Here’s a really core reason why we have such good cause to worship Jesus as God. This can be solid rock for our souls; God shows his reality to different people in different ways, but this is one of the central paths!
We need to think hard about what happened in Palestine two thousand years ago. (Too many people refuse to!)
ISSUE ONE: WHAT HAPPENED TO JESUS’ BODY?
First, it’s worth thinking about the body of the dead Christ. Everybody involved in the original events ‑ friends or foes of Jesus ‑ agreed that Christ was crucified, died, and was buried. We have the arguments of some of Christ’s opponents, and know what they said about it all – because they would have been sure to have checked what happened; certainly someone as intelligent and active in opposition as Saul of Tarsus would have wanted to know. And no one says anything different: Christ died. (And what’s more, John 19:34 tells us about the blood and water coming from Jesus’ side; since the discovery of the blood circulation, we know (as John couldn’t have) that this is strong medical proof of death.)
So Jesus died. And then a strange thing occurred: his body vanished. What happened?
In fact there are not many possibilities. That the body vanished, and that this was not his enemies’ doing, also seems definite. Then and later, Jews and Romans wanted to remove this threat to peace and orthodoxy. Jesus was regarded as a highly dangerous radical, and soon after his death it’s clear that Jerusalem was in turmoil as the disciples preached that he had risen from the dead. So we can conclude that, if anybody had taken his body and hidden it, it would not have been his enemies, because they badly needed that body. Religious factors aside, the Jerusalem authorities had good reason for fear, with thousands of Jews turning to Christ, either that they would be called to fatal account for `this man’s blood’ (cf Acts 5:28), or that the social instability would provoke a Roman takeover and the end of the Jewish nation. (Compare John 11:48, or the parallel problem when the new faith reached Ephesus in Acts 19:40.) As regards the Romans, it’s clear that for example Felix was very keen to do the Jews a favour when they were trying to put an end to Paul’s ministry (Acts 24:27); and if he could have produced either the body, or the Romans who had disposed of it, that would have been an ideal favour to grant. He never tried; the Talmud would surely say if he had. It’s also striking that we never hear of the Roman opponents of Christianity blaming the Jews for having removed the body, nor the Jews the Romans. If there was any way his enemies could have produced the body, or those who removed it, in the early days of the infant church’s rapid growth, they would surely have silenced the preaching of the resurrection; but it never happened. Clearly neither the Jews nor Romans had removed the body.
There’s another thing that they didn’t say, a daft idea that only emerged centuries later. This was that Jesus swooned on the cross, apparently died, and then, without any medical care or food, revived in the tomb, emerged triumphant and so healthy that he convinced his followers that he had conquered death. This isn’t a theory we seem to hear today. Why has it been forgotten?
Probably because on reflection no one can believe that a person close enough to the edge of death to deceive his executioners, with no food or medical care, should be able to shift the massive stone at the mouth of the tomb, evade the guards if they were there, walk on his horribly damaged feet to Emmaus and on other occasions too, and yet persuade his followers that death itself has been transcended forever. It’s striking too that there is no hint of any record anywhere in ancient history as to where Jesus’ body eventually rested. And, of course, all this makes Jesus himself a liar. It is not surprising that this bizarre explanation has vanished off the scene; and none of his early enemies suggested it.
Rather, the early church’s enemies explained the body’s absence by accusing the Christians of stealing it. This is the only hostile explanation the gospels seem aware of and needing to counter (cf Matthew 28:11-15), and is the one Justin Martyr has to face in his encounter with the sceptic Trypho a century later; Tertullian, in his apologetics a few decades later; and Origen in his debate with Celsus later still in the third century. It is also the explanation repeated in the later Jewish Toledoth Jesu. But it is noticeable, and remarkable, that the accusation never resulted in a trial. Jesus’ disciples were indeed executed, but never on this charge.
And one wonders what they could possibly have had to gain by doing such a thing. And afterwards, with no motivation, they proceed to centre their whole lives around their affirmation of the resurrection, building a new religion with baptism commemorating Jesus’ resurrection as one of its two central rituals, and changing the sabbath that was central (for Jews) for salvation, to Sunday in commemoration of the resurrection – and all this time they know it’s all a lie. Equally bizarre – as we expose ourselves to the ethical teaching of these earliest Christian leaders – is the notion that these people who were doing a great job of spreading as powerful and gripping a religious vision as the world has ever seen, in the teeth of huge opposition, right across the Roman empire, and for no financial gain, were themselves aware it was entirely false; underneath, they were some of the world’s most effective con‑men. Strangest of all is that, as many of them (and their families) were beheaded, crucified upside down, whipped and otherwise tortured or executed, no-one ever admits the truth, that they had stolen the body. All this seems impossible to imagine.
