The Final Move
Sep 20, 2008
Regarding what I said before, we know that two things must have occurred.
- The tomb must have been empty. If there had been an empty tomb and no appearances of the risen Christ, everybody in the ancient world would have drawn the obvious conclusion that body snatchers stole the body. In fact, that is what Mary thought at first. But this was not the eventual conclusion. Simply having an empty tomb is insufficient evidence to explain the rise and nature of Christianity in the first century.
- Jesus must have bodily appeared to the disciples. It will not do to say that the disciples simply had some kind of experience that they took to be a meeting with Jesus. They knew Jesus had been killed and they understood all about hallucinations, ghosts, and visions since ancient Jewish and Pagan literature is full of such things (see Homer and Virgil). Recently, some have explained it all away with the idea that when those you love die, you often experience them in the room with you, even talking to you, and then they disappear again, which probably happened to the disciples. But they knew about that type of phenomena, meaning that if the tomb had not been empty (which was verifiable b/c of their burial practices), they would have given up that belief no matter how powerful because the body in the tomb would have destroyed it. In addition, hallucinations and inventions are not accurately shared across multiple people in that way. Several people may have a hallucination but it is nearly impossible for them to all be in agreement over what hallucination was had. Likewise, if the story were merely invented (which had never been done in the other Messiah movements of the time), it is inconceivable to imagine every disciple (except John) giving his life for this truth, and it is inconceivable that Resurrection becomes the centerpiece of Christian preaching and practice.
The Final Move—If the tomb was empty and if Jesus appeared to His disciples (conclusions which are nearly irrefutable), then by far the best way to explain them, along with the rise of Christianity, is by Resurrection. The best and really only good explanation is that Jesus really was raised from the dead, and the disciples really did meet Him. To quote Wright again:
“The early Christians did not invent the empty tomb and the ‘meetings or ‘sightings’ of the risen Jesus in order to explain a faith they already had. Nobody was expecting this kind of thing; no kind of conversion-experience would have generated such ideas; nobody would have invented it, no matter how guilty or how forgiven they felt, no matter how many hours they poured over the Scriptures. To suggest otherwise is to stop doing history and to enter into a fantasy world of our own.”
I believe that from what I have argued so far, the historicity of the resurrection is beyond dispute. This leaves us one final question which I will take up next week—“So what?” What if it is true? Why should that matter at all to me or anyone else? I believe this is very personal so look for the next entry coming next Tuesday.