Transcript

As we said in the introduction, the resurrection of Jesus is the foundation of Christianity.

Without it, all of Christianity is a lie and a false religion.

But unlike most miracle claims, Christians claim there is good historical evidence for the resurrection.

So, what is this evidence, and how can we use it?

We already went over the basic underlying philosophy in the introduction and pointed out that we already gave natural theology arguments for God's existence, argued the New Testament documents are reliable, and established that miracles are not impossible.

However, as we noted in the introduction, we will not assume the New Testament documents are inspired or even accurate in every detail.

Instead, we will only argue from facts that are agreed upon by the majority of New Testament scholars and have good evidence to infer they are true.

This means even if the rest of the New Testament is a fabrication, it will not show these facts are false, since even many skeptical scholars doubt the historicity of the entire New Testament but at least agree these facts are true.

So now, with this as our underlying foundation, we can begin to look at the historical evidence and see if it infers a resurrection.

First, two underlying facts about the death of Jesus: It is almost unanimously agreed that Jesus died by crucifixion just outside of Jerusalem.

Skeptical scholar John Dominic Crossan says this is as sure as anything historical can ever be.

Skeptical scholar E.P. Sanders lists this as one of the most indisputable facts about Jesus' life, so there is no question for historians whether or not Jesus died by crucifixion.

Second, it is widely agreed that Jesus was buried in a nearby tomb.

The evidence for this is pretty overwhelming.

We have multiple attestations from early sources like Paul and Mark, and Josephus agrees that crucified victims were allowed to receive a proper burial.

Jewish law demanded that even foreigners and criminals had to be buried.

We have archaeological evidence for this as well.

The burial account of Jesus also meets the criteria of embarrassment since they had to admit they could not afford their own tomb to bury Jesus but had to use the tomb of a member of the court who had just executed him.

There are just too many facts which support the burial of Jesus.

Only a few skeptical scholars in the Jesus Seminar deny this, but the majority does not.

We’ll come back to this later and discuss it more, but both of these facts could still be true, and Jesus would still be dead in the grave.

The real question is, what happened next?

What caused the events which followed and led to the rise of Christianity from a small backwater province in Rome?

There have been a wide variety of theories that have been proposed in order to explain what took place three days after Jesus was buried.

In this video, we’ll cover the four most popular and general theories to see which best fits the data.

The first theory is the mythic theory.

This is probably the most popular among layman skeptics.

It argues that all the events and miracle claims of Jesus were made up at a later time and were not made up by early eyewitnesses.

The disciples never claimed Jesus rose from the dead, and it was only made up by later Christians.

The second theory is like the mythic theory, but it is called the conspiracy theory.

Historical evidence suggests this is probably the earliest competing theory offered to challenge the resurrection account.

It says that the disciples made up the story of Jesus rising from the dead and simply lied about it all for their own gain.

Third, we'll look at the hallucination theory, which comes in many variations and is probably the most popular among skeptical New Testament scholars.

It basically says that after Jesus died, the disciples were grief-stricken and had hallucinations or visions that Jesus had arisen from the dead, and that propelled them to think he was alive again.

Finally, we'll compare these to the resurrection theory, which is that Jesus actually did rise from the dead, and the disciples believed it because they witnessed it.

So let's look at the facts and see if any of these theories can fully explain the data.

The first piece is something that is accepted by almost unanimous scholarship, which is that after Jesus died, his disciples said he appeared to them again alive.

There is not a lot of doubt among scholars that the disciples believed this had happened.

Bart Ehrman says, I don't doubt at all that some disciples claim this.

Paul, writing about 25 years later, indicates that this is what they claimed, and I don't think he is making it up.

E.P. Sanders says, It is an equally secure fact that Jesus' disciples saw him, in what sense is not certain.

After his death, his followers saw him.

The reason for this is because it has multiple attestations in various sources, including Josephus, and there is no way to explain the rise of Christianity if this did not happen.

Something had to happen which compelled the disciples to begin the world's largest religion with seemingly nothing.

Well, people claim they see all sorts of things, so why should we take the claims of the disciples seriously?

How do we know their testimony is reliable and they were not simply making the appearances up?

Well, in our previous series, we've already established the New Testament is very early and reliable in what it reports, so there is plenty of evidence their testimony is reliable.

But putting that aside, we should at least evaluate when eyewitness testimony is unreliable.

For instance, when events happen quickly or over a period of a few seconds, it is hard to retain memory of an event.

Or when people go out looking for what they want to find, people that are desperately desiring to find Bigfoot will sometimes fool themselves into thinking they found something.

