The Son Rises: Historical Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus

THE APPARENT DEATH THEORY

Another explanation that cropped up after the controversy with the deists was the apparent death theory. H. E. G. Paulus in Das Leben Jesu (1828) argued that all the miracles recorded in the gospels could be explained by purely natural causes. He was the high-water mark of the natural explanation school and devised all sorts of clever explanations for Jesus’ various miracles. As for the resurrection, Paulus held that Jesus did not really die on the cross but was laid unconscious in the tomb. There He revived, managed to escape, and convinced His disciples that He had been raised from the dead. It is an unfortunate note of history that F. D. E. Schleiermacher, the father of modern theology, also adopted this theory.

The theory, however, proved to be as worthless as the conspiracy theory. The natural explanation school as a whole suffered from a brittle artificiality. Paulus’s explanations of the miracles of the gospels were themselves so contrived that it was easier to believe in the miracles. His explanation of Jesus’ resurrection through a merely apparent death was especially ridiculous:

1. The theory failed to take seriously the extent of Jesus’ physical injury. In order to demonstrate this, let us review the events leading up to Jesus’ death and burial. Jesus was arrested on a Thursday night and tried illegally by a night session of the Jewish court. During the trial, they spit on Him; they blindfolded Him and hit Him in the face with their fists. They turned Him over to the guards, who beat Him further. Up all night without sleep, Jesus was taken Friday morning to the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, who in turn sent Him off to the Jewish king, Herod, who after interrogation sent Him back to Pilate. Condemned before a crowd screaming for His blood, Jesus was given to the Roman guards, who whipped Him. They made a crown of thorns and shoved it down onto His head and beat Him with a stick. Jesus was then compelled to carry the heavy cross, on which he was to be crucified, through the streets of the city to the place of crucifixion. Unable to bear the load, He collapsed from exhaustion. Another man was forced to carry the cross the remainder of the way. Jesus was then laid on the cross, and nails were driven though his wrists and a spike through his feet. Judging from skeletal remains of crucifixion victims, this could have been done by first nailing the wrists of the victim to the cross, then twisting the body sideways and driving the spike through both ankles. In this contorted position, the victim was then raised up on the cross, and the cross was dropped into a hole in the ground.

The Shroud of Turin, whether it is the authentic burial cloth of Jesus or not, illustrates graphically the extent of Jesus’ physical suffering. The image of the man on the cloth is covered front and back with wounds from head to foot, where the flagrum, a multi-thonged Roman whip tipped with metal or bone, had torn apart his flesh, furnishing us a grisly picture of what Jesus must have looked like when He was laid on the cross.

Death by crucifixion is slow and gruesome. As the victim hangs on the cross, his lung cavity collapses, so that he can no longer breathe. In order to breathe, he must pull himself up on those nail-pierced hands and push with his feet until he can catch a breath. But he cannot remain in this position very long. So he has to let himself drop back down. Then he cannot breathe anymore, so he must start the painful ascent all over again, in order to get air. And so it goes, hour after hour after hour, until the victim is too weak to pull himself up and so literally chokes to death. Sometimes the Romans sped up the process by breaking the legs of the victim with a mallet (called in Latin crurifragum), so that he could no longer push himself up to breathe, and the victim, dangling helplessly by his arms, died of asphyxiation. It is interesting to note that because it is difficult to determine just when the victim dies, the Romans, if they did not simply leave the body on the cross until the flesh decayed or was eaten by birds or wild animals, would ensure death by stabbing the victim with a lance.4 The Roman executioners were aware that death might be apparent and had a method of ensuring that the victim was really dead.

The gospels report that although the Roman guards broke the legs of the two men crucified with Jesus, they did not break Jesus’ legs because they saw that He was already dead. According to procedure, one of the soldiers took his spear and stabbed Jesus in the side to ensure that He was dead, and, John reports, blood and water flowed out. This flow could have been a serum from the pericardial sac, mixed with blood from the heart, or a hemorrhagic fluid in the pleural cavity between the ribs and the lungs. Jesus was then taken down from the cross and buried in the customary Jewish manner. This included binding the hands and feet and wrapping the body in linen and aromatic spices, in Jesus’ case about seventy-five pounds of them. The body was then laid in a tomb carved out of rock, and a great stone was laid across the entrance. This was then sealed, and, according to Matthew, a guard was set around the tomb.

Bearing those facts in mind, we see how foolish the apparent death theory is. Considering the beatings of Jesus, His exhausting all-night trial and interrogations, His scourging, His crucifixion, the spear in His side, the binding and wrapping of the body in seventy-five pounds of linen and spices, and the cold tomb sealed by a large stone, it is just out of the question to suppose that Jesus had not died and had somehow escaped from the tomb to convince His disciples that He had risen from the dead.

2. The apparent-death theory makes Jesus into a deceiver. The necessary implication of the theory is that Jesus was a charlatan who tricked the disciples into believing that He had been raised from the dead. Such a portrait of Jesus is a figment of the imagination. Jesus was one of the world’s great moral teachers, a deeply religious man, if nothing else. It is impossible to cast Him in the role of a hoaxer.

3. A weak and half-dead Jesus could never have convinced the disciples that He was the Lord of life and Conqueror of death. D. F. Strauss denied the historical resurrection of Jesus, as we shall see; nevertheless, he rejected Paulus’s apparent death theory as completely ridiculous:

It is impossible that a being who had stolen half-dead out of the sepulchre, who crept about weak and ill, wanting medical treatment, who required bandaging, strengthening and indulgence, and who still at last yielded to his sufferings, could have given to his disciples the impression that he was a Conqueror over death and the grave, the Prince of Life, an impression which lay at the bottom of their future ministry. Such a resuscitation could only have weakened the impression which he had made upon them in life and in death, at the most could only have given it an elegiac voice, but could by no possibility have changed their sorrow into enthusiasm, have elevated their reverence into worship.5

Strauss’s critique really put the nails in the coffin for the apparent death theory. Again, I want to emphasize that no contemporary scholar would support such a theory; it has been dead over a hundred years. Only in propaganda from behind the Iron Curtain or in sensationalist books in the popular press does such a theory still find expression.