Contrary to Popular Belief - (Resurrection Series Part 4)
Jesus of Nazareth Rose from The Dead & Four Reasons Why You Should Believe It
By Jeremiah Taylor
Reason #2: A conspiracy by 12 of Jesus’ disciples cannot account for the transformation of the disciples’ lives
Imagine you are in 1st century Palestine. You live in a land occupied by the oppressive Romans who despise you. Your hope is that God will one day send a special leader (a Messiah) who will lead your people to overthrow your Roman overlords and restore your country to its former glory. Now imagine that you believe you have found this leader. But instead of this leader overthrowing the Romans, he is brutally murdered by the Romans, in front of everyone. Now, keep in mind what we just learned last week: no one believes the real messiah would be murdered. Everyone believes that a murdered messiah is a false messiah. Additionally, no one believes that the messiah would rise from the dead all by himself.
Now, let me ask you this: Would you make up a story of a dead man rising and insist that this man is the true Messiah? Is it reasonable to believe that dozens of Jesus’ disciples would have made up this story?
If one believes that Jesus’ disciples did indeed make this story up, they are instantly confronted with difficulties like, how did these disciples take out the Roman guards and remove the body? How did these disciples hide Jesus’ body from everyone—forever! If you know anything about church culture you will know that it is extremely hard to hide ANYTHING for very long at all! But, let’s say, for the sake of the argument, that these problems could be reasonably explained. Is it still reasonable to assume that Jesus’ disciples would do this?
Here is what we know about the disciples. Peter, Jesus’ chief disciple, denied Jesus three times. The gospel accounts tell us that every single one of Jesus’ disciples ran away in fear for their lives when Jesus was arrested. They all deserted him. Additionally, we see that Jesus’ disciples make embarrassing mistake after embarrassing mistake during Jesus’ ministry. They are prideful at times, and just plain stupid at others. Is it reasonable to assume that these very same men, all of a sudden, worked up the courage to concoct a plan to steal and hide Jesus’ body, and then execute this plan, tell no one about this plan, and even more extraordinary, eventually die for this plan?
After Jesus’ supposed resurrection, every single one of Jesus’ disciples became passionate ambassadors for Jesus and started preaching about his bodily resurrection from the dead everywhere they went. Eventually, every single one of them suffered and died for their testimony. No matter how I try to work it out in my mind, I just cannot believe, nor do I think it’s reasonable to assume, that these very same men could become the kind of men, who would suffer and die for a cause, unless they really did see something that they did not expect and which changed everything.
Tell me, who in the world would make something of this magnitude up, and then die for it? Perhaps, one crazy person could do something like this… But dozens of people? No way! When people die for things, they die for things that they BELIEVE are TRUE. People do not die for something that they KNOW is a lie. Consider the Americans who paid the ultimate price in service to their country during WW2. They laid down their lives because they believed that the cause of America was right and true. These men did not run to the recruiting offices because of a cause they did not believe in, but for a cause they did.
So, when some scholar from Princeton dismisses the resurrection account with a wave of the hand saying, “Jesus’ disciples just made up a myth,” I want to say to them: “you are a very smart person, but on this point, you are not thinking hard enough.”
You see, it’s easy to dismiss the resurrection of Jesus without doing the hard work of explaining how the birth of the Christian Church came about without it. From my vantage point it seems, not only highly unlikely, but impossible, that dozens of people, would die for a lie that they made up—a lie that they already knew nobody would believe.
Yet, this is exactly what many scholars believe happened. But I don’t believe, these scholars believe this because the evidence leads them there; instead, they believe this because they are absolutely committed to a worldview that will not allow the existence of a miracle like this.
After the Watergate scandal of the Nixon years, a man by the name of Chuck Colson, who served as Nixon’s special counsel, went to jail for his role in the scandal. In jail he became a Christian. Later on, he became a minister of the gospel. He once wrote about the reasonableness of the resurrection of Jesus by comparing it to Watergate.
“I know the resurrection is a fact, and Watergate proved it to me. How? Because 12 men testified they had seen Jesus raised from the dead, then they proclaimed that truth for 40 years, never once denying it. Every one was beaten, tortured, stoned and put in prison. They would not have endured that if it weren't true. Watergate embroiled 12 of the most powerful men in the world-and they couldn't keep a lie for three weeks. You're telling me 12 apostles could keep a lie for 40 years? Absolutely impossible.”
The most compelling explanation, I have ever heard, as to how cowards were able to be turned into courageous warriors that were willing to lay down their lives for the cause of Jesus, is that these “cowards” saw their leader, who they thought was dead, rise victoriously from the grave—alive and well. This event so changed their lives that they themselves were willing to die for what they saw.
Reason #3: Women eyewitnesses at the resurrection
For people who want to dismiss the resurrection of Jesus as a myth, they must account for another important feature of the resurrection story that we find in all four of the Gospels. In Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the very first people we see at the tomb, and who supposedly see the freshly risen Jesus, are women. This is highly significant. How come? Well, I’m glad you asked!