Or when the participants are all strangers, like during a bank robbery, it is hard to retain memory when you are around unfamiliar people.

And last, it is hard to retain memory if there was a weapon involved for the simple reason that everyone is focused on the weapon and not anything else.

However, if we examine the resurrection reports, none of these seem to be a factor.

There is certainly not a weapon involved, and it is not with strangers; the disciples are familiar with each other and who they are witnessing they believe had risen.

The disciples were also not expecting Jesus to rise from the dead.

All of the accounts embarrassingly report that the disciples had misunderstood the Scriptures and what Jesus had claimed, and they did not expect him to come back.

The reports do not seem to happen quickly, but over a period of time where Jesus would eat and drink with them, engage in conversations, or give them instructions.

Even if you could write off the Gospels and Acts as later myths, we still have preserved for us early creeds and oral sermons handed down which report these as well.

So the reports on the surface level do not match circumstances that create unreliable testimony.

As E.P. Sanders admits, they definitely experienced something, which doesn't bode well for the conspiracy theory.

So what if these accounts were just made up at a later date?

Well, this seems to be rejected by most scholars since Paul preserved for us an early creed in 1 Corinthians 15, which is a list of witnesses that Jesus was said to have appeared to.

They include Peter, the rest of the disciples, a group of 500 at once, then James, and then all the apostles.

Most scholars believe this list of witnesses in the creed goes back to within three years of Pentecost.

The reasons for this are simply overwhelming.

It is formed in a mnemonic structure and with parallelism, and it is less than 50 words.

All this seems to mean it was an early creed for catechizing new Christians; it was something easy to learn and memorize.

Paul also says to the Corinthians, I delivered to you what I received.

This is a rabbinic statement for a teacher passing on something to his students, so it would have to have come from the disciples themselves very early on before they could teach it to Paul.

The creed also calls Peter Cephas and not by his name Peter.

Cephas was an early name for him; only later on was he called Peter.

It has an independent tradition that is not contingent on the Gospels, such as the appearance to James and the independent appearance to Peter.

Jerobo Collins says that he doesn't know of any New Testament scholar who dates the creed after the mid-40s, so all the evidence suggests it is very early, and this means the reports of appearances are very early on as well.

And that rules out the mythic theory.

What about the hallucination theory?

Well, the problem is the appearances happen in group settings.

Even in the early creed, group hallucinations are exceptionally rare, and because of this, there is not a lot of scientific literature to explain them.

In a private email with scholar Mike Licona, psychologist Dr. Gary Sibsey says, I have surveyed the professional literature, peer-reviewed journal articles, and books written by psychologists, psychiatrists, and other relevant healthcare professionals during the past two decades and have yet to find a single documented case of a group hallucination—an event for which there is more than one person purportedly sharing in a vision or other sensory perceptions where there was clearly no referent.

So there is not a lot of scientific evidence that group hallucinations can happen.

Peer-reviewed work on hallucinations also reports that they most often manifest in one sensory mode, such as auditory or visual, and that multi-mode hallucinations are exceptionally rare.

Yet the appearances of Jesus contain at least both of these elements, making the hallucination theory exceptionally improbable.

For an hallucination to explain the appearances, you would have to say that the disciples are all each having a rare multi-mode hallucination that they are all agreeing Jesus is doing certain things, like eating and drinking and giving them the exact same instructions.

This would need to have happened multiple times, not just once.

Even if you could write off the Gospels and Acts as later myths, we still have the early creed preserved in 1 Corinthians 15 and other early sermons preserved in Acts, which report that Jesus ate and drank with the disciples.

C.H. Dodd notes that speeches in Acts seem very early because they lack influence from Pauline theology or vocabulary.

They contain a high degree of Semitism, meaning they were likely originally Aramaic, and they lack resemblance to the original written elements of Acts and Luke, meaning they likely predate Acts and seem to be very early Aramaic speeches.

So the reports are very early and appear in group settings, multi-sensory, and over a period of time.

Hallucinations with these elements are so improbable it would have to be a miracle to cause one, let alone several.

But what about the power of suggestion?

Sometimes one person can cause others around them to hallucinate the same thing through the power of suggestion, such as people in a lifeboat where one thinks they see a ship in the distance and they all think they see the same ship.

In an anomalistic psychology study of extraordinary phenomena of behavior and experience, authors Zuse and Jones read some of the very little literature on group hallucinations and theorized that if there is an expectation, emotional excitement, and people having been informed beforehand, then a group hallucination may be possible.

It is also believed they will vary in what is reported.

