Reason for the Hope: The Resurrection

We just finished the Easter season with a glorious celebration of Christ’s resurrection. Paul says our faith is in vain (1 Cor. 15:14) if Christ were not risen, and if we had no hope of an afterlife, we are a people to be most pitied (1 Cor. 15: 19). Earlier posts touched on the historic fact of the empty tomb and emphatically could not have been stolen, at least not by the disciples as demonstrated in The Faults in the Framing: Part 1 & Part 2. What about the before and after, the death and the resurrection?

Jesus was really dead and there is medical proof.

First, Jesus was really dead and there is medical proof. In Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ, he systematically investigates the claims surrounding the person of Jesus and Christianity’s claims about him. He talks to a medical expert that agrees with the Biblical accounts of Jesus’ death. There is no medical possibility Jesus could have survived such a horrible scourging. To be bludgeoned nearly to death by a whip of sharp stones surely left our Lord bloody and gruesome. I don’t doubt the violence in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004) was not exaggerated. Not only was Jesus whipped in the most horrific way, but he was crucified, the Roman execution of choice. This is a slow and painful death by asphyxiation and exhaustion, to not even mention being nailed by the hands and feet. On top of all of this, the Romans were expert killers, delivering the death blow into his side by spear, through his lungs and heart to be very sure he was, in fact, dead.

Second, Jesus really resurrected from the dead and there is eyewitness proof. There was no swooning as some have theorized–no Roman soldier would ever allow a victim to come off the cross the tiniest bit alive, under penalty of his own death! Norman Geisler and Ronald M. Brooks wrote a handy book, When Skeptics Ask, which is a wonderful reference book for any believer on different apologetic topics. They offer the historic basis by offering specific names of witnesses and how they encountered the resurrected Jesus. Sometimes it was individuals, sometimes in groups, at least 500 in all. An “embarrassing fact” includes the first witnesses to be women! In the first century the words of women were not considered reliable, and yet the writers of the gospels claim they were the first witnesses of the risen Christ. If they were going to make this up, they could have done a better job. Paul even goes as far as to challenge the reader of his epistle to go and ask those witnesses directly because they were still living at the time (1 Cor. 15:6).

The evidence of the surrounding events of Christ’s death and eventual resurrection make the Biblical account the most rational explanation of the empty tomb.

The tomb was empty and there was no body to be produced by anyone. The evidence of the surrounding events of Christ’s death and eventual resurrection make the Biblical account the most rational explanation of the empty tomb. As J. Warner Wallace so thoroughly examines in his book Person of Interest, no other event in history has caused such an explosion throughout human history evidenced in art, philosophy, and archaeology as the resurrection of Jesus. He is risen–He is risen, indeed!