And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men.(1 Cor. 15:17-19)
I don't suppose anyone needed telling, but it really does put the recreational drugs issue somewhat in the shade to say the least. If anything in scripture is a bar to faith, then it is certainly worth discussing, but for the scriptures actually to matter to gentiles in the way that they do, this is "of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Peter, and then to the Twelve."(1 Cor. 15:3-5)
Right, well for reasons not scrupulously argued I came to believe that Christ did die for my sins and was raised back to life also. I believed for a time because my parents believed and passed the form of that belief on to me, as St. Paul did. A long time ago parents were infallible beings, if you recall. Well, naturally,that perception didn't last; this my parents may well attest to. I expect I believed then out of habit, but increasingly because, for all their nefarious parent ways, like sending me to bed before I really wanted to, they loved me and wanted me to know the same Lord who had been kind to them. My mother was also raised as a Christian, but my father had been an atheist. Now he's a vicar in the Church of England. I did not receive an infant baptism, but I think it was when I was 10 that I decided for myself that I wanted baptism; that in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. In time I was also confirmed. The world seemed full of people who believed firmly in Jesus as more than a man; in the Anglican church, the leaders of the Christian ventures I went on, the worshippers at Spring Harvest. They all elaborated on the theme that my parents had given me, that Jesus, in love for the whole world, consented to be crucified and die, but was raised by God, becoming the hope for the whole world. Naturally, I believe that God had the primary hand in preparing me to believe in his Son. Not a readily verifiable claim however.
I see that I have veered into theology. As exciting as these ideas still are to me, I wanted the facts of the matter, in time, as much as anyone who became rapdily bored with that last paragraph. So I discovered apologetics. Predictably enough, this 2000 year old cult into which my parents had initiated me had at times been called upon to defend itself rationally. For instance, when people said things like "Jesus was raised from the dead.", the conversation did not invariably continue along these lines:
NON-CHRISTIAN No he didn't.
CHRISTIAN Yes he did.
NON-CHRISTIAN No he didn't.
CHRISTIAN Well I've got faith - nyeh!
NON-CHRISTIAN Gosh, well that's my argument scuppered. Where do I sign up?
Insofar as I am able to then, I'm going to outline reasons to believe that Christ's resurrection from the dead is actually far more likely than not. This will hopefully explain why people have felt compelled to facilitate their own death by asserting this. And then I suppose some of you will argue with me, and try to prove the converse. A hypothesis about the resurrection must account for these things
- Jesus' burial
- The discovery of an empty tomb
- The appearances after his death
- The disciples' belief in the resurrection
These are believed by the majority of NT scholars. Lest anyone think that unremarkable, I should point out that orthodoxy is not apparently the mainstay of contemporary theological thought. Many critics of the resurrection are forced by the evidence to maintain that these are facts, proposing alternate theories to account for them.
It is related that after the crucifixion, Jesus was buried by Joseph of Arimathea in the tomb. This is to say that the location of Jesus' body would have been public knowledge. For the disciples to convincingly preach Christ raised from the dead this known tomb would have therefore to be empty. "Joseph of Arimathea, a prominent member of the Council"(Mark 15:43) is an bizarre figure to be credited with giving Jesus an honourable burial, given the hostility of early Christian writings towards the Jewish authorities. This unexpected feature suggests truth, rather than a justifying fiction. It even puts a member of the Sanhedrin in a more courageous role than the apostles, who were reportedly in hiding. If it were untrue, it would also be a simple matter to get the Sanhedrin to refute the claim.
The Sunday after the crucifixion, Jesus' tomb was reported empty by a group of his women followers. Again, the 'choice' of protagonists is a bizarre one. If anything, it is an embarassing admission, because women's testimony was regarded as so worthless that they were not entitled to serve as witnesses in a Jewish court of law. Happily, in these enlightened times, there is no such reason for one to distrust the testimony of women. We can instead admire the fact that the gospel writers felt compelled to retain the fact of the sex of the witnesses even though it apparently weakened their case. In a legendary account we would expect male witnesses.
On multiple occasions and under various circumstances, different inidividuals and groups of people claimed to have seen Jesus alive from the dead. St. Paul claims that Jesus "appeared to more than five hundred brethren at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep."(1 Cor 15:6) As I'm sure you'll appreciate, that's a pretty stupid thing to say if you haven't actually got somewhere around 500 eyewitnesses to verify your story, especially as he goes on to name some of those witnesses: "Peter, and then [...] the Twelve. [...] Then he appeared to James[.]"(1 Cor 15:5-7) This James was Jesus' brother - another abberation, as he hadn't believed in Jesus as Messiah before the resurrection. Josephus records his martyrdom for the sake of his brother. Other named witnesses in the gospels include Mary Magdalene,the other women, and Cleopas. In Acts 2:24 Peter is recorded to have declared to a "multitude" of "Jews, devout men from every nation under heaven", "dwelling in Jerusalem" that:
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 [...] you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men. But God raised him up[.]"(Acts 2:5-24)This would be the right time to say "No he didn't.", but there is apparent silence. Christianity spread like a rash in Jerusalem; if Peter's words were ludicrous to his audience then why would this be the case?
The disciples came to believe that Christ had risen from the dead. In addition to the scepticism you or I might have against Jesus' resurrection, there are distinctive features of Jewish theology which counted against it. firstly they weren't expecting the Messiah to die - what he was meant to do, they thought, was to liberate Jerusalem from the Romans, rather than be crucified by them. According to Jewish law, Jesus died the death of a heretic*; he could not therefore be seen as the Messiah, and was hardly a candidate for the only ever resurrection. . Also, though certain groups believed in a general resurrection at the end of the world, there was no precedent for anyone rising before then. And yet they came to believe. The apostles often went without food, slept exposed to the elements, were ridiculed, beaten, imprisoned, and most of them were executed tortuously for this belief, which had been counter-intuitive.
Now the resurrection of Jesus accounts for these facts, and it accounts for them fully. It is consistent with the claims of Jesus and the accounts of miracles that have been preserved and handed down. It requires no ad hoc historical event to support it. One needs a more convincing account to dismiss the Christian claim.