Zuse and Jones cite an event from 1917 where 70,000 people said they witnessed a public miracle; however, the reports varied.

Although the children reportedly saw the Virgin, the crowd—at least many of them—witnessed a color phenomenon in which the sun, in the shape of a fiery disc, began to move and approach the Earth.

However, Zuse and Jones also had to conclude that the final answer to these questions has yet to be obtained, so they still maintain a scientific explanation has yet to explain collective hallucinations.

However, even if they could, it is interesting how their criteria doesn't fit the resurrection appearances.

Expectation and excitement were definitely not present.

The narratives embarrassingly portray the disciples as cowardly, running for their lives after Jesus was crucified.

They even doubted the report of the women, and when they first saw Jesus, they were frightened, which shows they were not excited and didn't understand what was going on.

Second, it is interesting that if the appearances of Jesus were hallucinations, then they do not fit the criteria of varying drastically between reports.

All report a bodily resurrection of Jesus, where he looks sort of like himself but also slightly different, and his body has new powers that it did not have before.

As William Lane Craig says, The fact remains that there is not a single instance in the case books exhibiting the diversity involved in the post-mortem appearances of Jesus.

But the biggest problem with the hallucination theory is this: even if you discount the Gospels as unreliable, one still has to account for the early Christians preaching bodily resurrection and not a spiritual appearance.

The first Christians were very familiar with visions and claimed to actually have some.

In Acts 12, when the servant girl finds Peter at the gate, she runs to tell everyone, and they tell her the appearance she had was just an angel.

So the Christians firmly understood what visions and spiritual experiences were, yet they never interpreted the appearances of Christ as just spiritual visions.

They firmly believed it was a bodily appearance, and that is what they preached from the beginning, as even skeptical scholar Gerb Ludemann agrees.

So since the appearances were in group settings, multi-sensory, do not vary, were never interpreted to be spiritual but always physical, and there was no expectation or excitement for them, the hallucination theory cannot account for these appearances.

So what about the conspiracy theory?

Well, despite the early facts we mentioned about how the resurrection appearances do not match factors that make testimony unreliable, it would be hard to explain how the Christians could hold together such a radical conspiracy with over 500 people involved.

Before Christ was crucified, they couldn't even keep Judas from betraying them.

However, if all we have to go on is the appearances themselves and no other piece of data, we have to accept that this theory could at least tentatively account for the reports of appearances, even though it seems like a stretch.

So I don't see any reason why the conspiracy theory could not account for this piece of data, especially if there was no more data to go over.

Finally, the resurrection theory can account for this since if Jesus did rise from the dead, reporting his physical appearance makes perfect sense.

The next piece of data is appearances to skeptics.

It is almost unanimously accepted that James and the brothers of Jesus were not his followers during his crucifixion.

It is also unanimously accepted that Paul was an enemy of the Church originally and a later convert.

The reason for this is Paul admits it himself and cites an early creed in Galatians 1:22-23: He who used to persecute us is now preaching the faith he once tried to destroy.

If we add the account in Acts, we have multiple attestations, and it meets the criteria of embarrassment since Paul reports it himself that he was once the enemy and was in the wrong.

The same goes for the conversion of James.

It is clear in the early material of Paul that the leader of the Jerusalem Church was none other than James, the brother of Jesus.

However, all the evidence suggests that James did not believe his brother was the Christ during Jesus' ministry.

The Gospels embarrassingly report that the brothers of Jesus were skeptical of him.

No early Christian would dare attack a prominent leader in the Church by claiming he was once Jesus' enemy.

James was also not listed as one present at the cross, and Jesus surrendered his mother over to the beloved disciple.

But why not his own brothers if they were in the Christian ranks?

This is why most scholars accept that James and his brothers were early skeptics and only converted after the crucifixion.

So what happened that turned these enemies into believers?

Well, the mythic theory has a hard time explaining this since Paul was very early on writing and quoting a creed about his own conversion.

Also, mentioning that James was an early skeptic would not have been made up, as no Christian would dare to dishonor, shame, or lie about one of their own leaders in such a terrible way.

So this fact would not have been made up later on.

Yet it is clear James was the early leader of the Jerusalem Church, as Paul and Josephus record.

Could James and Paul have lied?

The question must be asked: why on earth would they have done that?

The early Church was a small, persecuted, and hated minority with a Messiah who was just shamefully crucified as a criminal and was too poor to even afford their own tomb.

Jesus had dishonored the family, and James was already opposed to him.

Why would James suddenly feel the need to make up an appearance of Jesus' resurrection if there was nothing to gain and only shame and dishonor to suddenly reverse and proclaim his brother was Lord?

