A Simple Case for the Resurrection

Welcome back to Shameless Popery and, if you are watching this during the Easter season, Happy Easter! This is a time when we as Christians celebrate the fact that Jesus is risen from the dead and I thought it seemed appropriate to examine why we believe that. Because, as I’m sure you know, plenty of people don’t believe Jesus rose from the dead. And that creates a sort of historical question because, here’s the thing, we know that there is a movement in the first century of people claiming to follow this Jesus of Nazareth, and claiming more than that, this Jesus, the founder of their religious movement, died and rose from the dead. And so to disbelieve what they’re saying creates a historical question which is, well, “What really happened?” So I want to explore that today. I want to look at six different theories, five of which I’m going to reject.

Six theories of resurrection (1:00)

So, those six different theories about the Resurrection are as follows. That Jesus didn’t really die. This is something that’s called the Swoon Theory. You know, maybe he looked like he died. He kind of tricked the soldiers into thinking he was dead, but he didn’t really die. That’s the first theory. The second that, yeah, sure, he died, but he wasn’t really buried. He was just left to be eaten by animals. Or he was buried in some unmarked grave that was lost to the apostles. Or he was buried and animals ate his body; various theories related to that.

So the first one: Good Friday wasn’t really the death of Jesus. The second: Holy Saturday isn’t really the time when Jesus is in the tomb, because he isn’t there. He’s somewhere else. And then the third theory: the resurrection is just a metaphor, that when the apostles claimed that Jesus rose from the dead, they mean something like his message was really triumphant. The fourth theory: this was just a legend. The apostles didn’t really say Jesus rose from the dead. That was just later Christians who kind of took whatever the original language was and exaggerated it into this story about Jesus literally rising from the dead. The fifth theory is that the apostles, yeah, they claimed Jesus rose from the dead, but they were lying about it. And then, if none of those theories are right, I think we’re left with the sixth theory, which, as you might guess, is the one I believe is correct: the apostles are accurate eyewitnesses, and the resurrection is true.

Approach to the evidence (2:40)

I want to be clear about a few things as we start out. I am not starting by presupposing the inspiration or even the inerrancy of the New Testament. The reason I’m not starting with that is because it’d be totally circular to say, “I believe in the resurrection because the New Testament tells me so. I believe in the New Testament because it’s divinely inspired. I believe it’s divinely inspired because the God of history entered the world.” And then you just go in this full circle and say, “Well, how do I know that? Well, the New Testament tells me so.” And so you think that’s obviously not going to be convincing to someone who isn’t already a committed Christian. And if you’re already a committed Christian, then you probably don’t need to be sold on the authenticity and historicity of the resurrection.

Did Jesus really die? (5:08)

And so, yeah, when I ask, “Did Jesus really die?” there are, like I said, a lot of different theories about this. One is that Jesus only appeared to be dead. Maybe he was unconscious and then was buried by mistake, and it was all just a crazy coincidence. You know, here’s this guy who promised that he would suffer, die, and then rise again on the third day, and it so happened that he went into a three-day coma and then got out of the coma on the third day. What a weird coincidence that is. It’s not a very plausible kind of explanation, just on the face of it. It’s a pretty remarkable coincidence.

It also presupposes a remarkable degree of ineptitude among the Romans. And this is worth mentioning: the Romans didn’t execute, like, three people. They executed thousands of people. And so the idea that Jesus, the one guy whose death they really could not afford to mess up, was the one whose death they happened to mess up is in the realm of a minor miracle all by itself.

But it also doesn’t really make sense of the facts. Because if you have someone who’s been scourged, tortured, nearly killed, and then left to rot in a cave for three days, how’s he moving the stone away on his own? How’s he getting past the guards posted there by these two? Like, it doesn’t… There’s a lot of things that are wrong with it.

But besides all of that, it gets a lot of the medical information wrong. And I know that might sound really strange if you’re used to thinking of this as just kind of a story, but there’s enough information from the first-century evidence to present some interesting medical conclusions. Now, I’m not qualified to do that, but in the 1980s, JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, presented a piece called “On the Physical Death of Jesus Christ.” It was written by a pathologist by the name of Dr. William Edwards, who worked at the Mayo Clinic, as well as a Protestant pastor, Wesley Gable, and a medical graphics specialist, Floyd Hosmer.

And I mention this because this is a great combination. As much as I sometimes quibble with aspects of Protestant theology, it’s really good to have someone who understands the theological information and can say, “Oh, here’s what that passage means. Here’s what that Greek means. Here’s what…” Because a doctor isn’t really qualified to parse first-century Greek, but neither is a pastor particularly qualified to say, “Here’s the medical cause of death.”

And so, in “On the Physical Death of Jesus,” they’re asking, from a medical perspective, what’s actually going on here in the New Testament accounts? Because the evangelists are not presenting this from the same point of view or in the same language that a pathologist would use in presenting a cause of death.

And so it’s really remarkable. But even more, the third person, Hosmer, does medical graphics, and so there are these really remarkable depictions that he gives. He shows the scourging at the pillar and the direction of the whip marks, the way the whip was actually designed at the time, as well as the carrying of the cross. It probably doesn’t look like we normally envision, where Jesus is carrying the entire cross, because it would weigh about 300 pounds. Instead, he would just be carrying the crossbeam, called the patibulum.

And then there’s the nailing of Jesus’s wrists. Here again, it’s not like the popular imagination. Crucifixion wasn’t nailing in the middle of the palm, because that wouldn’t support the weight of the person. Instead, it was nailing between the ulna and, I believe, the radial artery in the wrist. It’s really fascinating stuff. It’s graphic. It’s gory. I mean, as you might imagine, the crucifixion is graphic and gory. But then it also explains how respiration works during crucifixion, because you may have heard that it’s very hard to breathe while you’re being crucified. They show why, both in an illustration and by explaining it.

So it’s an interesting article. It’s well worth the time to read it, but I wanted to get to the conclusion. They have two conclusions. First, they have conclusions about how crucifixion worked in general. They say, “The actual cause of death by crucifixion was multifactorial and varied somewhat with each case, but the two most prominent causes probably were hypovolemic shock and exhaustion asphyxia,” meaning you became too tired to push yourself up to breathe. Because on the cross, you’re contorted in such a way that you have to physically push yourself up against the wood of the cross, just ripping into your back, in order to get a breath. And you just can’t keep doing that forever. And so, finally, you become so exhausted you can no longer breathe.

