THREE HISTORICAL FACTS CONCERNING JESUS OF
1. His empty tomb
2. His post-mortem appearances
3. The origin of the disciples belief in His resurrection
Historians have reached something of a consensus that Jesus of Nazareth came on the scene with an unprecedented sense of divine authority. The authority to stand and speak in Gods place. He claimed that in himself the kingdom of God had come and as visible demonstrations of this fact, He carried on a ministry of miracle working and exorcisms. But the supreme confirmation of His claim was His resurrection from the dead. If Jesus really did rise from the dead then it would seem that we have a divine miracle on our hands and thus evidence for the existence of God.
Most people would probably think that the resurrection of Jesus is something that you just believe in by faith or not.
There are actually 3 facts represented by the majority of historians today which are best explained by the resurrection of Jesus.
Fact #1 - On the Sunday after His crucifixion Jesus' tomb was found empty by a group of His women followers. Jacob Kramer, an Austrian Specialist, states that “By far most scholars hold firmly to the reliability of the biblical statements concerning the empty tomb.” 1
Fact #2 - On multiple occasions and under various circumstances, different individuals and groups of people saw appearances of Jesus alive after His death. According to the prominent new testament critic Gerd Lüdemann “It may be taken as historically certain that Peter and the disciples had experiences after Jesus’ death in which Jesus appeared to them as the risen Christ.” 2
Fact #3 - The original disciples suddenly came to believe in the resurrection of Jesus despite having every predisposition to the contrary. Jews had no belief in a dying and executed Messiah and Jewish beliefs about the afterlife precluded anyone's rising from the dead to glory and immortality before the end of the world. Nevertheless, the original disciples came to believe so strongly that God had raised Jesus from the dead that they ultimately went to their deaths for the truth of that belief. Luke Johnson, a New Testament scholar from Emory University, states that “some sort of powerful, transformative experience is required to generate the sort of movement earliest Christianity was . . . .”3 N. T. Wright, an eminent British scholar, concludes, “that is why, as a historian, I cannot explain the rise of early Christianity unless Jesus rose again, leaving an empty tomb behind him.”4
The three most popular explanations that Critics, both past and present, use to explain away the resurrection are as follows:
1. The disciples stole the body.
2. Jesus wasn't really dead after the crucifixion.
3. Everyone who claimed to see Jesus alive after His death was experiencing a corporate mass hallucination.
These attempts to undermine the historicity of Jesus' resurrection have been overwhelmingly and universally rejected by contemporary scholarship. The fact is, there is absolutely no plausible naturalistic explanation of these facts. The Christian is amply justified in believing that Jesus rose from the dead and therefore was who He claimed to be.
1. Jacob Kremer, Die Osterevangelien—Geschichten um Geschichte (Stuttgart: Katholisches Bibelwerk, 1977), pp. 49-50.
2. Gerd Lüdemann, What Really Happened to Jesus?, trans. John Bowden (Louisville, Kent.: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995), p. 80.
3. Luke Timothy Johnson, The Real Jesus (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1996), p. 136.
4. N. T. Wright, “The New Unimproved Jesus,” Christianity Today (September 13, 1993), p. 26.
