Palm Sunday and Easter will be taking place the next two Sundays, prompting people all over the world to join the Christians who have been remembering/celebrating the death and resurrection of Jesus. Last week, I started a series exploring the veracity of the historical claims regarding the events we are celebrating. My primary focus in that article was whether or not there was any evidence that supports the claims that Jesus rose from the dead. My article zoomed in on the many surviving eyewitness accounts and offered some context for them in comparison to other historic events.
I believe there is an overwhelming amount of evidence testifying to the resurrection of Jesus. This prompts an important follow up question: “If there are witnesses, couldn’t they just be lying?” This is a valid question and one that can easily be weighed given the facts we have about what took place.
As a starting point, I would suggest that people lie often and for all sorts of reasons. We lie to look good, to get out of trouble, for profit, etc. In terms of the 12 disciples, I would ask “What did they gain?” Of the original 12 disciples, Judas committed suicide. John was the only one who died of natural causes, after being imprisoned for years for preaching. Peter was crucified upside down in Rome under Nero, after being forced to watch as the Romans crucified his wife. Andrew was crucified and continued to preach over the several days it took him to die. James was the first martyr, beheaded by King Herod in 44 AD. This list goes on. They were skinned alive, hung, stabbed, stoned to death, etc. The point here is that, apart from John and Judas, all of them died horribly, swearing that they saw Jesus raised from the dead. They were poor, left their homes to preach, and lived exiled by their own nation for saying they saw Jesus raised from the dead. Their lives and fates are probably the most compelling argument against the notion that they were lying. No one lies and keeps lying if it costs them everything, leads to prison, and eventually to tortured deaths. If they all lied, they did so stupidly. They gained nothing except pain and death. The way they lived and died are a pretty compelling argument in favor of the truthfulness of their claims.
Beyond the testimony of the disciples’ lives, a quick look at the claims they were making in the context of first century culture is valuable. On so many levels, the story told in the Gospels was hard to swallow. For starters, none of the disciples look particularly great in the Gospel accounts. They are prideful, often mistaken, and sometimes bumblers. Most people make themselves look good when they lie. Beyond that, many of the witnesses that God chose to put on the spot for these events were ones that could not testify in court amongst the Jewish people. Women, shepherds, tax collectors, and foreigners are all prominent witnesses. None of these were allowed to testify in Jewish courts. A liar would have built the strongest case possible for the readers. At times, it seems that the witnesses go out of their way to do the opposite. Further, amongst Jews, the story of the resurrection would have resonated with the beliefs of a large swath of the population. However, the claim that Jesus was God incarnate would be deeply offensive. The story of the resurrection fulfilled a central belief they held, but in a manner that would make it unacceptable to the hearers. Once the disciples left their Jewish audience, the Greeks would consider the idea of resurrection utterly absurd. It ran against core philosophical tenets they held dear. If the resurrection was a lie, it was not tailored for anyone in the first century world. It would have been a badly written lie… or it was the truth.
A final point worth considering is that this story was told in Jerusalem first and for years in the beginning of the church. In fact, Jerusalem was basically the place the leadership of the church called home for decades. If they fabricated the story, they were doing it in the place where it took place. There are a ton of easily verified facts that would have made it possible to dismiss the disciples’ claims about Jesus healing the lame, giving sight to the blind, etc. If they didn’t happen, telling that lie to people who were there would be beyond foolish and ineffective. One of the important additional bits of information that further strengthens the claims was given to us by Paul. In a letter to the church in Corinth, he recorded a list of who Jesus appeared to and in what order. On that list is 500 people. This claim would be easy to disprove or verify by simply talking to other witnesses, of which there were many, all nearby. The choice to preach the resurrection in the place where Jesus was crucified and resurrected was not the action of men who were trying to sell a lie. It would never have taken hold there.
A final point regarding the choice to preach in Jerusalem: all that would have to happen to disprove the story was for the body of Jesus to be produced. Paul wrote that if Jesus was not raised from the dead, then the whole of the Gospel is false. No one produced the body of Jesus to disprove their claims. They killed some of the leaders of the church, they raided homes and threw people in prison, and they did all manner of other things to slow down the newborn church. However, they never produced the still dead corpse of Jesus. That was because He was alive.
Next week, we will look at some of the popular explanations against the resurrection that seem compelling on their face but fall apart quickly with any degree of examination.
