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Fact 3: The birth of the Early Church

It can be very easy in our 21st century beliefs to assume that people “ in those days” believed any kind of resurrection rubbish because they believed miracles were possible , but now that we have sophisticated minds which are more critical and scientific we know better.

We are only able to hold onto these kinds of views because we are mostly uninformed about resurrection beliefs in first century Palestine.

If we look at the beliefs of Jews and Greeks in the first century we can see that neither group believed that dead men rise! It was practically unthinkable.

But what about the resurrection in Jewish scripture and greek mythology, surely that is where they got their ideas from?

Greek mythology and resurrection

In short this is not true; there were some very fundamental differences in the concepts of ‘resurrection’ in all both parties. As we have already seen from 1 Cor 15 in the previous article, Paul is preaching a bodily resurrection, not merely a spiritual one. Greek thinking at the time was dominated by Platonic and Homeric thought, and in neither of these types of texts do we find any consideration of a bodily resurrection. Tim Keller writes ‘ In Greco-Roman thinking, the soul or spirit was good and the physical and material world was weak, corrupt, and defiling…therefore salvation was conceived as liberation from the body.’

In other words, in the views of the Greeks’ if you could lose your body then your soul would be free. If this is what you were hoping to achieve, being resurrected in the body was not only implausible to the Greeks, but it was also completely undesirable.

What about the Jews?

It is probable that the Jews were unaware or not impacted by these Greek worldviews, after all they were God’s chosen people in their eyes. They were immensely proud to worship the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and would have been unlikely to look to the Pagans for a change of belief; since they believed they were given the Old Testament scriptures by God, why then look to another culture for a sudden change of view?

So what was the Jewish worldview involving resurrection?

Jewish Resurrection thinking

N.T. Wright points out in his extensive scholarly work, The Resurrection of the Son of God, that the Jewish community did have an expectation for a form of resurrection, but one at the end of the world. This is mostly seen in a few passages in the Old Testament such as Daniel 12:2-3, which alludes to an end-time resurrection for the nation of Israel as a whole. Such sentiments are displayed in Isaiah chapters 24-27 of  which talks of God’s judgement, and the hope for resurrection at the end of the world (Isaiah 26:19). This is also seen in Ezekiel 37, arguably the most famous of all resurrection passages.

It is true also that in non-canonical Judaic writings from 400 BC ( like 2 Maccabees, Ecclesiasticus) up to the times of Jesus that similar themes were established. The main two being the restoration of Israel, and resurrection bodies being given at the end of the world.

Messiah as warrior

However, we will note here that just like the long-awaited Jewish messiah was expected to be a warrior who would overthrow with power those governing over the Israelites (rather than a man who would be crushed and crucified); there was no expectation for the Messiah himself to be resurrected, nor for any other form of resurrection in the Jewish community before the end of the world.

Conclusion

N.T. Wright summarises: ‘The immediate conclusion is clear. Christianity was born into a world where its central claim was known to be false’.

The first two factors of the empty tomb, and the post-death encounters of Jesus alone are extremely persuasive in convincing us of the reality of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, but the birthing of the early church is quite simply the knock out blow. In Acts 2:41, Peter preaches the first sermon about Jesus’ resurrection  and we see 3000 promptly respond to become followers of Christ.

This incredible birthing of the early church took place in Jerusalem, the very area where these resurrection events had taken place a few short weeks earlier. Frankly, you could understand this world religion growing from a myth if this all happened a few thousand miles away, but not in a place where there were eye-witnesses. Surely it would have been quashed immediately?

In the final article of this series I will look at the implication of all these facts combined.

For the other articles looking at the resurrection of Christ please click below.

http://reason.cck.org.uk/tag/resurrection/

Having established the historicity of the empty tomb of Christ in our previous article in this series, we now move onto looking at the evidence for the post-mortem appearances of Jesus to people.

Fact 2: The Appearances of the risen Jesus

We need to turn again to Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, to see his reporting of public testimony about the resurrection. It is quite extraordinary that in 1 Cor 15:3-8 we hear that Jesus appeared not only to a few people, but more than 500 people on one occasion, these appearances went on for almost six weeks before Jesus left his disciples again for good (Acts 1:9-11). Paul tells us (1 Cor 15:6) that ‘most of them are still living’. This statement is very significant indeed as Tim Keller comments:

‘Paul’s letter was to a church, and therefore it was a public document, written to be read aloud. Paul was inviting anyone who doubted that Jesus had appeared to people after his death to go and talk to the eye-witnesses if they wished.’

