Why Jesus’ Resurrection is Likely the Best Documented Historic Event Ever
Today is Easter Sunday. Two-thousand years ago on this day, Jesus’ disciples, beginning with Mary Magdalene, began claiming His tomb was empty and they had seen and talked with Him because He had been resurrected from the dead.
If that claim is true, it is the most remarkable fact of history and the central event upon which all history depends. If that claim is a lie, it is the biggest fraud ever perpetrated in human history.
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
So, if you aren’t now a follower of Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, how do you determine whether you believe He is alive and, as He claimed, “the way and the truth and the life,” or, in C.S. Lewis’ memorable formulation, a liar or maybe a lunatic?
Scott Powell of the Discovery Institute is here to help, with an excellent piece today on The Federalist that quite ably makes the case that Jesus’ resurrection is historically well documented, so much so in fact that it may well be the best-documented act in history.
Here are Powell’s introductory graphs:
“There are many religions with different founders, prophets, and teachers going back thousands of years. But only one of them, Christianity, has a founder who professed to be the Messiah — the son of God — who provided irrefutable proof of who He was by conquering death through resurrection. Easter is the celebration of Christ’s resurrection.
“Christ is also the only person in history who was pre-announced starting a thousand years before he was born, with 18 different prophets from the Old Testament between the 10th and the fourth centuries BC predicting His coming birth, life, and death.
Scott Powell is also author of “Rediscovering America,” currently an Amazon best-seller, on how our national holidays disclose who we are as a nation.
“Hundreds of years later, the details of Christ’s birth, life, betrayal, and manner of death validated those prophecies in surprisingly accurate and minute detail. One thousand years BC, David prophetically wrote about the crucifixion of Christ at a time crucifixion was unknown as a means of execution.
“Every other consequential person of history came into the world to live. The death of other religious leaders — such as Abraham, Moses, Buddha, Mohammad, and Confucius — brought an anticlimactic end to their lives and their work.
But Christ came into the world as God’s son in order to die and pay the price for man’s sin. His sacrifice was the ultimate climax of His life, done for the benefit of all mankind—opening the way to eternal life in heaven for all who believe.”
Go here for the rest of Powell’s presentation.
“More Than A Carpenter” by Josh McDowell and his son, Sean, is a classic presentation of the evidence for Jesus Christ as so much more than a mere man who happened to be a great moral teacher. Get your free copy today, it’s HillFaith’s Easter gift to you.
The New Testament was written largely backward: First the epistles, then Mark, then Matthew, Luke, and John. Because of that, rather than describe the events first, and then tell us what long wisdom has decided those events meant, we are treated to the conclusions first, with ever more fabulous stories being invented as time went on, until we are given the contradictory fables that Jesus was born in 4 BC in Bethlehem with the wise men coming to see him, and stopping along the way to see Herod the Great (who died in 4 BC), and the census of 6 AD, 10 years after Herod’s death, causing his family to go to Bethlehem.
Donald, you are presenting an example of the familiar skeptics’ argument that Jesus never claimed to be God during His lifetime or ministry, but that claim was rather the result of decades of, as you put it, “ever more fabulous stories invented as time went on,” and with a result that multiple alleged contradictions arose such as your claimed example here concerning Herod and the census. Rather than me responding point-by-point, I encourage you, Donald, and readers here to spend a little time in this video of Dr. Gary Habermas explaining why the timeline of post-crucifixion events, as understood on the basis of evidence skeptics and believing scholars alike agree on, simply does not support the fable-over-time argument.Habermas has spent decades studying the evidence and the arguments on all sides of the debate. Please feel free, Donald and anybody else who is following this exchange, to listen to Habermas and then come back here for further comment and discussion.
I did view the Habermas talk, in which he says he can prove his position using only facts that are not disputed by his unbelieving colleagues like Bart Ehrman. Which raises some obvious questions: How do people arrive at diametrically opposed conclusions from the same set of facts? How can either position claim to have “proved” anything, given that the opposite position is equally supported by the same facts? In any event, if Habermas’ position is so convincing, then why aren’t other experts, with the same set of facts, already as firmly convinced as he is?
My other comment disappeared, so I hope this one makes it through. Shalom.
Maybe the opposite position isn’t “equally supported by the same facts,” much as we want to think it is? Not recalling your previous comment. Refresh my memory please. HillFaith’s Comment Policy is here.
This ground is well trod, but a few obvious objections to Powell’s piece leap to mind. Like:
• Why should we interpret ancient Jewish prophecy as referring to Jesus, when Jewish scholars and ordinary Jews reject that interpretation?
• If willingness to suffer persecution and death makes someone believable, then why shouldn’t we believe the Jews, who suffered centuries of persecution and death at the hands of Christians for keeping faith with God’s covenant, rejecting Jesus as a false prophet?
• If the “eyewitnesses” to the Resurrection offer “irrefutable proof,” then why did most of their contemporaries — who, after all, shared the same faith and the same prescientific mindset — not believe them? How can it be reasonable — twenty-two centuries after the fact — to treat ancient personal anecdotes, derived from deeply subjective spiritual experiences, as if they were objective, factual, “literal” reports from the day before yesterday?
• Powell devotes much of his piece to contrasting Jesus with other religious, historical, and literary figures. How is that relevant? “Better than Homer” doesn’t cut it. The claims about Jesus are extraordinary. They demand commensurate — extraordinary — evidence.
• As Powell puts it, Jesus appeared to his disciples precisely because God wanted them to have such evidence — what Powell calls “seeing-is-believing evidence.” So why don’t WE get the same consideration? Evidence for the “most remarkable fact of history and the central event upon which all history depends” — performed by “the smartest man who ever lived,” (per J. W. Wallace) — should stand on its own feet: If not utterly extraordinary, the evidence at the very least should be utterly straightforward, transparent, unmistakable and inarguable.
• But really, why is “evidence” such a big deal for believers like Powell anyway, since Jesus blesses those who believe without seeing?
(For the record, I am not a skeptic with regard to the Gospel, although I am skeptical of fundamentalism. We do well to remember how Jesus criticized the literalism and fundamentalism of his day.)
Well put, Devil’s Advocate, I don’t agree with some of your points but I appreciate the reasonable way you make all of them. Good illustration for everybody on HillFaith of the respectful way to make a case.