Then they look at other possible contributing factors, like dehydration, stress-induced arrhythmias, congestive heart failure, and they also look at what’s called crucifracture, which is the breaking of the legs below the knees, which would quickly lead to asphyxiation.

Now remember, you have to push yourself up in order to breathe. That is why, if you remember the New Testament accounts, they go out and they’re going to do this to all three of the men being crucified. But when they get to Jesus, he’s already dead, and so they break the legs of the other two. This crucifracture is done to the two thieves. It’s not done to Jesus, and the reason it’s not done to Jesus is he’s already dead.

Nevertheless, one of the soldiers pierces the side of Jesus, and blood and water flow out. Now, from a medical perspective, the blood and water is really interesting, partly because there’s this question about the order. So, is it that blood flows out first and then water, or vice versa? Medically, they say it’s more likely that water actually came out first. They look at why and, kind of based on where the piercing is, what might have happened to cause blood and water to flow out. Like I said, fascinating stuff.

So, after looking at how crucifixion in general works, they then look at the biblical account and say, “What can we say about the death of Jesus as it’s presented in the Bible?” Well, they point out that the fact that he died so quickly, after only three to six hours on the cross, is presented as surprising even to Pontius Pilate. So if someone says, “You know, that is a quick time to die,” well, yeah, in a way that’s true. He had been scourged nearly to death, he had been carrying the cross, and he had been undergoing a whole lot. But then they say, “The fact that he cries out in a loud voice and then bows his head and dies suggests the possibility of a catastrophic terminal event.”

In other words, it looks like Jesus isn’t just gasping for his last breath. He actually cries out in a loud voice. One popular explanation has been that Jesus died of cardiac rupture in the setting of the scourging and crucifixion, with associated hypovolemia, hypoxemia, and perhaps an altered coagulable state. Friable non-infective thrombotic vegetations could have formed on the aortic or mitral valve.

So that’s getting into a lot of details about heart stuff that I don’t understand, but I understand the basic idea of cardiac rupture. They say the other explanation may be more likely: Jesus’s death may have been hastened simply by his state of exhaustion and by the severity of the scourging, with the resulting blood loss and preshock state. The fact that he could not carry his patibulum, that is, the cross, supports this interpretation. He was already in clearly a weakened state. He’s described as having fallen three times.

So the actual cause of Jesus’s death may have been multifactorial and related primarily to hypovolemic shock, exhaustion, asphyxia, and perhaps acute heart failure. A fatal cardiac arrhythmia may have accounted for the apparent catastrophic terminal event.

So, if you’re like me, you understood, like, I don’t know, maybe half of that. Like, cardiac’s heart something. And so, for those of us who aren’t regular readers of JAMA, or who don’t normally subscribe to the American Medical Association’s journal because we’re not doctors and we’re not involved in the medical field, a lot of it’s going to be a little foreign and mystifying.

But I think it’s important to point out that Jesus appears to be dying by all accounts. They make this point as well: look, this is the kind of thing that was intended to kill you in a bunch of different ways, slowly working together. And so isolating a single cause of death may be very difficult, especially reading it 2,000 years later. But nevertheless, what’s very clear is that Jesus does in fact die.

They say, “It remains unsettled whether Jesus died of cardiac rupture or of cardiorespiratory failure. However, the important feature may not be how he died, but rather whether he died. Clearly, the weight of historical and medical evidence indicates that Jesus was dead before the wound to his side was inflicted and supports the traditional view that the spear thrust between his right ribs probably perforated not only the right lung but also the pericardium and heart, and thereby ensured his death. Accordingly, interpretations based on the assumption that Jesus did not die on the cross appear to be at odds with modern medical knowledge.”

Great. So when we’re looking at the six theories, we can take the first one off the list: that Jesus didn’t really die. It contradicts everything we know medically. It’s implausible given what we know about the Romans and about crucifixion, and it’s even more implausible given what we know about medical stuff, like cardiovascular stuff and respiratory stuff. Jesus appears to be dead, and the fact that a spear thrust through his side really supports that.

Now, you might say, “Well, how do we know the apostles aren’t just making all that up?” Well, we’re going to get to that in theory number five, if the apostles were intentionally lying. But leaving aside whether the apostles are lying, we know enough about Roman crucifixion because we know of thousands of Roman crucifixions, not just from Christian sources. There are Roman and Jewish sources that attest to this as well. We even know the history of crucifixion, how the Romans inherited it from the Greeks. So none of this is particularly out there.

You know, basic knowledge of history and basic knowledge of medicine point to the fact that it’s not plausible to say that Jesus didn’t die on the cross. He clearly did, and there’s no plausible rival explanation. You’ll notice even the early opponents of Christianity don’t say, “Oh, Jesus didn’t really die on the cross.” It’s just not a plausible theory.

The burial and the tomb (16:06)

Okay, that leads to the second theory: Jesus is eaten by animals, or there was no tomb, or the tomb was lost. This is the idea that we don’t know if there’s an empty tomb because we don’t know where the tomb is in the first place. The person who’s most famous for this, I believe, would be John Dominick Crossan. He was a former priest who ended up leaving the priesthood and becoming extreme in his views of skepticism. He was involved in what’s called the Jesus Seminar, which really picked apart a lot of the Gospel texts and tried to figure out which ones were authentic sayings of Jesus. I think it’s fair to say the Jesus Seminar these days is not particularly well respected among scholars, even non-believing scholars, because they’re clearly bringing their own kind of agenda into this.

Nevertheless, in John Dominick Crossan’s view, he lays this out in Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography. He says that Roman crucifixion was state terrorism. Its function was to deter resistance or revolt, especially among the lower classes, and the body was usually left on the cross to be consumed eventually by wild beasts.

So this is going to be a two-fold kind of attack. You’ve got the birds, who would be pecking out the eyes, that sort of thing, and you would also have dogs who, if the body was taken down, would eat the body. It’s gory, it’s graphic, but this is kind of the claim: hungry animals, maybe starving themselves, would consume the bodies. And this is apparently not unheard of with victims of crucifixion.