The implication is clear, there is no way that Paul could have written this in a public document unless these 500 eye-witnesses really existed. When taken together with the gospel accounts that we looked at with regard to the empty tomb, we have multiple attestations that these appearances were completely genuine.

Even the sceptical New Testament scholar Gerd Ludeman makes this emphatic declaration: ‘It may be taken as historically certain that Peter and the disciples had experiences after Jesus’ death in which Jesus appeared to them as the risen Christ.’

Physical or Spiritual Resurrection?

Some people have tried to imply that these resurrection appearances were not in fact physical ones but a host of spiritual visions by reading the latter part of Paul’s letter (1 Cor 15:42-44), where he contrasts the natural body and the spiritual one. Surely this shows that Jesus’ resurrection was only spiritual and therefore it was not a bodily resurrection after all?

Well, if we take a closer look at the greek words  ’pneumatikos’ (which is used to describe ’spiritual’ in this context),  and ‘psychikos’ (describing ‘natural’ ), we find that it is used in the same letter by Paul in 1 Cor 2:14-15. Here Paul is also contrasting the spiritual man with the natural man.

In this context, he is talking about the difference between a Christian ( the spiritual man) and a non-christian (the natural man). Clearly, Paul does not believe that Christians do not have physical bodies, therefore it follows that we should not take this to mean a non-physical resurrection which Paul is describing.

William Lane Craig summarises the point for us:

‘Natural man does not mean ”physical man,” but ”man oriented toward human nature.” And Spiritual man does not mean ”intangible, invisible man” but “man oriented toward the Spirit.” The contrast is the same in 1 Corinthians 15. The present, earthly body will be freed from its slavery to the sinful human nature and become instead fully empowered and directed by God’s Spirit. Thus, Paul’s doctrine of the resurrection body implies a physical resurrection.’

Were they just hallucinations?

One of the most regular points made by sceptics at this stage is that surely even if the disciples believed that it was a physical resurrection, they could have just imagined and hallucinated the experience.

This argument is really starting to clutch at straws because we are being asked to believe here that every one of the multiple encounters of the risen Jesus was a mere hallucination, including very tangible physical events like Jesus cooking breakfast on the beach (John 21:1-25). Take into account that some of these people included Jesus’ own brother James, sceptics like Thomas (John 20:24-29) and that these appearances took place for so many people, over 40 days and we are really being asked to ignore very compelling evidence.

Another point worth making is that this theory provides very narrow explanatory scope, as it does not explain away the empty tomb of Jesus. As N.T. Wright points out even if hallucinations happened, this does not explain why people came to believe that Jesus rose from the dead. In a Jewish world-view, any visions or hallucinations of a dead person did not mean that you believed they were alive, it confirmed even more that they were dead!

Summary

As we take a close look at the evidence, it would seem very clear that Jesus’ followers had genuine encounters with the him after death, and that they were bodily in form. It is also very clear that Paul wrote the letter of 1 Corinthians in such a manner that anyone who did not believe could have checked out the evidence by speaking to eye-witnesses very easily.

For links to our other articles on the resurrection click here.

Click here for my recent interview with CCK.

As we look at our 3rd article in the series on Jesus’ resurrection, we turn our attention to the first of  three key facts that we will examine.

Fact 1: The Empty Tomb

The first detail that we need to concern ourselves with is the empty tomb. I’m making the very non-controversial assumption, which is agreed among New Testament scholars today, that Jesus of Nazareth did in fact die on that cross at Golgotha.

The Burial

After Jesus had died, he was buried by Joseph of Arimathea, who was a member of the Jewish Sanhedrin (the council of Israel). This is highly probable due to the fact that there would have been very little reason for the early gospel writers to have lied about this. This would have been an embarrassing truth for them; that one of the leaders of the pack who effectively arranged the murder of Jesus, then gave his own tomb for him to be buried in. New Testament scholar Raymond Brown said that it was ‘almost inexplicable’ for the early Christians to have made this up. This is significant in that it would mean that both Jews and the followers of Christ, alike, would have known where this tomb was.

We find multiple attestation of this fact in each of the gospel accounts (Mark 15:42-47, Matt 27:57-61, Luke 23:50-54, John 19:38-42) but we are not reliant on this. Actually, there is an even earlier account in 1 Cor 15:3-5, which attests to the burial, that can be dated to around 36AD (within 6 years of Jesus’ ministry) confirming the burial.

More could be made to support this issue, but I want to look at two further reasons why the empty tomb is so strongly agreed on by New Testament scholars today.

Women giving testimony?