Let’s pretend I am trying to engage in a little insurance fraud. Let’s say, I hide some diamonds that belong to my wife and call the police in order to file a report. When the police arrive, they would begin asking me questions. I would tell them that someone stole the diamonds. In order to validate my claim, I need to provide a trustworthy source, who saw the robbers fleeing, so that the police would believe my story about the diamonds being stolen.
Now, guess who I wouldn’t have as an eyewitness to my made-up crime? My five-year-old daughter, Selah. Why wouldn’t I provide her as a witness? The answer is because her eyewitness account would be worthless to the police because she is not a credible witness. A five-year-old’s testimony would not be permissible in court. Now, my daughter would be very cute in court, but she would not be convincing, because she is not a reliable witness. In other words, if I want a false witness to authenticate my made-up crime, I would need to find one who appeared credible.
In 1st century Palestine, a women’s testimony was not considered credible. It meant virtually nothing. A man had to be an eyewitness of something if an accusation was going to be taken seriously. Now, I know, these folks were on the wrong side of history. But this is what everyone thought at the time.
Why is this fact important? Well, to apply the principal I demonstrated in my fictitious insurance fraud scheme above, if you are making up a fictitious story about your dead leader rising from the dead—you would not have the first eyewitnesses of that event be women, because their testimony would not be credible. If you wanted to deceive people into believing your made-up story—you would find and highlight witnesses that made your story look more credible—not less credible.
Thus, it seems likely then, that the best explanation as to why women are mentioned as the first eyewitnesses in all of the Gospels is because they were. They really were the first people who saw Jesus alive after his death. The Gospel writers, who recorded what happened on that first Easter, did not concern themselves with reporting fictitious details that would make their story more believable—they only concerned themselves with reporting the details that actually happened, even if it made their story less believable. Why? Because they were writing history.
Reason #4: The Empty Tomb and The Sightings of the Risen Savior
In N. T. Wright’s massive book on the resurrection, he writes the following:
“Neither the empty tomb… nor the appearances by themselves, could have generated the early Christian belief. The empty tomb alone would be a puzzle and a tragedy. Sightings of an apparently alive Jesus, by themselves, would have been classified as visions or hallucinations, which were well enough known in the ancient world. However, an empty tomb and appearances of a living Jesus, taken together, would have presented a powerful reason for the emergence of the belief. [N. T. Wright, “The Resurrection of the Son of God,” 686]
What N. T. Wright is saying, is that if people claimed to see the risen Jesus two-thousand years ago, but there was a body in the tomb, Christianity would have never taken off because everyone would have written off those sightings as mere hallucinations. Perhaps the Jews would have told those who had the sightings to calm down on the LSD. How come? Because they could just walk over to the tomb and say, “hello! There’s a body right here! Whatever you think you saw, you did not see Jesus bodily raised from the dead.”
Likewise, if there was not a body in the tomb, but nobody was claiming to have seen sightings of the risen Jesus, Christianity would not have taken off either because people would have assumed that somebody stole the body.
But neither of these scenarios are what happened two-thousand years ago in the region of Palestine. At that time, and in that place, you had people saying they LITERALLY saw Jesus bodily raised from the dead, while at the same time, Jesus’ body went missing! You need both of these things in order to explain the birth of Christianity and how thousands of people were willing to follow this Jewish messiah would had just died a criminal’s death. And both of these things are what we have!
In conclusion, a month ago, I posted a blog that was entitled: “Contrary to popular belief, Christianity has been really good for this world.” In that blog, I argued that all of the good that Christianity has done for this world could be traced back to one event in the life of Jesus of Nazareth—His resurrection. In the following blog, I showed how a lot of people today consider the bodily resurrection of Jesus to be a myth, a laughable lie made up by Jesus’ disciples to keep whatever power they possessed from their waning religious movement. In the following three blogs, I gave four reasons as to why one should believe in the resurrection of Jesus. In other words, I showed that the “resurrection-as-myth” claim won’t work, not only because it fails to take seriously the evidence against it, but also because it doesn’t follow the evidence that we actually have to where it actually leads.
So with all of that said, in my humble opinion, it takes a lot more faith to believe that the disciples made up a lie that they knew no one would believe, have women as the first eyewitnesses that they knew no one would believe, and then they themselves suffer and die for an idea that they themselves did not believe because they made it up—it takes a lot more faith to believe in that—then to simply believe that three days after Jesus died and was buried—he rose from the dead and walked out of that tomb just like he said he would do.
Because Jesus rose from the dead—Christianity took off and the world was turned upside down. I have never heard of a better or more plausible explanation than that.
I’d like to end this blog series by asking you to consider three questions:
Are you truly open to follow the evidence where it leads or has your mind already been made up? Would you be willing to change your belief about Jesus’ resurrection, if when considering the plausibility of other explanations, they are found wanting?
How will you, going forward, explain the birth of Christianity? Will your explanation satisfactorily account for the transformative boldness of Jesus’ disciples; Jesus’ empty tomb; the hundreds of eyewitnesses who claim to have seen Jesus of Nazareth raised from the dead—not to mention the women who were first on the scene; and the fact that generally speaking, folks don’t make up stories that they already know everybody would think is patently absurd?
If Jesus did rise from the dead, what would the implications of this be for you personally?
Thank you for tuning in!
Grace and peace,
Jeremiah Taylor