So, you know, I will say there’s an advantage of this theory over theory number one. Theory number one is just naive about the brutality of crucifixion. Theory number two takes the brutality of crucifixion seriously and says maybe it’s so brutal there’s nobody left to be buried, that the body has been fed to the animals.

Okay, and then he says, “No wonder we have found only one body from all those thousands crucified around Jerusalem in that single century. Remember those dogs. And if you seek the heart of darkness, follow the dogs.” He’s implying very heavily there that what happened to Jesus is he was eaten by wild dogs.

He makes this point in kind of an exaggerated way by saying we’ve only found one body of a crucifixion victim. Well, we know of more bodies. We have only found one archaeologically, but we know from other sources that other crucifixion victims were given proper burials. We just haven’t found all of their corpses. And, of course, we haven’t. Think about the number of people buried in the first century compared to the number that we’ve happened to stumble upon. So it’s not actually that striking that we don’t have a lot of crucifixion victims.

Nevertheless, he’s absolutely right that in many cases the body would be left out, and this was on purpose as a demonstration, as a mockery, especially for something like a revolt. You’d have an attempted revolution, and then you might have a thousand people or more crucified. Those people would be left up on the crosses for the Romans to say, “Don’t try it.”

So it makes sense that the body would be left out. It’s striking, however, that none of the early opponents of Christianity say this is what happened. They don’t say, “Jesus wasn’t laid in the tomb. We left his body out for days.” And, in fact, there’s clear Christian evidence that this isn’t what happened. Now, again, I’m not saying you need to believe it’s divinely inspired, but at least consider what the first-century evidence, the unrebutted first-century evidence, actually has to say.

But before we get there, one more bit from Crossan. I keep saying “Crossan” like it’s breakfast food or something. He says, “With regard to the body of Jesus, by Easter Sunday morning those who cared did not know where it was, and those who knew did not care. Why should even the soldiers themselves remember the death and disposal of a nobody?”

Well, I think there’s a pretty clear answer to all of this, which is that whether the Romans cared or not, we have clear testimony of the burial from the earliest Christian sources. So there are all kinds of disputes about which documents were written before which ones, in terms of dating the New Testament. But generally speaking, people would say the early letters of Paul are probably the oldest writings we have. And so, one of those is 1 Corinthians. And in 1 Corinthians 15, Saint Paul says, “I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and then he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.”

So Paul mentions explicitly that he was buried. That’s an important detail. It was an important detail that he received in becoming a Christian. This is part of the original Christian proclamation. The Christians were very explicit. This was a detail they cared about, and it mattered because this is an obvious detail to wonder about: “Well, do you know where his body is?” And they said, “Yes, we do.” That’s the early Christians. This is within maybe a decade, then two decades, right? Like, this is not just one of the oldest New Testament documents, First Corinthians, but Paul pointing back to earlier ones, that this is what he’s received, earlier testimony that he’s received.

Matthew, which was historically considered the first of the four Gospels, is clear about this as well. He actually gives much more detail than Saint Paul does. He says, “When it was evening, there came a rich man from Arimathea named Joseph, who was also a disciple of Jesus. He went to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus. Then Pilate ordered it to be given to him, and Joseph took the body and wrapped it in a clean linen shroud and laid it in his own new tomb, which he’d hewn in the rock. And he rolled a great stone to the door of the tomb and departed. Mary Magdalene and the other Mary were there, sitting opposite the sepulcher.”

And that tells us two important details. One, it gives us a clear and plausible explanation of why the body of Jesus wasn’t just left on the cross. Well, because a wealthy person asked a politician, and when wealthy people ask politicians for stuff, they tend to get it. And you might think, “Oh, it’s implausible that someone who is being condemned as a criminal would have a wealthy, politically well-connected follower.” And I don’t think that’s implausible at all. To give just one example, Whitey Bulger, the notorious mobster, had a brother who was, if memory serves, the president of the Massachusetts State Senate. He was, whatever it was, a prominent politician in Massachusetts. Those are brothers, right? So this is just someone who is secretly or kind of discreetly a follower of Jesus, just saying, “Hey, as a favor, could I have his body to bury?” He’s someone in a great position to ask that question without having to worry about being executed.

And again, these are early sources. So if you care about what these early sources have to say, I don’t know, I mean, maybe take them seriously.

So John Dominick Crossan says, “We know from both literary and archaeological evidence that a crucified body could be given back to his family for burial.” Aha, so earlier he kind of exaggerated the case: “We only have one body.” But then he’s going to tell us, well, “Philo mentioned that as a possibility on certain festal occasions.” So on certain feasts, you might take the body down. Huh? “And Yehochanan’s corpse was honorably buried in the family tomb. There were also found, by the way, in Ossuary 1 of Tomb 4 at Giv’at ha-Mivtar, the bones of a 16 to 17-year-old male who’d been burned to death on the rack and his bones were left there long enough to bear the marks forever.” Now, that’s not crucifixion, but it’s someone who was clearly executed and still had the body given back to the family for an honorable burial.

“In a patronal society, of course, even such burial concessions would have taken at least some influence—at least the ability to approach, indirectly if not directly, the powers involved.” Well, again, the New Testament explains exactly what that scenario looks like. Joseph of Arimathea is just the kind of person who is well positioned to get that done. And so to just ignore that evidence and not take it seriously strikes me as kind of a remarkable omission.

He says, “In general, however, if one had influence, one was not crucified, and if one was crucified, one would not have influence enough to obtain burial.” But again, it’s not that Jesus was so well connected with Pontius Pilate. He said Joseph of Arimathea was well connected, and Joseph of Arimathea wasn’t crucified. So it’s not particularly hard to solve this kind of problem, right, that he’s presenting as totally implausible that the body of Jesus would be given back, and yet he points out evidence he has that this sometimes happened, particularly on festival occasions, which we know Good Friday was. We’ll get into that in a second.

He does say, “In normal circumstances, the soldiers guarded the body until death and thereafter it was left for carrion crows, scavenger dogs, or other wild beasts to finish the brutal job. That nonburial consummated authority’s dreadful warning to any observer and every passerby.” So that’s normal circumstances, but nobody’s claiming these were normal circumstances. This is instead the eve of Passover. And why does that matter? Because this is one of those festal occasions, and we’re told pretty explicitly, and this is Mark.

