The first in a series of apologetics-based column to help Christians better understand the evidence for their faith. Read the introduction to the series in the Saturday, April 2, News-Banner.
Lee Strobel wanted Jesus dead.
His wife had recently converted, much to the atheist’s frustration, and even though he admitted that her new faith changed her for the better, he also felt betrayed, as if she had somehow broken their marriage vows.
Yet the investigative reporter knew that if he simply investigated the account of Jesus’ resurrection, he could disprove it and “liberate her from this cult,” he later wrote.
After interviewing multiple sources, however, he realized this “cult” anchored their beliefs in valid, logical reasoning and evidence — not superstition or blind belief.
They could defend their faith, “and based on the historical data I had examined, I became convinced they were right … I concluded that He really is the one and only Son of God, who proved it by rising from the dead.”
Ultimately, Christians can trust the resurrection accounts because they can trust the God who inspired them, but as Strobel learned, God doesn’t ask them to blindly trust. Instead, He inspired specific details to assure the wonderers and challenge the scoffers.
For instance, Jesus suffered torture so severe before and on the cross, no one could survive it. Even the American Medical Association testified in an article that Joseph of Arimathea removed a dead body, not a body that had just fainted or swooned.
“Picture taking a pair of pliers and squeezing and crushing the (funny bone nerve),” Dr. Alexander Metherell told Strobel during his investigation. “That effect would be similar to what Jesus experienced.” Yet Jesus suffered far worse than that, Metherell said.
Joseph then placed this dead body in a known tomb, one guards sealed and protected. Because of these circumstances, Jewish leaders could have easily refuted the disciples if they had lied about the empty tomb — but they didn’t. The rulers conceded its reality, even if they rejected the real reason.
And years later, opponents still ceded the empty tomb’s reality. In fact, when Justin Martyr, an early Christian, wrote to skeptical Jews, he reminded them that they accepted the tomb as historic fact.
Martyr also encouraged them to repent and believe because Jesus appeared to more than 500 people after His resurrection, as Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15:3-8. Two unbelieving but well-reputed historians, Tacitus and Josephus, also reported these eyewitnesses’ accounts — not legendary tales — inspired a new generation of disciples within just a few decades of the resurrection, when critics could have refuted their accounts if possible.
Some may argue these eyewitnesses lied, but Chuck Colson disagrees. He and other aides to President Richard Nixon helped orchestrate the Watergate conspiracy, and despite their intense loyalty to the president, Colson said, they confessed to their hoax within two weeks to “save (their) own skin.”
The disciples, however, sacrificed and died, and if Jesus didn’t arise, the disciples did all this for a lie they knowingly concocted, a lie that cost them greatly even before it cost most of them their lives.
The Apostle Paul particularly lays out the stakes in 1 Corinthians 15: “And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain. Yea, and we are found false witnesses of God; because we have testified of God that He raised up Christ: whom He raised not up, if so be that the dead rise not”
Paul in particular wouldn’t sacrifice so much for a known lie. Instead, his transformation and the disciples’ transformation from hiding doubters into brave witnesses confirm they truly believed in Jesus’ resurrection, as Peter later wrote. “For we have not followed cunningly devised fables, when we made known unto you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of his majesty”
Because of this evidence, even most skeptics concede Jesus truly lived and truly died and that His body truly disappeared; they concede people within years of his death believed He rose again, including people with no earlier devotion to Him, like the Apostle Paul or His earthly brother James.
Sadly, these skeptics have still created alternative explanations to dismiss the resurrection, but explanation is not verification. To disprove the resurrection, they must provide historical evidence better than the evidence in the New Testament and extrabiblical accounts.
No one will, though, because Jesus’ death, burial, and appearances, as well as the disciples’ changed lives, leaves no other reasonable alternative.
He is risen! He is risen indeed!
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