Is Christianity true? (the Resurrection - Part 8)
This blog is part of my series titled “Is Christianity true?” The series addresses four common objections to the truthfulness of the Christian worldview, namely concerns about: (1) the trustworthiness of the Bible; (2) the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection; (3) the compatibility of faith in God with modern science; and (4) the incompatibility of Christian truth claims with those of other worldviews.
HISTORICAL FACTS CONCERNING THE RESURRECTION - FACT #4
William Lane Craig (reprinted with permission (see Appendix C, “More Than Your Business Card”))
The original disciples believed that Jesus was risen from the dead despite their having every predisposition to the contrary.
“Think of the situation the disciples faced after Jesus’ crucifixion:
1. Their leader was dead. And Jews had no belief in a dying, much less rising, Messiah. The Messiah was supposed to throw off Israel’s enemies (Rome) and re-establish a Davidic reign—not suffer the ignominious death of [a] criminal.
2. According to Jewish law, Jesus’ execution as a criminal showed him out to be a heretic, a man literally under the curse of God (Deut. 21:23). The catastrophe of the crucifixion for the disciples was not simply that their Master was gone, but that the crucifixion showed, in effect, that the Pharisees had been right all along, that for three years they had been following a heretic, a man accursed by God!
Jewish beliefs about the afterlife precluded anyone’s rising from the dead to glory and immortality before the general resurrection at the end of the world.
3. Jewish beliefs about the afterlife precluded anyone’s rising from the dead to glory and immortality before the general resurrection at the end of the world. All the disciples could do was to preserve their Master’s tomb as a shrine where his bones could reside until that day when all of Israel’s righteous dead would be raised by God to glory.
Despite all this, the original disciples believed in and were willing to go to their deaths for the fact of Jesus’ resurrection. Luke Johnson, a New Testament scholar from Emory University, muses, ‘some sort of powerful, transformative experience is required to generate the sort of movement earliest Christianity was.’ N. T. Wright, an eminent British scholar, concludes, ‘that is why, as a historian, I cannot explain the rise of early Christianity unless Jesus rose again, leaving an empty tomb behind him.’
In summary, there are four facts agreed upon by the majority of scholars who have written on these subjects which any adequate historical hypothesis must account for:
Jesus’ entombment by Joseph of Arimathea,
the discovery of his empty tomb,
his post-mortem appearances, and
the origin of the disciples’ belief in his resurrection.
Now the question is: what is the best explanation of these four facts? Most scholars probably remain agnostic about this question. But the Christian can maintain that the hypothesis that best explains these facts is ‘God raised Jesus from the dead.’”
Next week, we will finish this series on the historicity of the resurrection by elaborating this argument that the resurrection of Jesus is the best explanatory hypothesis.
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
