I
set out as a young man to debunk Christianity. I met a young
Christian woman who challenged me to intellectually examine the
evi-dence for Christianity, and I accepted her challenge. I
aimed to show her—and everyone—that Christianity was nonsense. I
thought it would be easy. I thought a careful investigation of
the facts would expose Christianity as a lie and its followers
as dupes. But then a funny thing happened. As I began
investigating the claims of Christianity, I kept running up
against the evidence. Time after time, I was surprised to
discover the factual basis for the seemingly outlandish things
Christians believe. And one of the most convincing categories of
evi-dence I confronted was this: The Resurrection accounts found
in the Gospels are not the stuff of fable, forgery, or
fabrication. I had assumed that someone, or several someones,
had invented the stories of Jesus Christ’s resurrection from the
dead. But as I examined those accounts, I had to face the fact
that any sensible mythmaker would do things much differently
from the way Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John did in record-ing the
news of the Resurrection. As much as I hated to, I had to admit
that if I had been some first-century propagandist trying to
fake the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, I would have done a
number of things differently:
{
I WOULD }
wait a prudent period
after the events before “publishing” my account. Few historians
dispute the fact that the disciples of
Jesus began preaching the news of
His
resurrection soon after the event itself; in fact, Peter’s
Pentecost sermon (Acts 2) occurred within 50 days of the
Resurrection. And textual research indicates that the written
accounts of the Resurrection, especially the creedal statement
of 1 Corinthians 15:3–8, are astoundingly early in origin. Such
early origins argue against any notion that the Resurrection
accounts are legendary.
{ I
WOULD } publish my account far from the venue where
it supposedly happened. Dr. William Lane Craig writes, “One of
the most amazing facts about the early Christian belief in
Jesus’ resurrection was that it originated in the very city
where Jesus was crucified. The Christian faith did not come to
exist in some distant city, far from eyewitnesses who knew of
Jesus’ death and burial. No, it came into being in the very city
where Jesus had been publicly crucified, under the very eyes of
its enemies.”
{ I
WOULD } select my “witnesses” very carefully. I would
avoid, as much as possible, using any names at all in my
account, and I would certainly avoid citing prominent
personalities as witnesses. Yet at least 16 individuals are
mentioned by name as witnesses in the various accounts, and the
mention
of Joseph of Arimathea as the man who buried Jesus would have
been terribly dangerous if the Gospel accounts had been faked or
embellished. As a member of the Sanhedrin, a
Jewish “Supreme Court,” he would
have been well
known. J. P. Moreland writes, “No one
could have invented such a person who did not exist and say he
was on the Sanhedrin if such were not the case.” His involvement
in the burial of Jesus could have been easily confirmed or
refuted. Perhaps most important, I would avoid citing
disreputable witnesses, which makes significant the record of
Jesus’ first appearances—to women —since in that time and
culture women were considered invalid witnesses in a court of
law. If the accounts were fabrications, the women would never
have been included in the story, at least not as first
witnesses.
{ I
WOULD } surround the event with impressive
supernatural displays and omens. As Jewish scholar Pinchas
Lapide writes, “We do not read in the first testimonies [of the
Resurrection] of an apocalyptic spectacle, exorbitant
sensations, or of the transforming impact of a cosmic event....
According to all New Testament reports, no human eye saw the
Resurrection itself, no human being was present, and none of the
disciples asserted to have apprehended, let alone understood,
its manner and nature. How easy it would have been for them or
their immediate successors to supple-ment this scandalous hole
in the concatenation of events by fanciful embellishments! But
precisely because none of the evangelists dared to ‘improve
upon’ or embellish this unseen resurrection, the total picture
of the Gospels also gains in trustworthiness.”
{ I WOULD } painstakingly
correlate my account with others I knew, embellishing the legend
only where I could be confident of not being con-tradicted. Many
critics have pointed out the befuddling differences and apparent
contradictions in the Resurrection accounts. But these are
actually convincing evidences of their authenticity; they
display an ingenuous lack of collusion, agreeing and
(apparently) diverging much as eyewitness accounts of any event
do.
{ I WOULD } portray myself
and any co-conspirators sympathetically, even heroically. Yet
the Gospel writers present strikingly unflattering portraits of
Jesus’ followers (such as Peter and Thomas) and their often
skeptical reactions (Mark 16:11, 13; Luke 24:11, 37; John 20:19,
24–25; 21:4). Such portrayals are very unlike the popular myths
and legends of that (or any) time.
{ I WOULD } disguise the
location of the tomb or spectacularly destroy it in my account.
If I were creating a resurrection legend, I would keep the
tomb’s location a secret to prevent any chance that someone
might discover Jesus’ body, or I would record in my account that
the angels sealed it or carried it off into Heaven after the
Resurrection. Or I might have taken the easiest course of all
and simply made my fictional resurrection a “spiritual” one,
which would have made it impossible to refute even if a body
were eventually discovered. But, of course, the Gospel accounts
describe the owner
of the tomb (Joseph of
Arimathea)and
its location (“At the place where
Jesus was crucified, there was
a garden, and in the garden a new tomb” [John 19:41]), and
identify Jesus’ resurrection as a bodily one (John 20:27).
{ I
WOULD } try to squelch inquiry or investigation. I
might pronounce a curse on anyone attempting to substantiate my
claims, or attach a stigma to anyone so shallow as to require
evidence. Yet note the frequent appeal of Jesus’ disciples to
the easily confirmed—or dis-credited—nature of the evidence, as
though inviting investigation (Acts 2:32; 3:15; 13:31; 1
Corinthians 15:3–6). This was done within a few years of the
events themselves; if the tomb were not empty or the
Resurrection appearances were fic-tion, the early Christians’
opponents could have conclusively debunked the new religion.
As Dr. Edwin Yamauchi says of
the citation of the resurrected Christ appearing to more than
500 people in 1 Corinthians 15, “What gives special authority to
the list [of witnesses] as historical evidence is the reference
to most of the five hundred brethren being still alive. St. Paul
says in effect, ‘If you do not believe me, you can ask them.’”
{ I
WOULD } not preach a message of repentance in light
of the Resurrection [as Peter did in Acts 2]. No one in his
right mind would have chosen to create a fictional message that
would invite opposition and persecution from both civil and
religious authorities of those days. How much easier
and
wiser it would have been to
preach a less controversial gospel—concentrating on Jesus’
teachings about love, perhaps—thus saving myself and the
adherents of my new religion a lot of trouble.
{ I
WOULD } stop short of dying for my message. Lee
Strobel has written, “People will die for their religious
beliefs if they sincerely believe they’re true, but people won’t
die for their religious beliefs if they know their beliefs are
false.” While most people can only have faith that their beliefs
are true, the disciples were in a position to know without a
doubt whether or not Jesus had risen from the dead. They claimed
that they saw Him, talked with Him, and ate with Him. If they
weren’t absolutely certain, they wouldn’t have allowed
themselves to be tortured to death for proclaiming that the
Resurrection had happened.
These are not
the only reasons I believe in the truth of the Bible and the
reality of the Resurrection. But these were among the “many
convincing proofs” (Acts 1:3) that I encountered in my attempts
to prove Christianity wrong, which eventually led me to the
conclusion that Jesus Christ was who He claimed to be and that
He really did rise from the dead. It didn’t happen immediately,
but eventually I gave in to the truth, and on Dec. 19, 1959, the
risen Christ radically changed my life. I’ve seen Him do the
same for countless others, and I pray, if you haven’t done so
already, you will let Him do the same for you.
