The Son Rises: Historical Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus

EXPLAINING THE BELIEF IN THE RESURRECTION

Now the question becomes: What caused that belief? As R. H. Fuller says, even the most skeptical critic must presuppose some mysterious x to get the movement going.3 But what was that x?

If one denies that Jesus really did rise from the dead, then he must explain the disciples’ belief that He did rise either in terms of Jewish influences or in terms of Christian influences. Clearly, it could not be the result of Christian influences, for at that time there was no Christianity. Since belief in Jesus’ resurrection was the foundation for the origin of the Christian faith, it cannot be a belief formed as a result of that faith.

But neither can belief in the resurrection be explained as a result of Jewish influences. To see that we must turn to the Old Testament. Resurrection of the dead on the day of judgment is mentioned in three places (Ezekiel 37; Isaiah 26:19; Daniel 12:2). During the time between the Old Testament and the New Testament, the belief in resurrection flowered and is often mentioned in the Jewish literature of that period. In Jesus’ day the Jewish party of the Pharisees held to belief in resurrection, and Jesus sided with them on that score in opposition to the party of the Sadducees. So the idea of resurrection was itself nothing new.

But the Jewish conception of resurrection differed in two important, fundamental respects from Jesus’ resurrection. In Jewish thought the resurrection always (1) occurred after the end of the world, not within history, and (2) concerned all the people, not just an isolated individual. In contradistinction to this, Jesus’ resurrection was both within history and of one person.

With regard to the first point, the Jewish belief was always that at the end of history God would raise the dead and receive them into heaven. There are, to be sure, examples in the Old Testament of resuscitations of the dead; but the persons would die again. The resurrection to eternal life and glory only occurred after the end of the world. We find that Jewish outlook in the gospels themselves. Thus, when Jesus assured Martha that her brother Lazarus would rise again, she responded, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day” (John 11:24). She had no idea that Jesus was about to bring him back to life. Similarly, when Jesus told His disciples that He would rise from the dead, they thought he meant at the end of the world (Mark 9:9-13). The idea that a true resurrection could occur prior to God’s bringing the kingdom of heaven at the end of the world was utterly foreign to them. The greatly renowned German New Testament scholar Joachim Jeremias writes:

Ancient Judaism did not know of an anticipated resurrection as an event of history. Nowhere does one find in the literature anything comparable to the resurrection of Jesus. Certainly resurrections of the dead were known, but these always concerned resuscitations, the return to the earthly life. In no place in the late Judaic literature does it concern a resurrection to δόξα [glory] as an event of history.4

The disciples, therefore, confronted with Jesus’ crucifixion and death, would only have looked forward to the resurrection at the final day and would probably have carefully kept their master’s tomb as a shrine, where His bones could reside until the resurrection. They would not have come up with the idea that he was already raised.

As for the second point, the Jewish idea of resurrection was always of a general resurrection of the dead, not an isolated individual. It was the people, or mankind as a whole, that God raised up in the resurrection. But in Jesus’ resurrection, God raised just a single man. Moreover, there was no concept of the people’s resurrection in some way hinging on the Messiah’s resurrection. That was just totally unknown. Yet that is precisely what is said to have occurred in Jesus’ case. Ulrich Wilckens, another prominent German New Testament critic, explains:

For nowhere do the Jewish texts speak of the resurrection of an individual which already occurs before the resurrection of the righteous in the end time and is differentiated and separate from it; nowhere does the participation of the righteous in the salvation at the end time depend on their belonging to the Messiah, who was raised in advance as the ‘First of those raised by God.’ [1 Corinthians 15:20]5

It is therefore evident that the disciples would not as a result of Jewish influences or background come up with the idea that Jesus alone had been raised from the dead. They would wait with longing for that day when He and all the righteous of Israel would be raised by God to glory.

The disciples’ belief in Jesus’ resurrection, therefore, cannot be explained as the result of either Christian or Jewish influences. Left to themselves, the disciples would never have come up with such an idea as Jesus’ resurrection. And remember: they were fishermen and taxcollectors, not theologians. The mysterious x is still missing. According to C. F. D. Moule of Cambridge University, here is a belief nothing in terms of previous historical influences can account for.6 He points out that we have a situation in which a large number of people held firmly to this belief, which cannot be explained in terms of the Old Testament or the Pharisees, and that these people held onto this belief until the Jews finally threw them out of the synagogue. According to Professor Moule, the origin of this belief must have been the fact that Jesus really did rise from the dead:

If the coming into existence of the Nazarenes, a phenomenon undeniably attested by the New Testament, rips a great hole in history, a hole of the size and shape of the Resurrection, what does the secular historian propose to stop it up with? . . . the birth and rapid rise of the Christian Church . . . remain an unsolved enigma for any historian who refuses to take seriously the only explanation offered by the Church itself.7

The resurrection of Jesus is therefore the best explanation for the origin of the Christian faith.