After he had already mocked him openly, to do such a thing would make no sense.

Paul also had no reason to try this.

He was at the top of his game, a prominent leader on the rise, and making a name for himself while he persecuted the Church.

He had everything going for him, and suddenly he has an urge to leave all that and join the persecuted minority he had already hated?

Such a sudden conversion he knew to be a lie would take a miracle in itself, if nothing else.

So what if they both hallucinated?

Well, adding more hallucinations to this theory begins to multiply its assumptions and causes it to lack parsimony.

It is even harder to explain since neither of them were grieving that Jesus had died, especially Paul, who hated the Church.

James may have been in grief for his brother, but he didn't believe he was the Lord and would never have expected or even considered a physical resurrection, since a dying and rising Messiah was not part of Second Temple Judaism beliefs.

As scholar Mike Licona says, James and his brothers would have regarded their dead brother as a heretic rather than rush to Jerusalem and get caught up in the group ecstasy.

It seems more likely that Jesus' execution as a criminal and a blasphemer would have supported their continual unbelief rather than their conversion.

The plausibility of Paul having a hallucination is even far lower than that of James.

A hallucination would be very improbable as the cause of Paul’s sudden conversion.

However, the Christian theory can easily explain the conversion in appearance to skeptics.

If Jesus really did rise and appear to them, that would be enough to cause their miraculous conversion.

Now we have surveyed the appearances, but that is only half the battle since we cannot interview them personally today or perform a psychoanalysis.

What we can do is look at the surrounding facts that accompany these appearances for us today and see which theory is the most plausible for them.

So now it's time to fill in the gaps.

First up is the expectation of the Gospel to the surrounding world.

The message of Jesus dying on the cross for our sins may sound loving and warm to us, but to the ancient world—a culture that thrived on honor and status—such a message would be nothing but disgusting and horrendous.

Walter Baer said the enemies of Christianity always refer to the disgracefulness of the death of Jesus with great emphasis and malicious pleasure.

A God or Son of God dying on a cross?

That was enough to put paid to the new religion.

David de Silva notes the same thing in his work: Christianity was founded on a premise that should have failed from the moment it began.

The Christians preached to the Gentiles to worship a man that was shamefully executed on a cross.

Not only that, but a Jew of all people, whom the Romans looked down upon.

But even more than that, a Jew who was a carpenter, which was also a position that was looked down upon.

Cicero said that such an occupation was vulgar and compared it to slavery.

On top of that, they preached physical resurrection to the Roman world, which was detested by most pagans who thought the purpose of death was to escape the evil material universe and make it to the spiritual realm.

Yet the Christians taught the Jewish idea that heaven would be the restoration and eternal kingdom on earth, which was not something pagans hoped for.

But even more, the Christians placed ethical demands on the new converts that would have shocked most pagans: no temple prostitution or even extramarital affairs.

Morality was radically challenged by the Christians, which flew in the face of most pagans.

As de Silva notes, the message about this Christ was incompatible with the most deeply rooted religious ideology of the Gentile world, as well as with the most recent message propagated in the Roman imperial ideology.

This is seen in how the Christian opponents, like Celsus, attacked Christianity.

He attacked Christians for worshipping a God who could not beat the Romans or even escape from the cross.

Christians had to respond to these attacks because pagans were calling them mad for putting a crucified man next to the eternal God.

The Jews also thought the message of Christ was embarrassing.

Their supposed Messiah was shamefully crucified and murdered by the Roman enemy?

The Messiah was expected to be a conqueror who would defeat Rome and restore the kingdom of Israel.

Jesus was shamed and disgraced; to follow him was to give up on the Jewish idolization of a conquering Messiah and a restored Israel.

On top of that, Jesus was from Galilee, and Nazareth of all places—areas which were looked down upon by the Jews.

His father was not known to them, so he had a shady family history, which the Jews were not keen to forget.

Everything the Christians stood for was working against them.

They had better have good evidence and truly thought Jesus had been raised because the odds were completely against them on every front.

As N.T. Wright says, Christianity was born into a world where its central claim was known to be false.

This being so, knowing the expectation, the Gospel would have no group of conspirators ever have made up their core doctrine.

If you're going to make up a message to gain a following, you want to make up something that is appealing and will work to your advantage, not something that was expected to fail.

So the conspiracy theory cannot explain why the Christians would make up such a story.

Neither can the hallucination theory.

As we said before, the crucifixion of Jesus is almost unanimously accepted by scholars, as well as the fact that Jesus didn't advocate light ethical loads.

