Why I am a Christian (14)

Evidence for Christ’s Resurrection is So Good

In 2012 I jotted down all the reasons I could think of why I am a Christian. I found 26 so I decided to serialise them in a blog every fortnight for a year.

I have so far covered themes linked with science, philosophy and theology. This is now the last of five posts about Jesus.

And this one is the most crucial of all.

New York City based author Tim Keller in The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism  rightly argues that Christianity stands or falls on one thing alone.

I have already looked at Jesus’ atoning death, his compelling persona, his remarkable fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy and his unique teaching. But, says Keller:

“If Jesus rose from the dead, then you have to accept all that he said; if he didn’t rise from the dead, then why worry about any of what he said? The issue on which everything hangs is not whether or not you like his teaching but whether or not he rose from the dead.”

I absolutely agree. Either Christianity is supremely central to life (if the resurrection really happened) or it is irrelevant and even contemptible (if it didn’t).

The Apostle Paul made the same point about 15-20 years after Jesus’ death. Here’s a modern paraphrase of what he said:

If there’s no resurrection for Christ, everything we've told you is smoke and mirrors, and everything you’ve staked your life on is smoke and mirrors. Not only that, but we would be guilty of telling a string of barefaced lies about God, all these affidavits we passed on to you verifying that God raised up Christ—sheer fabrications, if there’s no resurrection. If corpses can’t be raised, then Christ wasn’t, because he was indeed dead. And if Christ weren't raised, then all you’re doing is wandering about in the dark, as lost as ever. It’s even worse for those who died hoping in Christ and resurrection, because they’re already in their graves. If all we get out of Christ is a little inspiration for a few short years, we’re a pretty sorry lot. (1 Corinthians 15.14-18 - The Message)

In other words, without the resurrection Christianity is false, Christian belief is futile, the Bible is fake and death is final.

Like Achilles’ heel, if you can successfully attack and disprove the resurrection, you fatally undermine Christianity, consigning it - lock, stock and barrel - to the dustbin of history.

Given the fantastic opportunity anti-theists have of discrediting Christianity and removing it from the list of world religions by proving the resurrection to be false, it is remarkable that so few of them have seriously attempted to set about doing so.

Some have though. About 260 years ago, two atheist lawyers from Oxford named George Lyttelton and Gilbert West decided to disprove the Christian faith by each writing a book.

Lyttelton set out to demonstrate that the conversion of Saul of Tarsus (the Apostle Paul) was a myth and West determined to debunk the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. Each spent a full twelve months in painstaking research to establish his case.

When they had completed their studies they met up to compare notes. Lyttelton confessed “As I have studied the evidence from a legal standpoint, I have become convinced that Saul of Tarsus was converted just the way described in Acts.”

And West, having sifted the evidence for the resurrection most carefully and painstakingly, became satisfied that Jesus almost certainly did rise from the dead at the first Easter just as the Gospels claim. So exhaustive and scholarly was West’s work that the University of Oxford awarded him a higher doctorate for it.

Both men became Christians in the course of their research.

West’s rather laboriously titled book Observations on the History and Evidences of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ printed a quotation from Ecclesiastes 11.7 on the flyleaf: “Do not find fault before you investigate.”

But sadly many people do find fault before they investigate. Many just say that the idea of a dead body coming back to life is simply ridiculous so therefore the resurrection must be categorised with fairies at the bottom of the garden, assertions that the Earth is flat and sightings of Diana and Elvis playing golf on the Moon.

As I mentioned in Reason 4 the irony of this viewpoint is that it is often held by the same people who also vigorously argue that non-living matter did become living matter all by itself many millions of years ago in the evolution of life on Earth.

When sceptics actually take the trouble to look into the resurrection of course they usually refuse the writings of the New Testament as admissible evidence.

Four reasons are usually given;

1) the Gospels were made up many years after the events

2) they are inherently biased

3) they fail to name any sources to substantiate their claims

4) in any case the four reports of the resurrection contain fatal contradictions

For those four reasons, many people dismiss the Gospels as texts unworthy of a second look. But each objection encounters difficulties.