Now, I mentioned Matthew is historically considered the first Gospel. Many scholars instead think Mark is the oldest Gospel. Either way, when we’re looking at First Corinthians, Matthew, and Mark, we’re looking at three of the oldest Christian documents describing the death of Jesus, perhaps the three oldest. And so, whatever order you put them in. In Mark 15 it says, “When evening had come, since it was the day of Preparation, that is, the day before the Sabbath.” Now, there’s a disputed reading about whether he just means it’s before Saturday or whether he’s saying the day of Preparation is about to be Passover. In any case, it appears to be both. It appears to be the afternoon before Passover begins in the evening. It also begins on a Friday afternoon, so it’s right before the Saturday Passover.

But he’s saying that because of this, “Joseph of Arimathea, a respected member of the council, who was also himself looking for the kingdom of God, took courage and went to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus.” Now notice, everything Crossan mentions is like these defeaters: “Oh, well, you’d have to be very courageous to do that. You’d be taking your life in your own hands.” Yeah, the New Testament kind of acknowledges that. Joseph of Arimathea did a brave thing. He went to Pilate. He was a well-respected member of the council, so he was able to get away with this. You know, he’s on the Sanhedrin. This is part of the political body that Pilate himself, a politician, doesn’t want to anger. And so he grants another political figure a favor. This has a million precedents in modern and ancient society. It is not at all unbelievable that a politician would seek to curry favor with someone who is well-respected in the community. It shouldn’t even take any explanation. Yeah, there’s nothing about this that’s implausible.

This is when Mark mentions that Pilate wondered if he was already dead, and then the centurion confirms that he is, in fact, dead. Then Pilate grants the body to Joseph, and we’re told again that he takes him and lays him in his own tomb. Like Matthew, Mark mentions that Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Joses saw where he was laid. So again, we know from the earliest testimonies both that Jesus was buried and that the disciples knew where he was buried. Joseph of Arimathea knew. Mary Magdalene knew, and Mary the mother of Joses, perhaps Jesus’s aunt, knew.

This is important because John Dominic Crossan is like, “Well, Jesus’s disciples ran away.” It’s like, okay, yeah, the male disciples ran away, but there were a number of women who, we know from all of these testimonial accounts, were there. These were also the women who went to the tomb later on, and they knew where they were going because they’d been there just a couple of days before.

All this to say, it is just not a good theory to say, “Yeah, his body was just left there to be eaten by animals,” or, “Yeah, you know, he was buried in some unmarked grave and no one knew where he was,” because all of the available evidence contradicts that. You have to just ignore all the evidence, both from the New Testament and from these other accounts of people being given back to their families after being crucified.

But there’s an additional reason. Under Jewish law, “If a man has committed a crime punishable by death and he’s put to death, and you hang him on a tree, his body shall not remain all night upon the tree. You shall bury him the same day, for a hanged man is accursed by God. You shall not defile your land which the Lord your God gives you for an inheritance.” It’s Deuteronomy 21:22–23.

So, for particular legal violations, when you’re being condemned under Jewish law, you’re not to be left up beyond that day. You can’t do this Roman thing of leaving the body to just rot in the air as a sign for your enemies. And so it makes sense that if Pilate is partly appeasing the Jewish high priest and the Jewish authorities, this is going to be treated very differently than the Romans putting down a political uprising. Would you do that? You’re going to be following Roman custom if you’re doing this. You’re not going to then tick off the very people you’re trying to appease by leaving the body to rot in the air in violation of Deuteronomy 21 on Passover.

So, for all sorts of legal reasons, as well as the festivity of Passover, it makes sense that Jesus’s body was taken down and given to Joseph of Arimathea, exactly like all of the evidence says it was.

Now, John Dominick Crossan tries to address this. He says, “Well, if the Romans did not observe the Deuteronomic decree, Jesus’s dead body would have been left on the cross for the wild beasts.” Fair enough, right? And his followers, who’d fled, would know that. Yeah, of course they wouldn’t possibly have a story about how Jesus was buried and then rose again on the third day if they saw his body lying there, hung there for days. So that seems to dispel that theory. Hey, here’s a theory that would immediately disprove the core of Christianity, because the Christian claim is that Jesus was buried that day. If he was left up in a very public place for days on end, the apostles would know that. You know who else would? Everybody living in Jerusalem. That’s literally the point of doing a crucifixion in a public place like this. You put this body in Golgotha, hung up on a cross, so that anyone walking in or out of Jerusalem has to look at it and say, “Don’t mess with the Romans.”

And so, of course, Jesus’s body isn’t still there, or the opponents of Jesus would have immediately said, “He didn’t get buried. His body was eaten by animals,” or, “His body was buried much later.” You know, anyway, so that part of the theory is clearly wrong, right?

He says, “Okay, so that’s if the Romans didn’t observe what Deuteronomy requires. But then,” he said, “If the Romans did observe the decrees, the soldiers would have made certain Jesus was dead and then buried him themselves as part of their job.” Well, again, that’s only if you ignore Joseph of Arimathea going to Pilate and making this appeal. Then he concludes, “In either case, his body, left on the cross or in a shallow grave barely covered with dirt and stones, the dogs were waiting, and his followers who had fled would know that too.”

So, in this theory, the disciples know Jesus isn’t actually buried in the tomb. It’s a pretty remarkable sort of theory. There’s a reason this is not a very mainstream kind of argument. There’s a reason most scholars, even if they’re non-believers, don’t take this to be a very plausible kind of theory of what happened, either, because it just doesn’t make sense of them. You have to actually ignore basically all of the evidence about Jesus’s burial and just say, “Well, if there was no one like Joseph of Arimathea, here’s what would have happened.” And it’s like, well, sure, okay, but there was. If this didn’t happen right before Passover, if this wasn’t a matter of Jewish law as well as Roman law intersecting, if it was, you know, like if you assume a counterfactual where you ignore all of the major events of the New Testament, then, right, if Jesus was a Roman revolutionary, he would have been left on the cross for days on end. And as long as this wasn’t in a Jewish area, nobody would have had a problem with that. That isn’t a very interesting kind of theory, because nobody thinks that’s what happened.

