversion on the Way to Damascus Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) |
For our final line of evidence we
look to the apostle Paul and his conversion experience upon seeing the
resurrected Jesus. The testimony of Paul as to his experience is particularly
useful as he “is the earliest known author to mention the resurrection of
Jesus, and there are numerous extant texts he wrote that give us clues
pertaining to the nature of Jesus’ resurrection.”[41]
The Scriptural record is clear that Paul was antagonistic to the early church
“ravaging the church, and…dragg[ing] off men and women…to prison”[42]
Paul testifies of himself that he “was a blasphemer, persecutor, and insolent
opponent”[43]
of the church prior to his conversion. The catalyst that drove Paul from
persecutor to willing martyr must then have been drastic and profound. By
Paul’s own words and the record of Luke we learn that this event was seeing the
resurrected Jesus.
Paul writes in Galatians that he
received his ministry “through a revelation of Jesus the Messiah”[44]in
which God “was pleased to reveal his Son to me”[45]
and not through the commissioning of men. Gerd Luedemann contends that Paul’s
use of the phrase revelation is indicative of “an experience in terms of its
religious character”[46]
and that this revealing was not a true experience of Christ resurrected but
only a vision. However, such an interpretation does not capture the full scope
of what Paul is saying. The revelation which Paul experienced was one of
commissioning by which he was to “preach among the Gentiles” the gospel of
Christ. Wright notes that
[A] comparison of this passage with
Romans 1.3-4 and 1 Corinthians 15:1-4 reminds us that when Paul here talks
about ‘the gospel’ he does not mean ‘justification by faith’ or ‘the inclusion
of the Gentiles’. He means ‘Jesus, the Messiah, is risen from the dead and is
the lord of the world’…[T]he best way of taking Galatians 1.12 and 16 is to
insist that when Paul spoke of the revelation of Jesus the Messiah, of God’s
son, he was taking it for granted that in and through his revelation he had
become convinced that Jesus had been raised from the dead in the sense
explained by those other two letters.[47]
At this
point we need to examine Paul’s description of Christ’s resurrection appearances
as recorded in 1 Corinthians to bring the statements in Galatians into their
full context. 1 Corinthians 15:3-8 is a creedal formula that most scholars
agree “was formed in Jerusalem and that Paul either received it directly from
the Jerusalem apostles or from someone he deemed very credible.”[48]Additionally,
this creed in its basic formulation has a very early date “within four to six
years of Jesus’ crucifixion and…it comes from the eyewitnesses themselves.”[49]
As we’ve already noted, the eyewitnesses mentioned in the creed all testified
that Jesus had appeared to them in alive in bodily form. The reader is thus invited
to test the veracity of their claims by being given the list of those to whom
Christ had appeared and the statement that most of those mentioned were still
alive and thus able to be questioned. To this list of witnesses Paul adds that
“as one untimely born, he appeared to me also.”[50]
Paul is not trying to indicate that his experience was different in quality
than that of the other witnesses as some contend. Rather, he is showing his own
unpreparedness for the life altering change seeing Jesus resurrected had upon
him. In effect, he “explains the difference between himself and the others not
in terms of his seeing of Jesus being a different sort of ‘seeing’, but in
terms of his own personal unreadiness for such an experience.”[51]
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| Paul Writing His Epistles Possibly Valentin de Boulogne (1591-1632) |
What does
this say of Paul’s experience and the possibility that it was either a mistaken
hallucination or a fabricated event? As we have previously noted, the idea of a
vision or visitation of a spirit would not have been interpreted as a full
physical resurrection, but rather been considered a haunting by the recently
deceased. Furthermore, Paul’s declaration that he was a “Pharisee, a son of
Pharisees”[52]
helps to demonstrate that the resurrection as described by him is not the
fiction that would have been told had he been creating a legend
extemporaneously. The tradition of the Pharisees was rooted in the second
Temple belief that “[r]esurrection…was not simply about ‘life after death’; it
was about a new, embodied life after
‘life after death’. Nobody supposed that the patriarchs, Moses, Reuben or
anyone else had yet been given this resurrection life.”[53]
Even the rabbinic tradition of the second century AD, which grew out of the
Pharisee’s beliefs, continued to look ahead because the “resurrection of the
dead, though confidently expected, has not yet occurred.”[54]
With our
historical basis in place we must finally ask how best to use the historical
and cultural evidence for the validity of the resurrection when confronted with
a contrary explanation. Since we have examined the claims of the resurrection
from a historical perspective and found them to fit with the historical record
and the cultural beliefs that were prevalent, it is only fitting that we
examine counter-claims in the same way and see if they are capable of
explaining both as well. Habermas and Licona point out that “as the Christian
can be expected to provide facts to support her claim that Jesus rose from the
dead, the critic must do likewise for his opposing explanations…The critic must
provide good reason why [their] theory…offers a better explanation for the
facts than does Jesus’ actual bodily resurrection.”[55]
In
comparing the resurrection narratives to any competing claims it is necessary to
have some criterion in place to judge which is most in accordance with what
really happened. Licona provides a set of criteria which provide an ample basis
on which to compare and a few of them merit mentioning in brief here. First,
explanatory scope is the means by which we “look at the quantity of facts
accounted for by a hypothesis. The hypothesis that includes the most relevant
data has the greatest explanatory scope.”[56]
Second, explanatory power examines the data to determine which account
“explains the date with the least amount of effort, vagueness and ambiguity.”[57]
Third, plausibility determines whether other areas of knowledge and accepted
fact lean towards one particular hypothesis or the other. Finally, each claim
must be examined to see which is less ad
hoc by avoiding “nonevidenced assumptions” that go “beyond what is already
known.”[58]
We have
only mentioned in passing some counter claims to the resurrection such as
Luedemann’s claim the resurrections events were hallucinations, the claim to
cognitive dissonance among the disciples, or the supposedly strictly religious
nature of the Easter narrative which has no basis in actual events. However, if
we were to examine each of these, and others like them, we would find that each
is unable to account for some aspect of the criteria that Licona suggests.