Firstly, the inital observers of the empty tomb that Jesus had been in were women. In our culture we simply don’t understand the significance of this. In First century Jewish culture, women were not seen as equal to men and they were not even allowed to be called as witnesses in court. Even part of the daily prayers that men said were to give thanks that they were not born as a woman. Shocking!

Tim Keller writes: ‘There was no possible advantage to the church to recount that all the first witnesses were women. It could have only undermined their credibility of the testimony.’

In light of these facts, N.T. Wright comments that there must have been enormous pressure on the early Christians to change these facts, but the reality is that they didn’t! They maintained their historical integrity and gave an account of what really happened.

Jewish Belief

Secondly, one of the first things that the Jewish leaders claimed is that the disciples stole the body (Matt 28:12-15), which means that they pre-supposed that the body was missing and the tomb was empty. There was no attempt to say that the wrong tomb was checked, or it had been moved. For the non-believing Jews, there was no issue about the empty tomb. It was obvious that the body was gone, and so a new story had to be created to try and cover it up. They had no desire for the birth of a new religion whatsoever.

Summary

When we add all of these pieces of historical evidence together, it seems to verify the fact that Jesus’ grave was found empty on the Sunday after he had been crucified. This provides us with our first part of the jigsaw in looking at whether the resurrection of Jesus really happened. Join us next week when we look at the next piece of evidence, the post-mortem appearances!

In this second article, we are going to be looking at how we tackle the historical evidence which is available to us, when considering if Jesus really rose again from the dead.

Investigating History

As the events we are looking at took place around 30 AD, it is obviously a more complex process than investigating a recent event like a Coldplay gig at Wembley Stadium, or a more serious event like the Holocaust in World War 2. Today, we have access to photography and film as well as written accounts of what goes on via newspapers. This is obviously a world away from first century Palestine, where most people were illiterate and oral tradition was the main form of communicating information.

Giving the New Testament a fair hearing

Given the culture of the time, it is all the more remarkable that we have such excellent sourcing to look into the events of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. We are very grateful to people like Luke who was sent by a man named Theophilus to investigate the claims of Christianity (Luke 1:1-4). Luke was not a Jewish believer, so Theophilus may have trusted him not only as a medical doctor ( a man of great intelligence), but also because of his Gentile background to be impartial in his scrupulous digging for facts. This reminds us that God in his sovereignty and providence, is not against those who wish to look into these matters for themselves; after all he has given us brains to reason with.

One of the major sources that we will be looking at for information is the New Testament itself including the gospel accounts of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Let me remind you again that we do not have the luxury of simply writing off the Bible, “because it is the Bible”. If this is your automatic response then I want to encourage you to look at these ancient documents as a historical text just like today’s New Testament scholars do. Be sceptical about your scepticism. It’s important not to put the cart before the horse, and we’ll see some of the reasons why the gospel accounts are reliable as we investigate further.

Reading the Bible as History

Although I do believe that the Bible is the word of God (and so is without error), we will be treating it in a similar way to any other ancient text like the works of Thucydides, Plato or Aristotle, for the purpose of historical analysis. Even if you think that there are passages in the New Testament that carry difficulties, other than those we will consider for this article, put these to one side for now. They are not relevant in this particular investigation. I am arguing for the resurrection of Jesus here, not for the infallibility of the bible as a whole (that is for another article). This hopefully means that we are investigating this from the same perspective, a historical agenda rather than a theological one.

My point here is that when historians look at texts, they make assumptions that not all the text is going to be accurate, but there are still facts which can be mined from the information available. It is this approach that I am arguing for, as we look at the relevant texts. We do not need to agree on everything else written in the Bible to come to the conclusion that the resurrection happened.

Historical Methodology

One of the things which is very important at the outset, is that we treat this hypothesis fairly, using typical tools of historical analysis to make an assessment on the truthfulness of the claim that Jesus rose again.

Dr. William Lane Craig shows in his book Reasonable Faith that if we use normal historiographical methods, then it is very conclusive indeed that Jesus was raised from the dead.  The Philosopher of History, C.B. McCullagh, suggests using a form of inductive reasoning called ‘Inference to the best explanation’ to do this most effectively. This method essentially means taking the initial facts that we have available to us and seeing which theory has the greatest explanatory power, explanatory scope and is the most plausible theory with the information available.

There are three key facts that we can outline when looking at the evidence based on both biblical and non-biblical accounts; the empty tomb of Jesus, the appearances of the risen Jesus and the birth of the early church. Over the coming weeks we will look at these one at a time, and then draw a conclusion.

Christians believe that Jesus was not merely just a great moral teacher or even a prophet (as Muslims believe), but that he was genuinely the second member of the Holy Trinity, the Son of God, God Incarnate or more simply the ‘God-man’. The resurrection of Jesus has always been (to Christians) one of the major proofs that he was indeed the Son of God.