So I think we can safely cross the second theory, that animals ate Jesus’ body or that there was no tomb or that we lost the tomb, off the list. You’d have to believe that the earliest Christians are not just wrong but actually lying about the evidence, because they’re saying, “Here are two women who actually watched him get buried. They saw where he was laid.” So to believe this, you have to say Joseph of Arimathea is lying, the two Marys are lying, and the apostles reporting this are lying. And so then we’re squarely in theory number five, that the apostles are intentionally lying. So we’ll get there. But assuming they’re not intentionally lying, theory one and two are totally off the table.

Resurrection as a metaphor (33:43)

That then leads to theory number three. Okay, sure, Jesus died and was buried, but he didn’t really rise from the dead. All that language about resurrection is just a metaphor.

There’s a German scholar by the name of Willi Marxsen who makes this argument. He says, “Witnesses, after the death of Jesus, claim that something had happened to them which they described as seeing Jesus, and reflection on this experience led them to the interpretation that Jesus had been raised from the dead.”

Now, if that sounds like 20th-century mumbo jumbo, I think it’s because it is. But he nevertheless says, “For ‘Jesus is risen’ simply means: today the crucified Jesus is calling us to believe.” Well, it’s worth asking: believe in what? Like, what? This is a strange kind of result.

Look, I’m potentially going to say something controversial, because I want to be very clear: mainstream and conservative Christians believe in the resurrection of Jesus. But there is a danger when you just say all that matters is faith alone, faith, faith, faith, faith, faith, and you take out everything else. It’s like, well, faith in what? And Willi Marxsen shows the kind of logical endpoint of this: yeah, the resurrection is just about having faith. Well, faith in what? Because the Christian claim is that you have faith in the resurrection of Jesus. You have faith in who Jesus is, who he says he was, and what happened to him. If you don’t have faith in that, then what are you having faith in? Like, faith doesn’t mean anything. To say it doesn’t matter if what you’re saying is true or not, the important thing is just that I trust you, is nonsensical, because what are you trusting, then?

And so here, the biblical witness is very clear that although we can talk about metaphorical resurrection, we’ve been, we enter into death through baptism. We’ve died with him, so we rise with him. There is certainly a sense, there’s certainly a sense in which the New Testament at times uses the language of death and resurrection in ways where, you know, Saint Paul does not literally mean you were physically killed during baptism. You know, you drowned underwater when you got baptized. There is a spiritual death and resurrection that, in some way, you could describe as metaphorical. I get all of that. I get what he’s saying.

Nevertheless, when we’re talking about the event of Easter Sunday, it’s equally clear we’re not in that category. Just because some things that Jesus says are parables or some things in the New Testament are metaphorical, it doesn’t mean that everything’s a parable or everything’s a metaphor. Some things are just literally, historically true. When we say Jesus rose from the dead, we mean Jesus actually rose from the dead. And when we say God raised Jesus from the dead, the other way this is formulated, there’s no sense in which that’s some kind of complicated metaphor for the crucified Jesus asking you to believe in something.

So this, again, I think, is clearly debunked by just reading the way the apostles speak about it, because they don’t talk about it like this is some vague metaphor. Saint Paul, in 1 Corinthians 15, puts it very powerfully. He says, “Now if Christ is preached as raised from the dead, how can some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead?”

So this is the problem he’s trying to respond to. As Christians, we believe in the resurrection of the dead: that Jesus rose from the dead historically, that we will rise from the dead on the last day, and that we will be united, body and soul, at some point after death. Death is a separation of body and soul. This will someday be reunited. And Saint Paul says, “Well, how could you deny that if you believe in the historic resurrection of Jesus?” Right? And then he poses a hypothetical. He says, “If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified of God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised.”

Like, that’s pretty logical, right? There are two possibilities: either the resurrection is historically true, or the apostles are liars. He goes on: “For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised. If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.”

Now, there’s just no way of getting around this. If Christ being raised is just some vague metaphor for faith, then Paul’s argument makes no sense, because his point is that your faith is ridiculous if Christ isn’t raised from the dead. The entire authenticity and credibility of the faith turns on the reality of the resurrection. That doesn’t read like a metaphor. He says, “Then those who also have fallen asleep in Christ have perished.” Right? Like, if the resurrection is just a metaphor, it’s not true, then everybody who’s died so far, well, they’re just dead. “If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all men most to be pitied. But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep.”

He makes it clear: if this is all just about this life, we are wasting our time and we are pitiable. None of that fits with reading this all as some elaborate metaphor. So I think we have to safely scratch that third theory off the list. This is all a metaphor.

The legend theory (39:05)

Okay, well, maybe it’s not a metaphor. Maybe it’s a legend. Maybe—some people will say this is theory number four—the original proclamation was just that Jesus was a good teacher or a good guy. Then later, centuries on or generations on as a game of telephone, it gets kind of exaggerated, and Jesus becomes a bigger and bigger figure until he’s no longer just a good teacher. Now he’s being treated as God, and now we’re making these claims about him being resurrected from the dead.

And look, I get it, right? You look at the history of Buddhism. Buddha is not claiming to be the Bodhisattva, you know. He’s not claiming to be God of any kind. He’s just a good teacher. And then, over time, you get some folk religion that exaggerates him and exaggerates him and exaggerates him. That’s kind of the claim.

The problem with that claim is it just doesn’t square with the historic evidence. So I will cover this more in depth in another episode that I think is going to come out a week from now. It’s going to look at just a simple case for the empty tomb, and it’s going to look particularly at the dating of things like Acts of the Apostles and how we know Acts of the Apostles is early. But I’m going to give an abbreviated version of it here for time’s sake.

The abbreviated version is we know historically that Acts is written pretty early. There are some people who say the early 100s. That is the latest you’ll find. That is not a particularly credible kind of claim. And again, you’ll have to take my word for it here, just because I’m not going to do all the work for it. The best evidence, based on internal evidence and external evidence, is that Acts of the Apostles was written in the 60s. And I’ll give you the abbreviated version.

