The Resurrection of Truth and Lies

The greater the relational bond between all the conspirators, the greater the possibility of success.

About Truth That Changes Lives

Unless pressured to confess, conspirators will continue lying. Pressure does not have to be physical in nature. When suspects fear incarceration or condemnation from their peers, they often respond in an effort to save face or save their own skin. This is multiplied as the number of coconspirators increases. The greater the pressure on co-conspirators, the more likely the conspiracy is to fail. There would have been too many disciples involved in the conspiracy. The apostles would have been required to protect their conspiratorial lies for too long over six decades.

The apostles had little or no effective way to communicate with one another in a quick or thorough manner, given the limited communication technology of the first century and the geographic distance between the disciples. While there were pairs of family members in the group of apostolic eyewitnesses, most had no familial relationship to each other at all. These men and women were either involved in the greatest and most unlikely conspiracy of all time or were simply eyewitnesses who were telling the truth.

Because they are not there to answer. I am the Lord your God. It is appalling that the orthodox Christian position cites this record as evidence that the dead can appear and communicate to the living. Sometimes a familiar spirit will appear to a person who is not actively seeking to contact the dead. Scripture makes it plain that contacting the dead is a sin forbidden by God. Surely those supposedly living in heaven with God would not sin by initiating or participating in contact with the living.

The reason for this is simple: What did those spirits that spoke through her want to communicate? Satan can then wield the power of death more easily, manipulating the untimely death of his victims by fatal disease, murder, suicide or accident. Does this teaching motivate a Christian to behave in a manner that will cause him to prolong, preserve and enjoy his earthly existence and service to God? One effect of this false doctrine may possibly be seen in the context of a serious illness.

It is generally understood that an individual with a strong will to live is more likely to survive a life-threatening illness. Unbelievers who think that this life is all there is can too often muster more of the innate and God-given instinct for survival than does a child of God.

Does it glorify God that His people should have less desire than unbelievers to live as long as they can on earth? Does this help win the lost and persuade them of the benefits of following the way of Jesus Christ? In the same vein, many Christians are very fatalistic about the moment of their deaths. Perhaps to deal with the fear of death, they assume the Lord already has the day picked. They think that God alone determines the day of their death when He is ready. It is obvious that our own choices go a long way toward determining what kind of life we live and for how long.

Thinking fatalistically, one is probably less likely to do those things that make for a long and healthy life. Of course, most Christians who teach that God kills His people seldom say it that way. The resurrection narratives bear unmistakable signs of being historically accurate.

The earliness of these accounts, at a time when hostile witnesses were present, would have made a fabrication unlikely and dangerous. There is agreement on the main facts and great variety in the witnesses given, yet they are not a mere repetition of some standardized story with all the discrepancies worked out. Deeper scrutiny, however, reveals that these appearances are non-contradictory. It is a well-known rule of evidence that the testimonies of several different witnesses, each reporting from his own particular vantage point, provide the strongest possible evidence when the testimonies contain superficial contradictions that resolve themselves upon close and careful examination.

This is exactly the situation with the various witnesses to the resurrection. At the time Paul met the resurrected Christ, he was an ardent antagonist to the Christian faith. A highly educated man, he was not easily persuaded of anything that appeared contrary to or inconsistent with the Mosaic traditions.

It could be said that he would have been the last person on earth to accept the idea of a crucified and resurrected Messiah based on the Jewish expectations of the time. The fact that he became so fully persuaded of the resurrection of Christ that he completely dedicated his life to his risen Lord is powerful evidence of the reality of the resurrection. Within a very few years of the time of the crucifixion of Jesus, the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus was, in the mind of at least one man of education [the Apostle Paul], absolutely irrefutable.

No reputable New Testament historian doubts the historical fact that the tomb in which Christ was placed after his crucifixion was empty.

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Therefore, there are only three explanations for it. Either his enemies took the body, his friends took the body, or Jesus was raised from the dead. The first possibility is extremely unlikely, because his enemies would have certainly displayed his body if they could have, in order to humiliate his disciples, quell the rumors of his resurrection, as well as to cut short any new religious movement that threatened their Mosaic traditions. It is equally unlikely that his friends would have taken his body, because after his crucifixion they were profoundly disappointed and discouraged men who did not believe that he would be resurrected.

It is absurd to think that under these conditions they would invent a scheme in which they would steal away the body to fabricate a story they obviously did not believe. The disciples were Jews who took seriously their Jewish privileges and obligations. Therefore, it is unthinkable that they would have been party to making up a new religion for personal gain. To a first-century Jew, such an act was equivalent to lying against the God of Israel, as Paul argues in 1 Corinthians Would such a person risk divine retribution for a few years of prestige as a leader of a new religion?

The answer can only be an emphatic no. The presence of women at the tomb is strong evidence that the biblical record is true. Women had virtually no credibility in the first-century Jewish culture, and their testimony in a court of law was considered worthless. For example, if a man was accused of a crime that only women witnessed, he could not be convicted on that basis.

Women bringing testimony of his resurrection that is then denied by the male disciples makes the latter look bad, and these men were the first leaders of the Christian Church. A fabricated story added later by the Church would certainly have painted their first leaders in a more favorable light. The Jewish Temple authorities paid those who had seen the tomb empty to lie and say that the disciples had stolen the body, and they even murdered many of those who preached about his resurrection.

The fact that they did not means they could not because he was risen. If he did not rise from the dead, what became of his body? If his enemies stole it and never showed it openly, that would have encouraged the very rumors of a resurrection that they were very anxious to prevent. But the decisive proof that his enemies did not take the body is that they surely would have quickly produced it with great fanfare, for they stopped short of nothing to discredit the story. As William Lane Craig argues:.

If Jesus was not resurrected, why is there no record of his disciples venerating his tomb as so often happens to religious leaders? Though God forbade it, the practice continued among the Israelites to the point that God Himself disposed of the bodies of Elijah and Moses lest their followers venerate their gravesites. Josephus, the first-century Jewish historian, wrote about Jesus Christ and the growth of Christianity as follows:. And when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him; for he appeared to them alive again the third day; as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him.

And the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day.

He was even made an honorary Roman citizen. There is no record of any objection being raised to this passage by early detractors of Christianity, and had this been a fraudulent and late insertion into the writings of Josephus, this fact would have been openly debated in the literature of the day. Because this did not happen, the silence of the critics is damning to their cause. But the only adequate explanation for the rise of the Church that has ever been given is that the early Christians believed Jesus had been raised from the dead.

The Four Gospels and the Apostle Paul give a unified witness of ten resurrection appearances. Because these records are harmonious and non-contradictory, the burden of proof is upon those who would say that they do not tell the truth. To Mary Magdalene Mark To the other women Matt. To Peter Luke To the two men on the road to Emmaus Mark To eleven of the disciples except Thomas—Luke To the twelve a week later John