I've been reading this book, "The Reason for God" by Timothy Keller and felt apt to share an excerpt from the book from chapter 13 about the reality of the resurrection, today being Easter.
Over the years skeptics over the resurrection have proposed that Jesus's disciples may have had hallucinations, that they may have imagined Jesus's appearing to them and speaking to them. This assumes that their Masters resurrection was imaginable for Jesus's Jewish followers and it was an option in their worldview , it was not. Others say it could be a conspiracy theory that the disciples could have stole the body and claimed he was alive to others, this assumes that the disciples assumed that others would be opened to the belief that an individual could be raised from the dead but none of that is possible. The people of that time would have considered the possibility of a bodily resurrection to be as impossible as the people of our own time though for different reasons.
In the first century their were many other messianic movements whose would be messiahs were executed however scholar N.T. Wright says in not one single case do we hear the slightest mention of any disappointed followers claiming that their Hero had been raised from the dead, they knew better, resurrection was not a private event, Jewish revolutionaries whose leader had been executed by the authorities and who managed to escape arrest themselves had two options, give up the revolution or find another leader. Claiming that the original leader was alive again was simply not an option unless off course, he was.
Their were dozen of other messianic pretenders whose lives and careers ended the same way Jesus's did, why would the disciples of Jesus come to the conclusion that his crucifixion had not been a defeat but a triumph unless they had seen Him risen from the dead.
After the death of Jesus the entire Christian community suddenly had adopted a set of beliefs that were brand new and until that point had been unthinkable. The first Christians had a resurrection centered view of reality , they believed that the future resurrection had already begun in Jesus, they believed that Jesus had a transformed body , that could walk through walls yet eat food, this was not simply a resuscitated body nor a solely spiritual existence.
Jesus's resurrection guaranteed our resurrection and bought some of that future new life into our hearts now, however the Christian view of resurrection absolutely unprecedented in history sprang up full blown immediately after the death of Jesus , their was no process or development . His followers say that their beliefs did not come from debating and discussing, they were just telling others what they had seen themselves no one has come up with any other plausible alternative to this claim even if you propose the highly unlikely idea that one or two of Jesus's disciples did get the idea that he was raised from the dead on their own , they would have never have got a movement of other Jews to believe it unless their were multiple, inexplicable, plausible repeated encounters with Jesus.
The subsequent history of the church becomes even more difficult to account for, how could a group of first-century Jews have come to worship a human being as divine? Eastern religions believe that God is an impersonal force that permeates all things. Therefore they can accept the idea that some human beings have more divine consciousness than others. Western religions believed that the various gods often took human guise. It was possible, therefore, that some human figure could really be Zeus or Hermes. Jews, however, believed in a single, transcendent, personal God. It was absolute blasphemy to propose that any human being should be worshiped. Yet hundreds of Jews began worshipping Jesus literally overnight.
The hymn to Christ as God that Paul quotes in Philippians 2 is generally recognized to have been written just a few years after the crucifixion. What enormous event broke through all of that Jewish resistance? If they had seen him resurrected, that would account for it. What other historical answer can do so? There is one more thing to keep in mind. As Pascal put it, "I [believe] those witnesses that get their throats cut." Virtually all the apostles and early Christian leaders died for their faith, and it is hard to believe that this kind of powerful self-sacrifice would be done to support a hoax. It is not enough for the skeptic then to simply dismiss the Christian teaching about the resurrection of Jesus Christ saying , it just couldn't have happened . He or she must face an answer of all this historical questions:
- Why did Christianity emerge so rapidly with such power?
- No other band of messianic followers ever concluded that their leader was raised from the dead ,why did this group do so ?
- No other groups of Jews ever worshiped a Human being as God what led them to do it?
- Jews did not believe in divine men or an individuals resurrections, what changed their worldview virtually overnight ?
- How do you account for the hundreds of eye witnesses of the resurrection who lived on for decades publicly maintaining their testimonies eventually giving their lives for their belief?
- What account can we give for the birth of the church ?
Nothing in history can be proven the way we can prove something in a laboratory however the resurrection of Jesus is a historical fact much more fully attested to then most other events of ancient history we take for granted. Every effort to account for the birth of the church apart from Jesus's resurrection flies in the face of what we know about first century history and culture . If you don't short circuit the process with the philosophical bias against the possibility of a miracle, the resurrection of Jesus has the most evidence for it.
The problem is however that people do short circuit the investigation, instead of doing the work of answering this very tough historical questions and then following the answers to where they lead , they bail out with the objection that miracles are impossible . I can sympathize with a person who says so what if I can't think of an alternative explanation , the resurrection just couldn't happen , lets not forget however that the first century people felt exactly the same way, they found the resurrection just as inconceivable as you do , the only way anyone embraced the resurrection back then was by letting the evidence challenge and change their worldview, their view of what was possible, they had just as much trouble with the claims of the resurrection as you yet the evidence both the eye witness accounts and the changed lives of Christ's followers was overwhelming.
In a sermon N.T. Wright said this, the message of the resurrection is that this world matters that the injustices and pains of this world must now be addressed with the news that healing, justice and love has won. If Easter means Christ is only raised in a spiritual sense then it is only about me and finding a new dimension in my personal spiritual life , but if Jesus Christ is truly risen from the dead Christianity becomes good news for the whole world , news which warms our hearts precisely because it isn't just about warming hearts. Easter means that in a world where violence, injustice, and degradation are endemic , God is not prepared to tolerate such things and that we will work and plan with all the energy of God to implement victory of Jesus over them all , take away Easter and it undermines any motivation to make a world a better place, why sacrifice for the needs of others if in the end nothing we do will make any difference , if the resurrection of Jesus happened however that means there is infinite hope and reason to pour ourselves out for the needs of the world.
When Jesus said, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.", he didn't just merely say it, He accomplished it through His life, He finished the work that was required to purchase man's redemption & salvation and He proved it through his resurrection that he indeed was the only way, the truth and the life to all who believe in Him.
Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.