Acts reads like an eyewitness account, in that Luke has a remarkable amount of detail in the later chapters of Acts about even things that are totally, I don’t want to say irrelevant, seemingly unimportant details about just his ship voyage with Paul. That reads like an eyewitness account and doesn’t read like historical fiction. Unless Luke is just a phenomenal writer, centuries ahead of his time, or someone on the level of Homer in the ancient world, he’s including details about small ports in Crete and all sorts of minor details. And yet he has a remarkable lack of detail about anything after the early 60s. He doesn’t have anything about the death of Paul, even though that’s who he’s profiling in the second half of the book. He doesn’t have anything about the destruction of the temple, the most important event in the second half of the first century, particularly for Jews. He doesn’t have anything about the great fire of Rome, which was a major point in Rome sort of turning against Christians.

So if you read Acts of the Apostles, this is basically the spread of the Gospel from Jerusalem to Rome, and it doesn’t mention the two most important events in Jerusalem or in Rome in the latter half of the first century. The best explanation for that is that he’s writing very early, like 61 or 62. So he’s writing before any of that stuff happens. And the reason he doesn’t write about what happens to Paul is because Paul has not been executed yet. Acts of the Apostles ends on this very strange note where Paul is just awaiting what’s going to happen to him. And that makes sense if that is, in fact, what Paul was doing at the time Acts was written. That’s the somewhat abbreviated argument for the early dating of Acts.

Well, at the beginning of Acts, in Acts 2, there’s a description of Pentecost, and Luke describes Pentecost, 50 days after Easter: “When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place.” That’s the disciples. There’s a sound from heaven. There are tongues of fire that descend and rest upon each of them. “They were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.” And he mentions that, “there were dwelling in Jerusalem Jews, devout men from every nation under heaven.”

But why were they there? Well, they were there because long before Pentecost was a Christian holiday, it was a Jewish holiday. So you would have Jewish pilgrims who would come into Jerusalem, where the temple was, for the major feast days. When you read about Jesus and his family, when Jesus has grown up, he goes down to Jerusalem for Passover. So it’s not strange that we’d find, you know, already you’ve got kind of a cosmopolitan town of Jerusalem during the Roman Empire. Everything’s kind of connected. All roads lead to Rome, so you’ve got a greater movement of peoples than you had in prior generations. But you have this especially because of the feast day.

“There were dwelling in Jerusalem Jews, devout men from every nation under heaven. And at this sound the multitude came together, and they were bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in his own language.” And they talk about this thing: “Wait, aren’t these all Galileans? And how is it we each hear them in our own native language?” And they mention where they’re from, “Parthians and Medes, Elamites, residents of Mesopotamia, Judea, Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt, the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabians, we hear them telling in our own tongues the mighty works of God.”

And so they’re amazed. They’re perplexed. Some are saying, “What does this mean?” And others are saying, “They are filled with new wine.” So I think that actually reads fairly plausibly. Now, some of you are going to say, “Speaking in tongues? I just reject that out of the gate.” But the fact that, well, if ever there is going to be a sizable group of people from every kind of nation, you would have it on a major feast day like Pentecost. And you see the skepticism of the crowd, saying, “Now they think they’re drunk.” Fair enough, right?

Well, Saint Peter gets up and he preaches to them, and he says, “Men of Israel, hear these words: Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs which God did through him in your midst, as you yourselves know—this Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men. But God raised him up, having loosed the pangs of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by it.”

So the first thing to notice there is this is a bombastic sermon. Peter is accusing a bunch of people he’s never met, basically, of murder. Not directly, right? But he’s sort of laying this corporate blame, saying, “We’ve killed Jesus, and God allowed it to happen, but then raised him from the dead.” That is the kind of claim that is, well, let’s say, striking. You know, if you are going on a pilgrimage somewhere and someone accuses you and the other pilgrims of being part of this conspiracy to kill their leader, their prophet, their holy man, you’re going to remember that, right? Like, that’s a memorable sort of event, whether you come to believe or not.

But he doesn’t stop there. He then describes Jesus as greater than David. Now remember, David is the greatest king in Israel’s history. Saint Peter then says Jesus is greater. He says, “Brethren, I may say to you confidently of the patriarch David that he both died and was buried, and his tomb is with us to this day.”

There’s some controversy, by the way, about whether David’s tomb is actually located kind of adjacent to where Peter was preaching. There’s some kind of reasoning about that. I’m not going to get into the details of that, whether that’s accurate or not. There’s some skepticism about whether that’s the correct spot for David being buried there. But nevertheless, we know that his tomb was known. Josephus reports that they knew where the tombs were, where David and others were buried.

Nevertheless, Peter says, “Being therefore a prophet, and knowing that God had sworn with an oath to him that he would set one of his descendants upon his throne, he foresaw and spoke of the resurrection of the Christ, that he was not abandoned to Hades, nor did his flesh see corruption. This Jesus God raised up, and of that we are all witnesses.”

Now again, this does not sound like a metaphor. This does not sound like we don’t really know what happened to Jesus. No, they’re claiming to be witnesses of the Resurrection. And this is 50 days, so this is 52 days, by our counting, after the crucifixion. So if you want to debunk Christianity and you are one of the people in the crowd here on Pentecost, he’s just made the entire claim centered around the fact that the tomb is empty, that Jesus is risen from the dead, and that he’s seen him, he and the others. You could walk from where he’s speaking to Golgotha. It is not far. I’ve been in both places. You could walk there and say, “Here’s the tomb. Here’s his body,” and Christianity is done by lunch. That’s it. That’s all it takes.

That doesn’t happen. Why doesn’t that happen? Because the tomb really is empty. And so the idea that what they were preaching was something other than this, the idea they were preaching, you know, “It’s just a legend,” or, “Jesus was just a great teacher. You should really listen to what he’s got to say,” no. All of the evidence we have, including first-century evidence, is that this is something totally different than that. They were preaching the resurrection as part of the integral message. Remember, back in 1 Corinthians 15, one of the earliest Christian documents, Saint Paul says this is what he’s received. Paul wasn’t there for this, but this is what the early Christian community believed, what they proclaimed, what they taught. This is the earliest form of Christianity. And here’s someone who’s in a position to know, saying this is what happened.