Indeed we would find that each must manipulate or ignore the historicity of the
records or the cultural beliefs that would have been incapable of conceiving of
the resurrection as presented in the gospels. We rightly reject these
explanations because, as Karl Barth put it,
(quite apart from the many
inconsistencies of detail) it all smacks too strongly of an apologetic to
explain away the mystery and miracle attested in the texts. And this is
something that cannot be said of the identification of the Easter event with
the rise of the Easter faith…[The belief in Jesus’ resurrection] did at least
keep closer to the texts by not only maintaining but trying to show that the
disciples did not come to this faith of themselves, but were brought to it by
some factor concretely at work in the world…[59]
We may rest assured that ours is not a blind faith informed
by legend, but a faith that has roots deeply imbedded in the historical reality
that is the promise of our future reality in Jesus Christ.
[1]
Flavius Josephus, The Antiquities of the
Jews XVIII.3.3.
[2] Michael R. Licona, The
Resurrection of Jesus, A New Historiographical Approach (Downers Grove, IL:
IVP Academic, 2010), 239.
[3]
Lucian of Samosata, The Passing of
Peregrinus, 11, http://www.tertullian.org/rpearse/lucian/peregrinus.htm
(accessed November 17, 2012).
[4]
Licona, The Resurrection of Jesus: A New
Historiographical Approach, 246.
[5]
Tacitus, Annals, XV.44, http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Tacitus/Annals/15B*.html#note28
(accessed November 17, 2012).
[6] Josh
McDowell, The New Evidence that Demands a
Verdict (Dallas, TX: Thomas Nelson, 1999), 120.
[7]
Ibid., 121.
[8]
Deuteronomy 21:23, ESV.
[9]
Josephus, The Antiquities of the Jews,
XII.5.4.
[10]
Ibid., XVII.10.10.
[11]
Flavius Josephus, The Wars of the Jews,
or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem, V.11.1.
[12]
Licona, The Resurrection of Jesus: A New
Historiographical Approach, 306.
[13]
Luke 24:3, ESV.
[14]
Matthew 28:15, ESV.
[15]
Acts 26:23, ESV.
[16]
Acts 26:26, ESV.
[17]
Matthew 28:7, ESV.
[18]
Gary R. Habermas and Michael R. Licona, The
Case for the Resurrection of Jesus (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications,
2004), Kindle e-book, 616.
[19]
Ibid., 625.
[20]
N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son
of God (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2003), 35.
[21]
Ibid., 43.
[22]
Ibid., 690-691.
[23]
Ibid., 99.
[24]
Matthew 26:56, Mark 14:50.
[25]
Acts 4:19-20.
[26]
Acts 5:40.
[27]
Acts 5:41.
[28]
Acts 7:57-60, 12:1-2.
[29]
Hippolytus, On the Twelve Apostles: Where
Each of Them Preached, And Where He Met His End, Christian Classics
Ethereal Library, http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/anf05.iii.v.ii.html
(accessed November 18, 2012).
[30]
Clement, The First Epistle of Clement to
the Corinthians, Chapter V “No less evils have arisen from the same source
in the most recent times. The martyrdom of Peter and Paul”, Christian Classics
Ethereal Library, http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/anf01.ii.ii.v.html,
(accessed November 18, 2012).
[31]
Licona, The Resurrection of Jesus: A New
Historiographical Approach, 366.
[32]
Acts 2:24, ESV.
[33]
Acts 2:31, 32, ESV.
[34]
Cf. Acts 3:14, 15; 4:10; 5:30; 10:39-41; 13:30.
[35]
Revelation 1:5, ESV.
[36]
Revelation 1:7, ESV.
[37] 1
Peter 1:3, ESV.
[38]
Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of
God, 63.
[39]
Ibid., 64.
[40]
Lee Strobel, The Case For Christ
(Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1998), 247.
[41]
Licona, The Resurrection of Jesus: A New
Historiographical Approach, 437.
[42]
Acts 8:3, ESV.
[43] 1Timothy
1:13, ESV.
[44]
Galatians 1:12, ESV.
[45]
Galatians 1:16, ESV.
[46]
Gerd Luedemann, The Resurrection of
Jesus: History, Experience, Theology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press,
1994), Kindle e-book, 52.
[47]
Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of
God, 380-381.
[48]
Licona, The Resurrection of Jesus: A New
Historiographical Approach, 237-238.
[49]
Ibid., 231.
[50] 1
Corinthians 15:8.
[51]
Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of
God, 328.
[52]
Acts, 23:6, ESV.
[53]
Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of
God, 199.
[54]
Ibid., 194.
[55]
Habermas and Licona, The Case for the
Resurrection of Jesus, 716.
[56]
Licona, The Resurrection of Jesus: A New
Historiographical Approach, 109.
[57]
Ibid., 109.
[58]
Ibid., 110.
[59]
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV.1: The
Doctrine of Reconciliation (New York, NY: T&T Clark International,
2004), 340-341.