As Dr. Tim Keller points out in his book Reason for God “If Jesus rose from the dead, you have to accept all he said; if he didn’t rise from the dead 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 he rose from the dead or not.”

The apostle Paul would seem to agree when writing to the church in Corinth, that if there was no physical resurrection we may as well all pack up and go home.

‘And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. (1 Cor 15:14)’

It really doesn’t get any more black or white on this issue, does it?

As this is an incredibly large topic I have decided to break it down into 5 separate articles, which you will see added over the coming weeks.

I want to encourage you as you read this set of articles to really think like you have never done about anything else in your life! If Jesus really died on that disgusting bloody cross, and rose again; the implications could not be greater than any fact in human history, it reveals whether God exists, who he is, what he is like and if he gives a monkeys’ about who you are. We will look at this in greater detail in the articles that follow.

Being Sceptical about Naturalism

Many people in western society believe in a philosophical position known as naturalism, which posits that everything that we see is explainable in terms of natural causes and laws. When this is applied to the resurrection of Jesus Christ we end up in a total cul-de-sac; as this is a completely circular argument which works out something like this:

‘The resurrection of Jesus can’t have happened because it would be a miracle, and miracles don’t happen’

The reality is as a sceptic, you can’t know that miracles don’t exist, you just might not have experienced one. This means the position that you should approach this critical subject on is being agnostic (not sure).

If you feel you’re not at this point yet then you may find it helpful to read the article below: go to:

Why can’t I be an Atheist?

My main point of this introduction to the subject is that we need to leave our pre-suppositions at the door. We need to allow history to speak for itself and follow the evidence where it leads, whatever that means for us.  If you think you are ready for this then you are ready for the next article, which will follow shortly.

I think that we can look at answering this question in two ways. Firstly, and with greater prominence we can look at the testimonies of the people who said that they saw him, and secondly, we can look into the testimonies of these individuals to discern their validity.
 
Biblical witnesses
 
With the first of these two points in mind I think it best to start by looking at the Bible, specifically 1 Corinthians 15:3-7.
 
 “For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance… that he appeared to Peter, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles…”
 
This part of the Bible was written a short time after the Resurrection, from the information given by people who had themselves seen Jesus alive again. This means that we have an account we can trust. In it Paul gives us a list of these witnesses; there are the five hundred brothers (by brothers he means fellow Christians, not literally brothers!), Peter, the Twelve (disciples who followed him around) and finally James (the brother of Jesus). If we look at them individually we firstly have the five hundred believers. These would have been people who followed the teaching of Jesus before his resurrection and subsequently would have seen him many times before.
 
If we move on to the Twelve, we have a group who saw Jesus every day for roughly three years, and consequently would have been very familiar with his appearance. They were not however, anticipating his resurrection. Luke 24:12 records Peter’s reaction to finding the tomb empty; “Peter, however, got up and ran to the tomb. Bending over, he saw the strips of linen lying by themselves, and he went away, wondering to himself what had happened.
 
 Even when the body had gone the disciples were not looking for a resurrected Jesus, and Luke 24 : 36-37 records their reaction to seeing him for the first time post Resurrection:“… Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, ‘Peace be with you.’ They were startled and frightened, thinking they saw a ghost” From these two passages we can gather that the disciples immediately recognised the resurrected Jesus, even thought they were not looking for him and did not yet fully understand what had happened.
 
Finally, Paul lists James the brother of Jesus as a witness, one who obviously grew up with Jesus and knew exactly what he look liked. Interestingly, James was not a Christian until after the Resurrection, and was so amazed when he saw him alive again that he rightly began worshipping him as God. This is not the likely response of a brother to a look-alike.
 
Validity of the testimonies
 
It is worth considering briefly why we should accept these individuals’ testimonies of resurrection of Jesus. In response to this I would point out the extreme suffering and persecution that these witnesses underwent, rather than deny what they had seen. As I observed earlier they did not expect Jesus to be raised from the dead, yet were fully convinced when they saw him and died affirming it as truth. James, Jesus’ brother was killed early on for believing and announcing his brother was God, a length people don’t generally go to for a lie. This is true also for all the other individuals who were killed for a certainty that brought them no benefits and only served to shorten their lives, filling them with suffering and persecution.
 
To summarise, Jesus appeared many times, to many people, and although they knew him in varying degrees of intimacy, with Thomas (better known as ‘Doubting Thomas’) they all declared him to be Jesus of Nazareth and “…my Lord and my God.”