And I don’t know a plausible way of accounting for the evidence of Acts 2 without conceding that the tomb really was empty, because if the tomb wasn’t empty, Peter can’t give this sermon. And if Peter didn’t give the sermon, if Luke’s making that up, Luke can’t get away with that, because this was a major public event. That is, if Luke wanted to invent a sermon, he could say, “Yeah, one time in Galilee, in a small town, in one of the synagogues, Peter gave this real stem-winder of a speech.” But no, he places his sermon in Jerusalem, the capital city, at a major Jewish feast, and says 3,000 people converted and then went back to their own homes. That, in the first century, you could go to these places, the ones he listed, like those parts of Libya, Crete, that sort of thing, and you could find people who were there that day. That’s what, like, this is what, you know, we read this and we’re just like, “Phrygia, and where?” And, you know, it doesn’t mean anything to us. To the people then, it meant something because it’s giving them leads if you want to check in on the historicity of this account.

So I don’t think there’s any historically plausible way of saying Luke is making up the account. And if he’s not, if Saint Peter really said this, I don’t think there’s any way Peter can say it unless Jesus is actually not in the tomb. And so we have to take the fifth theory off the list. Excuse me, the fourth theory off the list: that it was all a legend, or that the apostles didn’t see Jesus risen. They clearly did.

Eyewitnesses and martyrdom (50:25)

And that leaves us with the big one: how do we know the apostles weren’t lying? Because fair enough, right? We would say, as Christians, we think there are other people making religious claims who were lying. I’ll give three examples: Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism; Muhammad, the founder of Islam; and David Koresh, the Branch Davidian guy in the ’90s who died in the standoff in Waco.

How do we know that we should trust Jesus and the apostles and not those guys? Well, I would say start with two things. Number one, how many eyewitnesses? Number two, what did they have to gain?

On the eyewitnesses, I already mentioned 1 Corinthians 15, that this teaching that Saint Paul describes as having delivered as of first importance, and that he also received, includes both the death and resurrection of Jesus, but also that Jesus appeared, in his words, to more than 500 brethren at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some had fallen asleep.

Now, why does he mention that detail? Because, again, he’s inviting you to fact-check him. He’s inviting the Corinthians to go explore, to see, “Okay, you claim there are hundreds of living witnesses to the resurrection. Where are they?” And he can connect you. So this is really an invitation. This is kind of a shockingly large proclamation.

Now, this also matches up well with something William Lane Craig, the apologist, has pointed out. Jesus foretells one of the resurrection appearances. Most of the resurrection appearances of Jesus take people by surprise. They’re in a locked room, and he just shows up. They’re walking on the road to Emmaus, and he just shows up. They’re going away from the tomb, and he just shows up, whatever it is. But there’s one appearance where he says, “Go and tell the apostles that I go before you to Galilee.”

So the Galilee appearance, which seems to be the appearance described at the end of Matthew’s Gospel, is an appearance that he seems to invite a crowd for. That’s probably the appearance in which he appears to 500 brethren at one time. It also makes sense of a particular part where it says that the apostles believed and some doubted. How could they believe and some doubt? Are we seeing that the apostles doubted? That seems like a stretch. Even for the apostles, as much as they’d struggled, you would think by this point, after they’d seen Jesus numerous times, they wouldn’t still be doubting. But if the Galilee appearance is a public one, and you’ve got both the really hardcore followers of Jesus and people who are just kind of idly curious, that makes sense.

This actually does a really good job of synthesizing the evidence. To believe that the resurrection is a hoax, you’d have to believe not just that Paul is lying, or that Peter’s lying, or that all of the Twelve are lying. You also have a bunch of other people who claim to have seen Jesus, like the women at the tomb. You also have these 500 people. That’s a ton of people to say are lying. That’s very different from the claims of Mormonism, or Islam, or Branch Davidianism.

The other difference, as I mentioned, is with the stakes. In the case of Muhammad, he claims a special revelation from God that he gets to have as many wives as he wants, including some underage women. He also builds a large army and gets a lot of worldly success. Then you’ve got Joseph Smith, who builds a large army of like 10,000 people. He claims to have a special revelation from God that he gets to have sex with a bunch of different women, including some underage girls. Then you’ve got David Koresh, who built a small army, and he doesn’t claim the women are wives. He just gets to have sex with a bunch of different women in the compound, including some underage girls.

In each case, someone looking at this would say, “I see some pretty obvious reasons you might be lying about this.” Or, if you want to put it more charitably or generously, “I see some reasons you might be inclined to think God is talking to you even if he’s not, because he’s telling you stuff that’s going to make you really great and successful, and you get to have a lot of promiscuity and a powerful army and all this stuff.”

Contrast that now with the apostles. There’s a question about whether or not Saint Peter is married, because we hear about his mother-in-law, but we never hear about his wife and so his wife may actually be dead. We don’t need to get into all that. But the basic point is, as far as we can tell, the apostles are celibate or nearly all celibate, and they are traveling with no army, no money, disclaiming violence in the name of Christianity. “Put away your sword, Peter,” and all that. They’re getting nothing in terms of worldly benefit out of it. Instead, they’re being shunned and persecuted by both their fellow Jews and by the Romans. Then they’re being tortured and killed.

Now, we have plenty of evidence for this, both from Christian and non-Christian sources. For instance, Tacitus, the Roman historian, in 116, writes about the Great Fire in 64. He describes how Nero, to avoid being blamed for the fire himself, blamed the Christians, whom he says are, “a class hated for their abominations.” He says, “Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilate.”

Okay, so Jesus definitely did die. And he describes Christianity as a, “mischievous superstition, [that was] checked for [a] moment, [broke out again], not only in Judea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular.” I love that description of Rome. I lived there for three years. I think it’s hilarious.

But then he describes the really brutal way the Christians were being murdered. This was in 64, right? These were people who, in many cases, would have been eyewitnesses or known eyewitnesses of the resurrection, and they were being tortured and killed in horrible, horrible ways. He said, “Mockery of every sort was added to their deaths. Covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were doomed to the flames and burnt, [and they served] as nightly illumination,” meaning they were used as torches at night. “Nero offered his gardens for the spectacle.” He made a show of the mass murder of the Christians in Rome. Many of them, remember, would have been the same Christians coming back from Acts 2 to the city, or people they discipled or helped raise in the faith.

It was so extreme that Tacitus says even for criminals who deserved extreme and exemplary punishment, there arose a feeling of compassion. They thought, “That’s just not right.” There was no love for Christians, but he still says, “[we still felt sorry for them because it wasn’t] for the public good, but to glut one man’s cruelty,” meaning Nero’s, “that they were being destroyed.”

