SCRIPTURE FOUNDATION (I CORINTHIANS 15):
1 Moreover, brethren, I declare to you the gospel which I preached to you, which also you received and in which you stand, 2 by which also you are saved, if you hold fast that word which I preached to you—unless you believed in vain.
3 For I delivered to you first of all that which I also received: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, 4 and that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures, 5 and that He was seen by Cephas, then by the twelve. 6 After that He was seen by over five hundred brethren at once, of whom the greater part remain to the present, but some have fallen asleep. 7 After that He was seen by James, then by all the apostles. 8 Then last of all He was seen by me also, as by one born out of due time.
9 For I am the least of the apostles, who am not worthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. 10 But by the grace of God I am what I am, and His grace toward me was not in vain; but I labored more abundantly than they all, yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me. 11 Therefore, whether it was I or they, so we preach and so you believed.
12 Now if Christ is preached that He has been raised from the dead, how do some among you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? 13 But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ is not risen. 14 And if Christ is not risen, then our preaching is empty and your faith is also empty. 15 Yes, and we are found false witnesses of God, because we have testified of God that He raised up Christ, whom He did not raise up—if in fact the dead do not rise. 16 For if the dead do not rise, then Christ is not risen. 17 And if Christ is not risen, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins! 18 Then also those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. 19 If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men the most pitiable.
RESURRECTION: THE EVIDENCE
Prosecution Lawyer: With all of this said…(turn toward judge) your honor,(turn toward the congregation) ladies and gentlemen of the jury I rest my case. You must convict Christians and the church of fraud. There is no way that Jesus could have risen from the dead.
Judge: (Speaking to the defense lawyer) Are you prepared to make your closing arguments for the defense?
Defense Lawyer: I am.
Judge: Go ahead.
Defense Lawyer: (Face the judge) Thank you your honor. (Face the congregation) Ladies and gentleman of the jury, let us review the evidence. I believe that once we are done, looking at the arguments of my opponents arguments one by one, you will see that the prosecution has not proven that the resurrection as a fraud. As a matter of fact, you will come to understand that the resurrection is the only reasonable conclusion of what happened with Jesus that Sunday morning.
Now….
Prosecution Lawyer: OBJECTION
Judge: OVERRULED. Go on…finish your closing argument defense….
Defense Lawyer: Thank you your honor.
As I was beginning to say, I have given you three reasons why the evidence of the resurrection is factually true. They all start with the letter E.
The empty tomb
The eyewitnesses
The explosion of the early church and its resurrection-centered world view
I will repeat those:
The empty tomb
The eyewitnesses
The explosion of the early church and its resurrection-centered world view
Defense Lawyer (continued):
First—the empty tomb. On Friday Jesus was buried. By Sunday morning it was discovered that the tomb that the people laid Jesus in was empty.
The prosecution has offered alternate explanations to how the tomb could be empty. Each one of these alternate explanations can be proved non-factual and irrational looked at more closely.
The first objection to the empty tomb my opponent raised is commonly referred to as the swoon theory. According to this theory, Jesus did not die, he only passed out. Then he came awake at some point before that Sunday morning, rolled away the rock from inside the tomb, and walked out of the tomb alive.
This does not work on so many levels. First, the nature of the stress and torture that Jesus endured before he ever got to the cross would have been enough to kill most of us. He was so stressed anticipating the cross that the Bible records he was sweating blood. We know now that this is an extreme reaction to stress, and shows that his health was in danger before he was even captured. Then, he was without sleep for around 24 hours. He was beaten with a cat of nine tails 39 times. The reason they did not whip him 40 or more times is because 40 was considered fatal for many people. He had thorns crushed in his head. He was too weak to carry his own cross by the time they marched him to Calvary, or Golgotha, called the place of the skull.
Then, we need to understand the nature of death on a cross. When a person dies on a cross they die of suffocation. The weight of their body pulls their body down on the cross. This causes the person hanging there to be unable to breathe. They must then push their body up the cross to survive and breathe. When a person finally dies on a cross, they suffocate, as Jesus did. Then we see that they broke the other men's legs, to make sure that they could not push up, and thus hasten their deaths. By the time they got to Jesus they realized he was already dead. They did not need to break his.
Then, the apostle John's account of the death of Jesus make it clear that blood and water ran out of Jesus body when the soldiers thrust a spear in his side after he had died (19:34). This flood of blood and water that rushed out of his body when the soldier stabbed him indicates that Jesus' pericardial sack and heart were punctured fatally at this moment. So if Jesus was not dead from the torture before the cross, or what happened on the cross, he certainly was dead by the time they made that fatal blow to his heart.
