The Resurrection

One

Did Jesus Really Rise from the Dead?

The Resurrection is Jesus’ main miracle. It’s the supreme testimony that He was everything He said He was. If Jesus really died and came back from the dead three days later just as He predicted He would, it means He’s the real deal. It means it’s all true. 

So what are the alternatives?

There are people who don’t believe in Christ or in His Church.

What do they think happened after the crucifixion? Because obviously, something happened. Christianity is the largest worldview on earth and it’s still expanding. So how do they explain that? 

Basically, people give about four explanations: The Resurrection story was made up much later, the disciples hallucinated that Jesus had come back from the dead, the disciples lied and stole Christ’s body to support their lie, or Jesus faked His own death and then pretended to have come back from the dead.

But when you look at things carefully, none of these accounts really hold up.

Two

Was the Resurrection story made up much later?

Some people think that the story of Jesus’ Resurrection from the dead was first invented generations after Jesus actually died. There are many difficulties with that theory, but the main problem is a text from the First Letter to the Corinthians, “For I delivered to you first of all what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the Twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brethren at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep.” (I Corinthians 15:3-8).

Now clearly whoever’s writing this is writing to assure people of the truth of Jesus’ Resurrection, and to convince people he cites over five hundred eyewitnesses most of whom are still alive at the time. In other words, the author is saying, “Listen, some of the original witnesses are dead, but there are still a lot of people alive right now who saw Jesus rise from the dead.” 

But that claim wouldn’t work at all if it was written generations after Jesus lived and died. For it to make sense at all, that line had to be penned when it was still plausible for someone from Jesus’ day to still be living. Therefore, within a lifetime of Jesus’s Death and Resurrection, people were witnessing to the truth of the Resurrection. Which means that the story of the Resurrection wasn’t invented generations after Jesus’ time. It was part of the preaching of the first generation of Christians.

Three

Did the disciples hallucinate that Jesus had come back from the dead?

Some people say that the apostles were so psychologically wounded by the event of the crucifixion and that they so desperately wanted to believe that Jesus would rise, that they actually hallucinated and thought they saw Jesus back from the dead, even though He was still dead. But the main problem with the idea that the apostles hallucinated it all is that Matthew says that the anti-Resurrection story of his day was that the body had been stolen from the tomb. That’s what the Jews and the Romans said from the beginning. That implies that even the deniers of the resurrection admitted that the tomb was empty, that Jesus’ body wasn’t where it had been buried. 

Now, if the disciples had simply been hallucinating then the stolen-body story wouldn’t have been necessary. 

The synagogue leaders who opposed the Christians could have just opened the tomb and pointed to Jesus’ body. They could have said, “Look, he’s still here. You’re crazy.”

So saying the disciples hallucinated doesn’t explain the facts. It doesn’t explain what actually happened to the body.

Four

The disciples lied and stole Christ’s body to support their lie

What if the disciples just made the whole thing up? What if the whole story of the Resurrection was a fabrication by the apostles?

Well, there are plenty of problems with this account too. For instance, if they were disappointed by Christ’s death thinking, “I guess He’s not the Messiah after all”, why didn’t they just go back home and try to start over? 

If they really cared about Jesus enough to dedicate their lives to spreading His story (and many disciples have done just that after the death of their mentor), why wouldn’t they just try and spread His story and His teaching without this distracting Resurrection business? But the main problem with the deception hypothesis is this: Why would you give your life for a lie? Many of the apostles and first Christians were martyred in horrible, horrible ways. And no one in history has knowingly died to spread a hoax. 

Five

Did Jesus fake his own death and then pretend to have come back from the dead?

What if Jesus just faked His death? Could that have been it? He didn’t really die, He just faked His own resurrection?

There are so many problems with this idea that we can’t list them all, but here’s the big one: If Jesus hadn’t really died and risen, then He wouldn’t have ascended on a cloud several weeks later. In fact He would have eventually died in the normal way, surrounded probably by family and friends. In which case the bogus resurrection wouldn’t have made such a big impact on the apostles, after all, Jesus had raised Lazarus from the dead, and even in the Old Testament Elijah brought the widow’s son back to life. 

Those kinds of resurrections weren’t as big of a deal. Of course, it’s nice to be raised from the dead, but if you’re going to die again then really it’s just a delay of death, not a conquering of it. 

No, there’s no doubt about it, even if Jesus had faked his own death and resurrection, which, again, is preposterously implausible, it would not explain why the Resurrection changed everything for the disciples. So these other options just don’t seem to adequately account for the facts. 

What has given Christianity its impetus? What made it spread throughout the empire like wildfire, despite persecution and even martyrdom? 

Well, if you want you can always come up with increasingly improbable scenarios. You can make up weirder and weirder stories, and some people do.  You can say that Jesus had an evil twin, or that an earthquake opened up right below Jesus’ body and swallowed it into the earth, or that Jesus was an alien and that after His crucifixion He was beamed back up to the mother-ship.  

But the fact is that from the very beginning, the Christians were on fire with belief in Christ’s Resurrection. The fact is that they weren’t lying and they weren’t the victims of hallucination. And Jesus didn’t fake it.

Jesus rose from the dead. He rose from the dead to die no more. Why? So that we could too.