Now, Tacitus, now he wasn’t alive for that. Actually, he was a little boy, I believe, when that happened. This was in 64.

Pliny the Younger, another Roman source, writes to the emperor Trajan. I don’t know the year he writes the letter, but I know Trajan is emperor from 98 to 117, so end of the first century, beginning of the second century, so very early on. He writes to him asking about the appropriate way to interrogate and execute Christians. He explains the procedure. He basically gives them a chance to deny that they’re Christians and a chance to offer sacrifice to the emperor. But if they’re going to be inflexibly obstinate, he says they surely deserve to be punished. In the case of Roman citizens, he had them sent to Rome. That actually matches what we have in Acts, that Paul is able to appeal his case to Rome because he’s a Roman citizen.

So he makes it clear that he’s not hunting down Christians. He’s waiting for people to report Christians to him. He’s not trying to disrupt the social order, but if somebody reports a Christian, he will have them interrogated, tortured, and killed. Trajan said, “Yep, proper procedure. That is the way to do it.” He says, “It is not possible to lay down any general rule to serve as a kind of fixed standard. They are not to be sought out; if they are denounced and proved guilty, they are to be punished, with this reservation, that whoever denies that he is a Christian and really proves it—that is, by worshiping our gods—even though he was under suspicion in the past, shall obtain pardon through repentance.”

So, it’s very clear that the persecution of Christians happened. You will find scholars like Candida Moss and others who try to downplay or kind of deny the extent of Christian persecution, but the evidence really points to the fact that it was widespread. Fine, he didn’t go hunting for Christians. But the idea that people would turn in their neighbors for being Christian certainly appears to be true from the Roman evidence. They were unashamed of this fact.

All that is to say, the early Christians were martyred. You might say, “Well, okay, the Christians were lying about the faith, and the Christians being martyred for the faith weren’t the same group.” But we know that, at least in some cases, the people being martyred were the apostles themselves.

For instance, Jesus prophesies in John 13. At the Last Supper, “Simon Peter said to him, ‘Lord, where are you going?’ Jesus answered, ‘Where I am going you cannot follow me now; but you shall follow afterward.’ Peter [says], ‘Lord, why cannot I not follow you now? I will lay down my life for you.’ Jesus answered, ‘Will you lay down your life for me? Truly, truly, I say to you, the cock will not crow, ’til you have denied me three times.’”

That’s before the Passion and Resurrection. After Jesus is resurrected, they have breakfast, and Jesus says to him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, when you were young, you girded yourself and walked where you would; but when you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will gird you and carry you where you do not wish to go.’ (This he said to show by what death he was to glorify God.) And after this he said to him, ‘Follow me,’” (John 21:15, 18-19).

Now, that account only makes sense if John’s readers know that Saint Peter was martyred, and martyred seemingly by crucifixion, in the same way Jesus was murdered, because, in John 13, he foretells that he’s going to go the same path. He’s going to be martyred in the same way.

That’s just one example. Josh McDowell has a book called The Fate of the Apostles, where he explores the historical evidence. You’ll find Christians who say 11 of the apostles were martyred and then John died of old age. You might ask, “Where is that coming from?” Well, it’s coming from a variety of historical sources.

This puts us in a strange place, because people will die for a false religion if they think it’s true, right? The 9/11 hijackers are always the example people bring up. I don’t think Islam is true. I’m sure the people who died for it on purpose thought it was true, because why would they do it otherwise?

Then people bring up the case of Joseph Smith, because they say Joseph Smith was a martyr. Well, Joseph Smith wasn’t martyred. Joseph Smith died in a gun battle while trying to break out of prison. If that martyred him, then we need to totally revisit what we mean by martyrdom, because there are plenty of people who die trying to get away from the police, escaping a mob, or breaking out of prison, those kind of things. I don’t think that’s what we mean by martyrdom. We mean those who die like Christ, who lay down their life humbly and are willing to die for what they believe.

The point I’m making is very simple: no one will knowingly die for a lie in that way. They might be dying for a lie on accident, that it wasn’t their lie, but somebody else’s lie. They might be dying on accident. You know, they’re a liar who’s hoping they’re going to get away in the situation, but they don’t get away. But we see in the case especially of Saint Peter, who actually writes in Second Peter kind of in preparation for his own death, that the apostles are not running from this. The apostles are only too ready to embrace martyrdom. That doesn’t make sense if they’re knowingly lying about Christianity.

In fact, so that’s as far as the case often gets made. But it’s worse than that. Remember, in 1 Corinthians 15 how Saint Paul says, “We are found to be liars.” This doesn’t take seriously the Jewish notion of the afterlife or of punishment. There was a belief in something like hell, that if you were lying about God, if you were purposely leading people into something that was not Israelite worship, if it wasn’t Judaism, and you were intentionally doing that, you were a blasphemer. And so you’re gonna get tortured and killed, after being shunned and living a life of poverty and celibacy. You get tortured and killed, and then you’d go to hell for all eternity. What in the world is the motivation that would explain that? I think the answer is very simply: there is none.

You can’t point to an analogous case. You can’t point to a case where somebody did that. So, for that reason, if you hold Christianity to the same standard you hold other religious claims, you’ll find that Christianity floats when those ones sink. Christianity rises. And so the fifth theory, that the apostles are intentionally lying, just doesn’t work. And that leaves us with only one: the apostles are accurate eyewitnesses.

Again, I haven’t proven here the inspiration of Scripture. I’ve not proven here that every word and every detail is correct. I haven’t tried to do that. I’ve proven simply that the apostles’ claim that Jesus died, was buried, rose from the dead, and appeared to them and that this is a credible claim.

Well, I haven’t even looked at some of the other claims. You know, hallucination doesn’t really work if there are 500 people. It doesn’t work with different people in different places all seeing the same thing and getting accurate reports about where to go and what to do. None of that works.

So all that’s to say, in light of the historical evidence, both the historical evidence from early Christians and from Roman sources as well, it seems very clear Jesus died and was buried and rose from the dead. And that is why we celebrate Easter.

So, from all of us at Catholic Answers [indistinguishable], Happy Easter and God Bless you!