Excerpt modified from chapter 9 of Doctrine (Read the full chapter).
Without the resurrection, the few billion people today who worship Jesus as God are gullible; their hope for a resurrection life after this life is the hope of silly fools who trust in a dead man to give them life. Subsequently, the doctrine of Jesus’ resurrection is, without question, profoundly significant and worthy of the most careful consideration and examination.
Biblical Evidence:
- Jesus’ resurrection was prophesied in advance (Isa 53:8-12).
- Jesus predicted his resurrection (Matt 12:38-40; Mark 8:31; 9:31; 10:33-34; John 2:18-22).
- Jesus died. Jesus was crucified, and a professional executioner declared him dead. To ensure he was dead, a spear was thrust through his side and a mixture of blood and water poured out of his side because the spear burst his heart sac (John 19:34-35).
- Jesus was buried in a tomb that was easy to find. Had Jesus not risen from death, it would have been easy to prove it by opening the tomb and presenting Jesus’ dead body as evidence (see pp 288).
- Jesus appeared physically, not just spiritual, alive three days after his death (Matt 28:9; John 20:17; John 20:20-28; Acts 1:3; 1 Cor 15:6).
- Jesus’ body was the same as his pre-resurrected body (Luke 24:31; John 21:7, 12; John 20:16, 20:14, 15; 21:12).
- Jesus’ resurrection was recorded as Scripture shortly after it occurred (see pp 289-290).
- Jesus’ resurrection was celebrated in the earliest church creeds (1 Cor 15:3-4).
- Jesus’ resurrection convinced his family to worship him as God (John 7:5 compared to 1 Cor 15:7; James 1:1; Acts 12:17; 15:12-21; 21:18; Gal 2:9; Acts 1:14).
- Jesus’ resurrection was confirmed by his most bitter enemies (Phil 3:4-6; Acts 7:54-60).
Circumstantial Evidence:
- Jesus’ disciples were transformed.
- Jesus’ disciples remained loyal to Jesus and endured widespread persecution and martyrdom, which would have been unthinkable had Jesus merely died and failed to rise as he promised.
- The disciples had exemplary character.
- Worship changed. The early church stopped worshiping on Saturdays as Jews had for thousands of years, and suddenly began worshiping on Sunday in memory of Jesus’ Sunday resurrection. The object of worship changed. The commandments forbid worshiping a false god . . . it is impossibly to conceive of devout Jews simply worshiping Jesus as the one true God without the proof of Jesus’ resurrection.
- Women discovered the empty tomb. Since the testimony of women was not respected in that culture, it would have been more likely for men to report discovering the empty tomb if the account was fictitious and an attempt were bring made to concoct a credible like about Jesus’ resurrection.
- The entirety of the early church preaching was centered on the historical fact of Jesus’ resurrection. If the empty tomb were not a widely accepted fact, the disciples would have reasoned with the skeptics of their day to defend the central issue of their faith. Instead, we see the debate occurring not about whether the tomb was empty, but why it was empty?
- Jesus’ tomb was not enshrined (see pp 295).
- Christianity exploded on teh earth and a few billion people today claim to be Christians.
Read this entire chapter including more on the historical evidence, the primary ancient objections to the resurrection, and what the resurrection has accomplished here.
“the few billion people today who worship Jesus as God are gullible” that is as the Resurrection has been understood by tradition. But it may very well be that what is admittedly the central concept of Christian thought has been misunderstood since the beginnings of an institutional church. Is it possible that the event of Christ’s Resurrection was meant to be that demonstration of power showing that God is very much prepared to intervene directly into the natural world with his power to accomplish his will; providing the confirmation of reality that has eluded Christian tradition for all of it’s history, and make it an easy target of atheist and nonbelievers. However uncomfortable it may be, that is the argument being made by the first wholly new interpretation of the Gospel of Christ for two thousand years and spreading on the web.
Using a synthesis of scriptural material drawn from the Old and New Testaments, the Apocrypha , The Dead Sea Scrolls, The Nag Hammadi Library, and some of the world’s great poetry, it describes and teaches a single moral LAW, a single moral principle, and offers the promise of its own proof; one in which the reality of God responds directly to an act of perfect faith with a individual intervention into the natural world; ‘raising’ up the man, correcting human nature by a change in natural law, altering biology, consciousness and human ethical perception beyond all natural evolutionary boundaries. Intended to be understood metaphorically, where ‘death’ is ignorance and ‘Life’ is knowledge, this personal experience of transcendent power and moral purpose is the ‘Resurrection’, and justification for faith. Here, on a perfectly objective foundation of moral principle and virtue, true morality, salvation and ‘Life’ begins.
Here then is the first ever viable religious conception capable of leading reason, by faith, to observable consequences which can be tested and judged. This new teaching delivers the first ever religious claim of insight into the human condition, that meets the Enlightenment criteria of verifiable and ‘extraordinary’ evidence based truth embodied in action. For the first time in history, however unexpected, the world must now measure for itself, the reality of a new claim to revealed truth, a moral tenet not of human intellectual origin, offering access by faith, to absolute proof, an objective basis for moral principle and a fully rational and justifiable belief!
Revolutionary stuff for those who will test this teaching for themselves. Check it out at http://www.energon.org.uk
Comment by Robert Landbeck — April 2, 2010 @ 2:21 pm
You’re right. If there is no resurrection, it does make christians look gullible. However, your article makes two glaring mistakes.
First, Isa. 53 isn’t referring to Jesus at all. How can we know this?
Isaiah 53:3 contains, “A man of suffering, familiar with disease.”
Isaiah 53:10 states, “But the Lord chose to crush him by disease”
These passages tell us that the suffering servant being described was not only familiar with disease, but also afflicted with it, and crushed by it. It may be argued that Jesus was familiar with disease; however, he was not crushed by disease.
Jesus was no leper. He wasn’t smitten, afflicted, plagued or crushed by disease. Jesus doesn’t fit.
Isaiah 53:10 also states, “That, if he made himself an offering for guilt, he might see offspring and have long life”
-Jesus made a guilt offering? This is recorded nowhere. Jesus also didn’t have any offspring. The gospels don’t mention this, rather Christian tradition teaches that he had no wife or children. Nor did Jesus have a long life. He lived to his mid-30s. Jesus just doesn’t fit.
The second mistake in this article is that all of your evidence uses biblical scripture to prove the resurrection. You are using the bible to prove the bible is correct. This is circular reasoning: stating in one’s proposition that which one aims to prove. (e.g. The resurrection occured because the Bible says so).
Therefore, going on the evidence presented in this article, the resurrection cannot be proven.
Comment by UnaffiliatedGuy — April 8, 2010 @ 7:02 am