Clergy/Leaders’ Mail-list No. 1-069 (Apologetics)

EASTER — FACT OR FICTION?

EVANGELICAL ALLIANCE’S TEN KEY POINTS FOR THOSE WHO DOUBT THE TRUTH OF THE RESURRECTION

The Evangelical Alliance has issued a robust response to those who dismiss the Easter story as mere myth. In a paper published on 5 April 2001, the Alliance presents ten ‘points to be considered’ by anyone inclined to dismiss the biblical record of Jesus’ death, burial and resurrection. The paper, which is entitled Real Easter: The Plausibility and Historicity of Jesus’ Resurrection, emphasises that the Christian faith is based on well founded evidence – evidence which is once again being put under the microscope, in the BBC’s major new documentary series, Son of God.

The paper’s author, Alliance Theological Adviser Rev Dr David Hilborn, commented: “Son of God is a stunning piece of television, both visually and technically. It impressively evokes the society into which Jesus was born, and outlines some of the evidence for his life and deeds. But it bypasses a good deal of data relevant to the central claims of Scripture about Jesus — data which suggest that he was much more than a good teacher or revolutionary martyr.”

The Alliance paper summarises recent historical, archaeological and scientific research and urges sceptics to bear the following factors in mind:

1. Contrary to the idea that Christ did not die on the cross but merely swooned to revive later, the best medical evidence suggests that he would naturally have survived neither the cross itself nor his later entombment.

2. Some argue that the disciples stole the body on Easter Saturday. Yet to do so, they would have had to get past a guard of probably 16 heavily armed soldiers, who could have been executed if they been caught asleep on duty.

3. Others suggest that the soldiers conspired with the disciples to steal Jesus’ corpse. But pagan Roman soldiers would have had little motive for such collusion. In any case, it is unlikely that such a deception would have remained secret.

4. It has been claimed that Jesus’ female disciples went to the ‘wrong’ tomb and mistook it for the actual sepulchre in which Jesus had been placed. But in such circumstances, the authorities could simply have gone to the proper tomb and produced the body of Jesus if it had still been available.

5. The credibility of eyewitness accounts are generally undisputed in respect of other historical events in the ancient world, such as the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44BC. It is improbable that the 500 who together witnessed the resurrected Christ (1 Cor. 15:6) were all delusional, or that Paul would have ‘invented’ them, given that their number would have allowed for considerable cross- checking and falsification.

6. The fact that women are recorded as the first witnesses of Jesus’ resurrection is remarkable given their lack of legal status in the male-dominated culture of the day. This bears out the veracity of the Gospel accounts. As the paper puts it,

“If the Gospel writers had wished retrospectively to ‘normalise’ these accounts, they would surely have placed the male disciples at the scene, rather than the women, since in Jewish culture at the time the testimony of women had a relatively much lower legal status.”

7. Given that it was in the undoubted interest of both the Roman and Jewish authorities to produce Jesus’s dead body and thus scotch rumours that he had risen from the tomb, their failure to do so increases the likelihood that the resurrection did actually take place as described in the Gospels and 1 Corinthians 15.

8. The Gospels’ reports of Jesus sharing food and allowing himself to be touched after his resurrection detract from the notion that those around him were motivated by visions, or by wishful thinking. St Paul may have described the resurrection body as ‘spiritual’, but this does not preclude physicality as such, and certainly means more than that the risen Jesus was a hallucination or fond memory.

9. Many of Christ’s earliest followers died for their faith, often in the most appalling ways. Many Christians do so still. Such wide scale, long-term martyrdom is rarely commensurate with movements founded on a systematic lie.

10. Science, by its nature, may argue for the extra-ordinariness of the resurrection. It cannot, however, disprove it. It may contribute to the weighing of evidence in the debate, but it is limited in its ability to infer philosophical or theological conclusions from that evidence.

Dr Hilborn goes on to cite the continuing growth of the Church world wide as a further sign of the resurrection’s significance and power:

“From utter despair, the disciples were rapidly transformed by the resurrection into one of the most influential movements the world has ever known,” he writes.

“It seems unlikely that they would have been motivated to lead this movement on the basis of a few self-generated mental pictures or by a ‘legend’ concocted in a matter of days.

“It is quite improbable that a motley band of eleven weak, shell- shocked disciples would, within 36 hours or so of their leader’s death, devise a deception in which his body would be stolen and disposed of anonymously, so that they could devote their lives to a new religion born of that same deception,” states Dr Hilborn.

“On the contrary: their faith, and the faith of the worldwide Church they pioneered, is most genuinely represented as a faith based on these core events: that Jesus Christ died on the cross, was buried in Joseph’s tomb and on the third day was raised bodily from that tomb, leaving it empty.”

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Evangelical Alliance (UK) <>

Real Easter is published on the Evangelical Alliance’s website, http://www.eauk.org, in the ‘What’s New’ pages.