Without Jesus’ resurrection, Christianity collapses. The church’s existence makes no sense. It began only after His resurrection.
It’d be foolish to begin a religion based on the easily disprovable claim that George Washington resurrected. Jesus’ tomb was empty. No one could find His dead body.
Jesus’ resurrection is why Sunday is the Christian day of worship. The first Christians were all Jews. For them, Saturday, not Sunday was special. Jesus’ resurrection triggered the shift.
The New Testament contains six independent testimonies of the resurrection. Three were eyewitnesses (Matthew, John, and Peter). Paul’s writings suggest it was widely accepted as a fact in the 50s and 60s A.D. No shred of evidence suggests these six writers made it all up.
The earliest explanation of the resurrection was that Jesus’ disciples stole the body. They’d have gained nothing by making up a resurrection story. Most of them lost their lives by sticking with it.
How many people have you known who died for telling a lie they knew was a lie? The disciples utterly believed in the resurrection. It transformed them from cowardly hiders into bold preachers.
Jewish or Roman authorities didn’t move Jesus’ body. They’d have produced it to squash the preaching that Jesus had risen. They didn’t because they couldn’t.
Some insist that the women who first saw the empty tomb went to the wrong tomb. Joseph of Arimathea knew the right tomb. It was his. He would have corrected any such mistake. The Jewish and Roman authorities would have done the same.
Some claim Jesus somehow recovered from His wounds in the tomb. If so, He would’ve been a world-class liar. He encouraged His followers to believe in and preach His resurrection.
Jesus’ followers claimed to see Him alive from the dead. They didn’t hallucinate. None of them expected Him to resurrect. They had to be persuaded He had risen from the dead.
“You’ve been duped,” a critic commented on this blog. His second comment: “It certainly is not because you personally witnessed Jesus stepping out of the tomb or because you really know what you’re even talking about.”
My response:
“My belief in the resurrection is based on the testimony of reliable witnesses, exactly as evidence is examined in our law courts today. See “Evidence That Demands a Verdict” by Josh McDowell and Sean McDowell.
John Singleton Copley, one of the greatest legal minds in British history said, ‘I know pretty well what evidence is, and I tell you, such evidence as that for the resurrection has never broken down yet.’ I don’t have to see John Wilkes Booth shoot Abraham Lincoln to know it happened.”
Much of what we believe is based on the testimony of reliable witnesses. According to tradition, all but one of Jesus’ disciples died because they preached that Jesus had risen from the dead.
People don’t die for a lie that they know is a lie. By far the best explanation of their martyrs’ deaths is that they saw Jesus after He rose from the dead and never got over it! That is why I believe in the resurrection of Jesus.
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