1) On the reliability of the Gospels, the best scholarship dates the earliest (Mark) at around 64-76 AD, perhaps as little as 30 years after Jesus’ death. Because there are so many similarities between Matthew and Luke that are not contained in Mark, it is clear that they must have drawn on further common source material readily available at the time (scholars call this material “Q”) so there is little doubt that the Gospels are substantially primitive accounts. For obvious reasons, the earlier an account is to the events it describes, the less likely it is to have been embellished and exaggerated along the way.

2) On the question of bias, the problem is that it wasn’t only Jesus’ band of brothers who propagated this news. Saul of Tarsus for example ruthlessly attempted to suppress and extinguish the resurrection rumours at first. It was only after a dramatic conversion experience that he became one its chief heralds. Jesus’ brother James was another noted sceptic and cynic (Mark 3.20-21 and John 7.5) until he witnessed the risen Christ and then became a leading figure in the church at Jerusalem.

3) On the question of the historicity of the Gospels, it is true that they fail to name sources but history was recorded differently in 1st Century Judea than it is in 21^st century Europe. It is surely unfair to judge the literature of one age by the standards of another. Otherwise, shall we have to write Shakespeare off as illiterate because he rarely spelled his name the same way twice? There is enough variance in the four Gospels to establish that they clearly drew on different but complementary sources.

Furthermore, the eminent archaeologist Sir William Mitchell Ramsay, after spending two decades researching the areas Luke wrote about, with the specific goal of discrediting the Acts of the Apostles as hopelessly inaccurate, concluded in St. Paul The Traveller and The Roman Citizen that Luke's attention to detail was impeccable and that he made no factual mistakes. “You may press the words of Luke in a degree beyond any other historian's and they stand the keenest scrutiny and the hardest treatment” he wrote.

4) The apparent contradictions (e.g. was it dark or light when the women set out and how many of them were there?) have been perceptively accounted for in books like Easter Enigma by Greek scholar John Wenham and Who Moved the Stone by journalist Albert Henry Ross (under the pseudonym of Frank Morison).

Wenham conducts a detailed and fascinating reconstruction of the movements of the chief characters which intriguingly harmonises the four accounts.

Ross set out to analyse all the material and write a book entitled Jesus – the Last Phase to show that the resurrection was an ancient myth. He ended up, like Gilbert West, changing his mind altogether and becoming a Christian. Confessing that he wanted to strip the last week of the life of Jesus “of its overgrowth of primitive beliefs and dogmatic superstitions” Ross had to change his plans.

“Things emerged from that old-world story which previously I should have thought impossible. Slowly but very definitely the conviction grew that the drama of those unforgettable weeks of human history was stranger and deeper than it seemed. It was the strangeness of many notable things in the story that held my interest. It was only later that the irresistible logic of their meaning came into view.”

The internal evidence (that which is found in the Bible) for the resurrection has been laid out many times by many people and I am not going to repeat it at length here.

But briefly:

1. The resurrection of the suffering Messiah had been prophesied centuries before the birth of Jesus (see Reason 10).

2. On several occasions, Jesus had himself predicted his own resurrection while teaching his disciples – who didn’t understand what on earth he was saying until it actually happened.

3. According to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, the body had vanished from the tomb. But Luke and John also note that the burial shroud and head bandage were still in place. Why would any tomb raider steal the body, but leave the burial cloths in exactly the same place as they had been when they had covered the corpse?

4. If the Jewish authorities or Roman guards had removed the body, why did they not exhume it to put an end to the excited and increasingly troublesome proclamation - in that very same city and just six weeks later - that Jesus was alive?

5. If the disciples removed it and lied that they had not, why did they not back down or go away quietly when faced with violent attack, imprisonment and the death penalty?

6. And in any case, how would anyone have got past armed security guards at the tomb, shift the stone and remove the uncovered body completely unnoticed?