In order for the swoon theory to be true he would not only have to have woken up from this, he would have had to roll a several ton rock uphill and he would have had to escape. He would have to somehow make his death cloths look like they were unwrapped, ran out of the tomb naked, been unnoticed by the soldiers guarding the tomb, found an alternate set of clothes, disguised himself as a gardener, then ran out to Emmaus, and back to Jerusalem. This idea has long been discredited.
The next argument against the empty tomb that the prosecution made was that perhaps grave robbers got into the tomb and stole the body. This argument is as old as the first Easter Sunday, because the Jewish leaders made it up as soon as they heard about it. You can read about this in Matthew 28:11-15.
Really folks, is it realistic that the grave of Jesus was robbed? It was guarded by Roman soldiers who faced court martial and even death for failing in their charge to protect a grave. It had a seal of Caesar on the tomb to mark it for protection. Do you really think that this rag tag bunch of fisherman had the ability to attack or deceive the Roman soldiers, roll a huge boulder away from a cave, grab the body, and carry it off to create a rumor about a resurrection they were not really expecting?
All accounts say they were hiding in a rented room somewhere in Jerusalem scared to death to do much of anything. They did not even anticipate the crucifixion, despite Jesus telling them about it over and over again. They did not stand with him at the cross, with the exception of John, because they were too scared to be associated with Jesus. But they crafted a courageous plan to overcome an elite group of soldiers, steal the body, and pretend Jesus was risen? The argument does not hold water.
Then, the prosecution also alluded to the idea that the disciples must have gone to the wrong tomb. Really? Why wouldn't the soldiers and Jewish officials have just went to the correct tomb and showed people the body of Jesus. They would have! And at that point the "Christian movement" would have been completely over. The disciples would have been redirected to the right place by the owner of the tomb, and people would have cared for Jesus there.
The truth is that the prosecution does not want to believe the resurrection does not want to believe that the resurrection is true because he does not want to acknowledge Jesus as Lord. He wants to be Lord of his own life.
Prosecution Lawyer: Objection, argumentative
Judge: Sustained. The defense will stick to the facts of the case
Defense Lawyer: Yes your honor
Defense Lawyer:
In addition to the evidence of the empty tomb, we have the eyewitness testimony of the resurrection.
The apostle Paul said it most succinctly in I Corinthians 15: 3-6:
3 For I delivered to you first of all that which I also received: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, 4 and that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures, 5 and that He was seen by Cephas, then by the twelve. 6 After that He was seen by over five hundred brethren at once, of whom the greater part remain to the present, but some have fallen asleep.
Although as Paul says this, he focuses on the most reputable accounts according to his accounts. Mary Magdeline also saw him in the garden around the tomb, but people did not always find women's testimony credible, which is another part of the evidence in favor of Jesus' resurrection that we might get to later.
The prosecution has no credible argument to make against these eyewitnesses.
They tried to argue that there might have been some mass hallucinations. They even sighted a group of people in Portugal that seemed to have seen something as a group that was not there.
Once again, the prosecution is grasping at straws to prove the resurrection of Christ to be false. There is no such thing as one big psychic mass hallucination where the details are so clearly described by so many. The situation in Portugal was a perceptual suggestion made by a person that several people eventually agreed to—about the sun appearing to come closer to the earth. It is the equivalent of seeing Jesus and Mary in a piece of toast and all your friends agreeing.
It is not the same as several people, in different times, and in different places, having seen Jesus, touched him, had conversations with him that other people heard, and agreeing to the details of the whole experience with him.
Mass uniform hallucinations, the kind that would account for the resurrection anyway, do not happen.
The prosecution has referred to the eyewitness testimony as simply wishful thinking. But were the disciples really expecting a Messiah to die and rise again? Were they expecting a Messiah to conquer sin and death, but not conquer kings and kingdoms?
No the disciples, and all the Hebrew people, were expecting their Savior to lead them with a sword against their oppressors. This is why John and James, while Jesus is still with them, ask to be on Jesus' right and left when he comes into his kingdom. This expectation is why Jesus has to chide Peter when he tries to push him to become a conqueror by saying, "Get thee behind me, Satan" The disciples did not get what Jesus was saying about the resurrection. They were huddled in an upper room.
They had no idea what Jesus was up to w/ the cross and the empty tomb until they experienced it.
Besides, if the whole thing was wishful thinking, wouldn't they have put themselves at the empty tomb? Instead it is the women who first come and discover the empty tomb in every gospel, and then come back and tell the disciples that the tomb is empty. And then they don't believe.
Would future leaders of this movement really paint themselves as cowards and converts of a woman preacher if this were not true? In fact, they simply state the facts as they know them.
Still others that spoke on behalf of the prosecution say that the witness of the eyewitnesses were legends created later in history.
