The literal, bodily Resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ is the foundation of Christianity and the starting point for faith. It is the one guaranteed “sign” on which faith can be built! The Resurrection is not merely a “theological” issue based upon an irrational and improbable presupposition which Christians choose to believe. It is an historical issue. It either happened on the stage of human history or it did not. Jesus, Paul, and the Church across the ages have staked the entire corpus of Christianity’s absolute and exclusive Truth claims upon the Resurrection event. If the Resurrection did indeed occur, then ergo, Jesus is exactly Whom He claimed to be, His Words are both authoritative and infallible, and He is indeed the ONLY way for fallen man to be reconciled to a Holy and Just God. If the Resurrection did not occur, then Christianity is reduced to yet another human philosophy, the faith of millions of Christians worldwide is in vain, and we are all yet dead in our sins (I Corinthians 15:14-20). The question of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ is the single most important question any human being will ever face, and the answer each individual embraces will chart the trajectory for the rest of their lives.
For any truly meaningful discussion of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, we must make eight necessary assumptions. Each of these assumptions is even easier to prove than the Resurrection itself. When we look at all of the available evidence as a whole, these eight assumptions can be considered to be “facts” that no reasonable person would dispute.
- Jesus actually lived.
This would seem to be a no-brainer, as both Biblical and non-Biblical historical sources attest the existence of an itinerant rabbi in first century Palestine names Jesus (“Yehoshua”) of Nazareth. However, there have been some who have actually questioned the historicity of the man Jesus, positing that His entire existence was a later legendary fabrication. For Jesus to have died and risen from the dead, He must have first existed to begin with.
- Jesus was crucified.
Both the Bible and secular historians testify of the crucifixion of Jesus under the Roman governorship of Pontius Pilate.
- Jesus was CONSIDERED to be dead.
After He was crucified, Jesus’s body was examined several times by people who knew death firsthand. All of those that examined the body of Jesus considered Him to be dead.
- Jesus was buried in a known, accessible tomb.
One objection that has arisen to the Resurrection has been that, on Sunday morning, the women going to the tomb of Jesus simply went to the wrong tomb. However, the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea was well known, and its location not in dispute to any that were traveling there.
- Jesus was PREACHED raised!
It has been asserted that the miraculous events recorded in the Gospels, including the Resurrection of Jesus, were added centuries later by writers endeavoring to “deify” Jesus. It is claimed that nobody within the first couple of centuries believed or preached that Jesus actually rose from the dead. However, in the earliest Christian writings, both Biblical and extra-Biblical, we see references to the Resurrection. And in one of the best attested (by scholars) books of the New Testament, I Corinthians, written within three decades after the Resurrection event, Paul both proclaims the Resurrection and declares that there is no Christianity in any real sense without it!
- Jewish leaders and Roman leaders wanted to disprove Jesus’s Resurrection.
Neither the Jewish leaders nor the Roman officials disputed that the tomb of Jesus was empty. The Jewish leaders cooked up a story to explain the empty tomb, but they did not dispute that it was empty. If either Jewish or Roman authorities had simply been able to point to Jesus’s still dead corpse, Christianity would have died before it ever was born! They both had a vested interest in Jesus staying dead. However, none of them could demonstrate that He was indeed still dead.
- The disciples of Jesus were persecuted.
Well over five hundred people claimed to have seen Jesus alive after He was crucified, many of them at one time. It is not in dispute by any thinking person that Jesus’s followers suffered severe persecution both at the hands of Jewish authorities and Roman. Yet they held to their conviction that they were indeed eyewitnesses of His Resurrection, many even unto death.
- The tomb of Jesus was in fact empty.
Both Jesus’s followers, and undoubtedly the Jewish authorities as well, found the tomb of Jesus empty. Though the accusation was made that the disciples of Jesus stole his body by night, no charges of grave robbing were ever brought against any of them, and when they were called in to give account before the Sanhedrin, the issue in question revolved around their preaching and healing, and not about any suggestion of possible grave robbing. The Jewish authorities knew the story they spun was a mere fabrication and they did not pursue it further with any legal action (except that some later rabbinic writers make reference to it).
Assuming as we should that the tomb in which Jesus’s body was laid was indeed found empty on that first Resurrection morning, we will move on to examine various explanations as to why the tomb might have been empty. We must conclude that there is either a “natural” explanation, or a “supernatural” one. In our next installment we will consider several “natural” explanations for the empty tomb that have been posited by various ones over the years in an attempt to explain away the Resurrection of Jesus. None of these “natural” explanations takes into account all of the pieces of the available evidence, and evidence which does not fit some writer’s particular theory is often glossed over or rejected outright. There is no other reasonable explanation as to why the tomb of Jesus was empty that takes into account all of the available evidence other than that Jesus Christ actually rose literally and bodily from the dead! Be Blessed!
(I got this basic outline from a sermon I heard decades ago by Dr. EuGene Scott.)