Down the ages so many people have faced these facts and then built their lives around the conclusion that Jesus really did rise from the dead. It’s very interesting that a man as brilliant as Saul of Tarsus could find no other explanation. An obvious modern example is Frank Morrison, author of Who Moved the Stone?, who set out as an unbeliever to write a book giving the real story of the resurrection, and was forced as he examined the evidence to conclude that Jesus did rise from the dead. The resurrection has been called one of the best attested facts in ancient history. We’re talking solid historical, that’s to say scientific, evidence here. So we should be asking our friends, or ourselves, each Easter: So what do you think happened to Jesus’ body?
ISSUE TWO: WHAT ABOUT ALL THE PEOPLE WHO MET THE RISEN JESUS?
We can go further, however. Christ was seen after the resurrection. The careful historian Luke describes these appearances as ‘many convincing proofs’ (Acts 1:3) (and as Paul’s travel companion who saw Paul’s sufferings first hand, he had reason to want to be sure that `convincing` was what they were). In the mid-50s AD, twenty years after the resurrection, Paul writes to the people of the merchant port of Corinth from where people might easily travel to Palestine, giving them a long list of living witnesses in Israel who had seen the risen Christ and who could still be contacted, including five hundred who saw him at one time; most of these, he adds, were still alive to confirm what he was saying (1 Corinthians 15:1-8). This is surely very solid historical data. (And as N T Wright observes, it’s particularly interesting that Paul omits the women altogether, presumably because the evidence of women counted for so little in that culture. But then the only reason why the gospels included their encounters with the risen Christ would be that they actually happened.)
Then we should consider James, Jesus’ brother, a man not easily convinced, indeed a sceptic throughout Christ’s lifetime, yet also a man of sufficient moral stature to be accepted later as leader by the large numbers of believers in Jerusalem; he encountered Christ after the resurrection, and became a frontline Christian in Jerusalem where this was a very dangerous position, finally being beheaded in AD 62. He, we must affirm, lied or was deceived, if Christ did not rise. We should consider the meeting between the disciples and the risen Christ, recorded as the finale of both Luke’s and John’s gospels (these documents for the contents of which so many Christians would soon die), and again at the beginning of Acts. And lastly, what changed Paul himself from persecutor to missionary? He says: I saw the risen Christ.
What are we to make of these appearances and these witnesses? We cannot think of legends arising in so short a time. Besides, as C S Lewis points out, they would be exceedingly odd legends by the standards of classical culture. There is no account of the resurrection itself (the later apocryphal gospels certainly make up for that), no appearance to his enemies, appearances first to women. Indeed, many people find the vivid realism of passages like John 20 and 21 and Luke 24 enough to authenticate them as definitive eye-witness accounts; reread them and see what you think!
But if not legends, are we to see the appearances as deliberate lies? When these men were engaged in giving the world some of its highest ethical teaching? Again, we are left with the absurd idea of the disciples doing a superb job of spreading a powerful, gripping religious vision, spending their lives building a new religion with a central ritual, baptism, that focussed on the resurrection (why?), and at the same time jeopardising their eternal futures by abandoning their own religious background, knowing the key accounts that climax their whole gospel are all lies. (They resurrection’ would have faced massive internal struggles as well as external. The early church abandoned the Jewish Sabbath to begin holding its worship on a Sunday, because of the resurrection which happened on the `first day of the week’; but neglect of the Sabbath, in their old testament, was itself fully sufficient cause for God’s judgment to fall. And they risked that judgment for what they knew was a lie?)
So why did they bother? Many watch their families being seized and hurt by the persecutors. No one says: We made it up. And finally, one after another, they die unpleasantly; knowing it’s all a lie. That surely seems utterly improbable. The resurrection appearances aren’t lies.
But it feels equally bizarre to believe these encounters were mere `visions’. The difference between the Gospel appearances and Revelation 1, when John really does have a vision of the risen Christ, will be obvious to any reader of the two. And we note the authors’ repeated emphasis on the disciples touching the risen Christ (Luke 24:38-39, Matthew 28:9, John 20:24-28), going for extended walks with him (Luke 24:13-32, 50, John 21:20), and especially ‘eating and drinking’ with him (Luke 24:30,43, John 21:9-14, Acts 1:4, and particularly Acts 10:41). Hallucinations don’t eat fish, and they don’t go with groups of people on long country walks!
So what then transformed the twelve from a group of dispirited disciples who abandoned or betrayed their Lord (an account so detrimental to the church leadership that it’s unlikely to have been fabricated), into people who turned the world upside down? What transformed Paul from persecutor to missionary? What, after Jesus’ death, suddenly turned his own sceptical brother James into his follower, so that he too became a martyr?
And how much evidence, what kind of appearances, would we ourselves demand in such a situation, before staking our lives and deaths, and those of our families, in that way?
The apostles, and Paul, and James, all asserted that the key factor was their unmistakable encounter with the risen Christ. Is there really any plausible alternative?
And if this is true, it has consequences: death is broken; Christ’s gospel is true; I need to be forgiven and receive this Jesus; eternal heaven exists, and is come here, and is for us. We have solid rock to build our lives upon…
ABSORB TIME: Think about this evidence. Is there really any plausible alternative to the confidence that Jesus rose from the dead?
