History’s Greatest Linchpin
And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith.
-The Bible
The Only Question That Matters
If you want to disprove Christianity, don't go to the age of the earth, evolution, or weird stuff in the bible- go to the resurrection. It's Christianity's self-described linchpin.
But in 2022, how much can we know about something that happened two millenia ago? Turns out, a lot. The resurrection story isn't just unique in what it claims, but also in its early and prolific historic documentation of those claims. No one’s asking you to “just have faith." You’re going to need your brain for this one.
It turns out you don't need to believe the bible is an inspired book to believe in the resurrection. Feel free to treat the bible like any skeptical scholar would treat it - as a historical document with numerous claims of varying reliability.
So which biblical and extra-biblical claims are well-founded historically and relevant to the all-important "back from the dead” question? Here are the cliff-notes, an honorary degree in resurrection studies from Average Joe University. Turns out there are a few basic facts that scholars of various theological (and a-theological) viewpoints agree on.
The Facts
Here are some largely agreed upon facts from New Testament Studies:
1) That Jesus died by crucifixion;
2) That very soon afterwards, his followers had real experiences that they thought were actual appearances of the risen Jesus;
3) That their lives were transformed as a result, even to the point of being willing to die specifically for their faith in the resurrection message;
4) That these things were taught very early, soon after the crucifixion;
- Gary Habermas,“Minimal Facts on the Resurrection”
There’s nothing explicitly supernatural here. Some scholars might disagree with one or two, but they fight an uphill battle in opposing the established consensus view on each one.
The million dollar question, then, is what story best makes sense of these facts?
We don’t need blind faith - we need (our inner) Sherlock Holmes. We need to construct hypotheses, test and eliminate, and choose the best one. Over the years, many have done just that.
Sherlocking the Resurrection
We should prefer natural theories over supernatural ones. So over the centuries, naturalistic reconstructions (accounts without God or the supernatural) have been put forth to account for these facts. They fall into four buckets:
Legend creation: The story was changed / embellished over time.
Mass hallucination: Disciples only thought they saw Jesus back from the dead.
Jesus didn't really die: It just looked like he did. This is actually the Muslim take, FYI
Conspiracy Theory: Disciples stole Jesus’ body and lied about it.
To be “blogpost-level-concise”, these theories all suffer from fatal flaws.
Legend creation: There just wasn't enough time that passed for legends to develop.
Mass Hallucination: While hallucination is very much a thing, mass hallucination is not.
Not really dead: Roman soldiers were experts on human death. Also, crucified people left in a cold dark tomb don't recover without medical help. Here’s a dramatic youtube refutation of this view.
Conspiracy: Grief-stricken, disillusioned groups of fisherman and tax collectors don't come up with paradigm-shifting religious ideas, pull off the greatest conspiracy of all time, and then die for ideas they know are false.
An Inconvenient Truth
"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."
– Sherlock Holmes
Of course, there is a theory that makes perfect sense of these facts, but the theory comes loaded with implications for the universe… and our lives. And we don't always like that.
Most of us would rather suppress the truths that are too uncomfortable to handle, particularly those about God.
The theory that makes sense of the facts is that Jesus died and then came back from the dead.
If that is the case, his life and teaching deserve a closer look.
Conclusion
At the beginning of my search, I thought I needed to figure out if I believed in God first, and then peruse the entire canon of world religions, painstakingly working through Muhammad, Jesus, Buddha, the bible, the problem of evil and suffering, and all the rest.
For me, it ended up working backwards. In zooming in on the resurrection of Jesus, I came to believe that Jesus had really died and had really come back from the dead.
The implications of that one conclusion informed many of the other questions I had. The existence of God, the afterlife, and the truth status of other philosophies and religions all found their answer in who Jesus was - the resurrected Son of God.
The answer gave me some rope to keep believing when I came across difficult things in the Bible or the world that I didn’t like or understand. Most importantly, it made me want to listen to what the guy said.
Of course, this is just my take on the all-important question. We must all answer the question Jesus asked Peter all those years ago.
Who do you say that I am?
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