I ask you, would sane people die for a nice little legend that they created later in history? When their legend gave them no political power, no material or financial benefit, and complete and total alienation from their friends and family?
Would they have created a legend that was so counter-cultural? That in many ways went against both their Jewish roots, and against the empire of Rome in such forceful ways that both the Jews and the Romans would hunt them down and try and kill them for centuries? And then, for much of the early church, have that faith urge them to in no way take up arms, seek revenge, or try to fight against the persecution they faced?
No, if the disciples were making up a legend, they would have made it a nice, manageable, easy legend.
The orthodox church would have also adopted many of the later writings of people who pretended to be gospel writers and biblical teachers but really were spreading unrealistic, uncomfirmed and fantastical stories about Jesus. These writings, such as the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Peter, were roundly condemned by the church early on and have no real authority in the church today because they are so unhistorical and mythological.
The writings that squared with the historical facts, such as we have in Scripture, remained as Scriptures of the church because they told the truth instead of legends about Jesus by people who had personally encountered him.
So we have the evidence of the empty tomb. And we have evidence of the eyewitnesses.
The interesting thing is that while the evidence for the resurrection is compelling with either of these pieces of evidence, when you combine the empty tomb and the eyewitness testimony it makes an even stronger case for a factual, literal resurrection.
But this is not all of our case.
We also have the early church and it radically new world view to corroborate the resurrection. Our third argument for the resurrection, besides the empty tomb and the eyewitnesses, is the explosion of the early church and a resurrection-driven world view.
The early church based its whole existence on one historical truth. Jesus died for our sins, and rose from the dead on his third day in the tomb, conquering sin and death.
If this was simply a convenient myth, the early church would have been mocked and ridiculed out of existence. The truth is, the enemies of the early church had no answer for the fact that Jesus rose from the dead. Thus, the early church, and its faith in the message of Jesus, spread throughout the world. In less than 300 years, Constantine was ruling Rome, and came to the conclusion that he could not squelch Christianity, so he would join its ranks.
The prosecution has tried to show that dying and rising myths of the Ancient Near East predate Christianity, and that the resurrection of Jesus was a simple adaptation of those ideas.
This is a deceptive argument, because it has a measure of truth in it. There were other resurrection myths. But they were understood as myths. Not as realities. Most of them had to do with seasonal cycles. And the after-death appearances by the pagan God's were not bodily. They were more like ghosts. People did not report touching their wounds like they did with Jesus. As a matter of fact, these dying/rising myths were not claimed as historical truths the way Jesus' resurrection was.
As a matter of fact, most of philosophical and religious thought in the Greco-Roman world had a belief that spirit was good, and the body was bad. It would be offensive for someone to return in bodily form like Jesus. The Ancient Near East had contempt for the body. None of them would claim a bodily resurrection.
The prosecution also talked about Hebrew hopes for the resurrection, and how that formed their faith. It is true that Hebrew thought predicted a resurrection, and in fact Jesus fulfilled many of the promises about a Messiah in Hebrew thought.
But most people saved the idea of a resurrection for the end times. When the lion laid down with the lamb. After the day of the Lord and the final judgment.
Jesus' bodily resurrection from the dead was unexpected and world changing. Even though he said he would do just what he did!
The church went out. They did not fear death because they knew that they would rise again just like Jesus did. So they were slaughtered by the millions. They were concerned enough with loving the way Jesus loved that adopted the disabled children that everyone else abandoned. They refused to join the military because they would not have their allegiance to the Roman government conflict with their allegiance to Jesus as King. The church's commitment to honoring Jesus as King meant that they refused to worship pagan Gods. They refused to participate in wild parties that honored false Gods. They treated their neighbor as their equal. They treated every person, regardless of their previous history or social station, as brother and sister. And they changed the world. Their lives, and the lives of faithful Christians today, are witnesses to the power of the resurrection.
I ask you, ladies and gentleman of the jury, to return a verdict in favor of truth of the resurrection. And not only acknowledge that with your hearts and minds, but to acknowledge that with your lives and your minds, your hopes and your values.
Judge: Does the defense rest?
Defense Attorney: It does
Judge: And the prosecution?
Prosecution Attorney: We rest as well your honor
Judge: I believe the jury and I are ready to render a verdict. The verdict is (opens piece of paper)….HE IS RISEN!
Prosecution Attorney:
I would like to poll the jury
Judge: Very well. Men and women of the congregation..eheemm…I mean jury….if you agree with the verdict that Jesus is risen from the dead…would you stand and say "HE IS RISEN INDEED" after I say HE IS RISEN? Then the pastor will come to lead us in our invitation hymn. Ok…ready? HE IS RISEN (point to the congregation)
Jury: (as they stand) HE IS RISEN INDEED
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