But suppose the disciples were not just “left to themselves.” Suppose certain events led them to think that Jesus was risen from the dead. Let us assume, for example, that shock at finding Jesus’ tomb empty caused them to see hallucinations of Jesus alive from the dead. Could not that lead them to conclude that Jesus had been resurrected? Of course, you will probably think at this point, “But those hypotheses have already been extensively refuted and shown to be worthless.” But let us be generous and overlook all that we have said before. The question is, If that happened, would the disciples have proclaimed that Jesus was risen from the dead?

The answer is no, since hallucinations, as projections of the mind, can contain nothing new. But Jesus’ resurrection involved at least two radically new aspects not found in Jewish belief: it was a resurrection in history, not at the end of history, and it was the resurrection of an isolated individual, not of the whole people. Even if it were possible, therefore, that the disciples under the influence of the empty tomb projected hallucinatory visions of Jesus, they would never have projected Him as literally risen from the dead. They would have had a vision of Jesus in glory in Abraham’s bosom. That is where, in Jewish belief, the souls of the righteous go to await the final resurrection. If the disciples were to have visions, then they would have seen Jesus there in glory.

They never would have come to the idea that Jesus had been resurrected from the dead. Even finding the empty tomb, the disciples would have concluded only that Jesus had been “translated” or “taken up” directly to heaven. In the Old Testament both Enoch (Genesis 5:24; Hebrews 11:5) and Elijah (2 Kings 2:11-18) were supposed to have been translated to heaven. Stories of persons being translated to heaven are also found in Jewish writings outside the Bible (for example, Testament of Job 40, where the bodies of two children killed in the collapse of a house are not found, but later the children are seen glorified in heaven). It cannot be emphasized strongly enough that, for the Jew, a translation and a resurrection are two entirely different things. A translation is the taking up of a person directly into heaven. A resurrection is the physical and bodily raising up of the dead man in the tomb to new life. Therefore, if the disciples did see hallucinatory visions of Jesus, then even with the empty tomb, they would never have concluded that He had been raised from the dead, an idea that ran contrary to Jewish concepts of the resurrection; rather they would have concluded that God had translated Him into heaven, from where He appeared to them, and therefore the tomb was empty. The fact that the disciples proclaimed not the translation of Jesus, as with Enoch and Elijah, but—contrary to all Jewish concepts—the resurrection of Jesus, proves that the origin of the disciples’ belief in Jesus’ resurrection cannot be explained as their conclusion from the empty tomb and visions.

Therefore, even apart from the improbabilities of those hypotheses, it is clear that the empty tomb/hallucination explanation of the origin of the belief in Jesus’ resurrection is untenable. There is no way to explain the origin of the disciples’ belief that Jesus had been raised from the dead apart from the fact that He really was raised.

In summary, we have seen that the origin of the Christian faith owes itself to the belief of the earliest disciples that Jesus had been raised from the dead. But the origin of that belief itself cannot be explained either in terms of Christian or Jewish influences. Moreover, even if we grant for the sake of argument the hypotheses already refuted in themselves that the empty tomb was the result of theft and the appearances were hallucinations, the origin of the belief in Jesus’ resurrection still cannot be explained, for such phenomena would have led the disciples to conclude only that Jesus had been translated, not resurrected. Therefore, the origin of the belief in Jesus’ resurrection and thereby the origin of the Christian faith itself can only be plausibly explained if in fact Jesus actually rose from the dead.

Now we are ready to draw the conclusion that we have so long postponed. First, we have seen that ten lines of historical evidence support the fact that Jesus’ tomb was found empty. We further saw that no natural explanation has been offered that can plausibly account for the empty tomb. Second, we have also seen that four lines of historical evidence support the fact that on numerous occasions and in different places Jesus appeared bodily and physically alive from the dead to different witnesses. We found that no natural explanation, either in terms of hallucinations or veridical visions, could plausibly account for those appearances. Finally, we have seen that the very origin of the Christian faith depends on the belief in Jesus’ resurrection and that this belief cannot be plausibly explained in terms of natural causes. Each of these three great facts—the empty tomb, the appearances, the origin of the Christian faith—is independently established. Together they point with unwavering conviction to the same unavoidable and marvelous conclusion: Jesus actually rose from the dead.