7. According to 1 Corinthians 15, many eyewitnesses, over 500 people “most of whom are still living”, saw Jesus alive after his death. The challenge of the passage is “If you haven’t seen him yourself, go and ask someone who has.”

8. If the Gospel reports of the resurrection were fabricated, why were women the first recorded witnesses of it? Their testimony was not admitted as reliable in the ancient world so there was nothing at all to be gained by noting that they witnessed the empty tomb and the risen Jesus before anyone else did. In the same way, if I wanted to concoct a story about seeing the Loch Ness Monster or a UFO, I would not help my chances of deceiving people if I choose young children or my own family as my principal witnesses because their testimony would be widely viewed as unreliable or suspicious.

The striking thing about the Gospel reports is that they are so incidental. They make no inferences and draw no conclusions. No one says "The burial cloth was still there so therefore that rules out grave robber hypothesis." There's no exaggeration either. No one says "OMG, it was so mind-blowing, it was awesome!" as if they felt the need to sell you something. The Gospel writers are remarkable for their understatement. They just tell you what people remembered about that morning; nothing more, nothing less.

You can read much more about the internal evidence in books like the two I mentioned above. The excellent Gunning for God by Oxford professor John C. Lennox also has an outstanding and well researched chapter on this subject.

The external or circumstantial evidence is also very strong.

1. Why were the eleven surviving disciples, without exception, completely transformed individuals with the resurrection at the heart of their message? These people had fled, understandably fearing for their lives, when Jesus was arrested. What happened to them? Only something totally out of the ordinary accounts for such a dramatic and permanent change in their behaviour.

2. Why did the earliest Christians, who were all devout Jews, suddenly change their “holy day” from the Sabbath to the first day of the Jewish working week – Sunday? From having always worshiped on their weekly day of rest, the observance of which was regulated to near obsessive levels, they started to meet instead the following day at dawn before going to work.

There would have to have been a momentous reason to make them turn their backs on centuries of deeply entrenched religious practice. (If Muslims began to gather for prayer on Saturday rather than Friday, or if Christians started to hold services on Monday before work rather than Sunday we would rightly conclude that a seismic cultural shift had occurred and that something out of the ordinary would have to account for it).

3. How is it that a thoroughly laughable story, originating from a motley band of unpromising losers in a backwater province of imperial Rome, became what is still today the world’s biggest movement? 

Christianity took on the might of the Roman Empire and, despite widespread contempt and brutal persecution, soon eclipsed it for cultural significance. How do you account for the improbable and meteoric rise of this deeply loathed and illegal sect? 

One thing only can explain it – the resurrection of Christ from the dead. People everywhere began to believe it because they felt its life-changing aftershocks in their own personal experience. Millions all over the world still do. 

No. The more you look into the resurrection, the more it adds up. The more you try to come up with an alternative conspiracy theory for an explanation, the more it looks like desperation. 

I have emphasised evidence in all my posts up till now because I believe it is so sound.

I know, I know. People these days don’t tend to ask “is it true?” The postmodern questions are more like “does it work?” or even “how does it feel?”

But I’m not a Christian just because it gives me a warm glow inside. Christianity really, really matters because, above all else and no matter what you feel about it, it is true. And no matter how good it might feel, if it is untrue Christianity is of no consequence at all, it is the worst scam in world history and should be held in the highest contempt. I can't find any value in moderate Christianity if it is based on false testimony.

As C. S. Lewis once wrote in God in the Dock: "One must keep on pointing out that Christianity is a statement which, if false, is of no importance, and, if true, is of infinite importance. The one thing it cannot be is moderately important."

But if you don’t want to believe, no amount of evidence will be enough for you. However, if you want to believe, you can have an experience of Jesus that touches the deepest depths of your being. From Reason 17 onwards, these posts will emphasise experience more than logic.

For now though, the 14^th reason I am a Christian is because I believe Jesus rose from the dead. Nothing has persuaded me otherwise, and Christ's wonderful, life-giving, joy-filling presence in my life day after day brings my heart into glad agreement with my head.