So unless the entire population of Jerusalem hallucinated Jesus' crucifixion and message, this would not be something that Christians were fooled into believing.

Hallucinations also usually happen to grieving people as a psychological way to comfort themselves.

You would not hallucinate things to believe that would cause you more trouble and grief.

So the hallucination theory cannot explain why the disciples would preach an utterly embarrassing message in a way to win converts.

And again, as we've already noted, the disciples in the early Church knew what visions were, yet they preached a physical resurrection as part of the Gospel, not a spiritual vindication.

It would have been easier for their Gentile audience and even Jewish audience—who didn't expect a resurrection to happen until the end of time—to preach a spiritual assumption over a physical return and transformation.

Hallucinations would have inferred this, not a reanimation of the body.

Since we know crucifixion was preached early, the mythic theory cannot explain this either.

It would also have failed for the same reasons the conspiracy theory does.

But all this fits perfectly with the resurrection theory.

This is what was preached by Christians because this is how it happened, and they preached this embarrassing message because it was true.

The next fact to look at is the low status of women in the ancient world.

It is unanimously accepted that in the ancient world, the testimony of women was not to be trusted.

But let not the testimony of women be admitted on account of the levity and boldness of their sex.

Any evidence which a woman gives is not valid to offer.

Let the words of the law be burned rather than given to women.

There is a whole host of other sources we could look at which shows women were believed to be less trustworthy than men.

The ancient world was very clear: the testimony of women was not to be trusted.

Now take that and marvel at the fact that in the Gospels, the women are the first and primary witnesses to the empty tomb.

This fact was utterly embarrassing for the early Church.

First, they admit they didn't even trust the testimony of the women.

Then all the early sermons found in Acts and the epistles always skip over the fact that the women were the first to discover the tomb.

That doesn't contradict the Gospels, but they tend to stay silent on this matter in order to make their early case because women were not deemed to be credible witnesses.

Yet when they write down the accounts of how it happened, they cannot leave this fact out because they played such a key role in discovering the empty tomb.

This is a serious claim because, as Richard Bauckham says, in these stories, women are given priority by God as recipients of revelation and thereby the role of mediators of that revelation to men.

The Gospels claim the women were an intricate part of the revelation of God and the first key eyewitnesses to the resurrection, thereby making their testimony necessary in telling how the empty tomb was found.

For an ancient writer, this was not something you would ever make up.

Celsus even used it to try to discredit Christianity, claiming the entire argument for the empty tomb rested on the testimony of women.

N.T. Wright says, As historians, we are obliged to comment that if these stories had been made up five years later, let alone 30, 40, or 50 years later, they would never have had Mary Magdalene in this role.

To put Mary there is, from the point of view of Christian apologists wanting to explain to a skeptical audience that Jesus really did rise from the dead, like shooting themselves in the foot.

But to us as historians, this kind of thing is gold dust.

The early Christians would never, never have made this up.

So the mythic theory or the conspiracy theory lacks any explanatory power with this one.

As Mike Licona says, even if the disciples had fled Jerusalem, Joseph of Arimathea or Nicodemus may have been better candidates than women for discovering the empty tomb.

What about the hallucination theory?

It is difficult to say if the hallucination theory could fit with this one.

If all we have to go on is this fact, I suppose you could say someone had a crazy dream and thought women discovered the empty tomb before anyone else.

But why?

They weren't expecting it, and multiple sources seem to agree this is how it happened.

Plus, it was such an embarrassing fact that everyone involved would have wanted to make sure it actually happened and that it was not a dream or a subjective vision.

So we'll allow this one to pass just to be fair.

But there is really no reason why one would hallucinate this since it was not comforting or expected to happen.

But even though it lacks explanatory power, we'll allow it to tentatively pass until we can evaluate the evidence for the empty tomb.

Finally, the Christian theory has no problem explaining this because the writers were reporting how it happened, and of course, because God is no respecter of persons, and there is neither male nor female, for we are all one in Christ.

Next fact: the immediate proclamation in Jerusalem.

The majority of scholars cannot deny that the resurrection was first preached in Jerusalem.

All the evidence leads to Jerusalem as being the home base and happening very early on, such as the development of early Christian creeds and how all the sources suggest Jerusalem is where Christianity began.

Cassidus mentions off the cuff that Christianity began in Judea and spread from there.

In one of Paul’s early epistles, he mentions off the cuff that the apostles are still preaching in Jerusalem.

Now, why does this matter?

Well, when we look at the importance of time and when you proclaim a miracle, that fact can make a serious impact.

As James Siren said, the apostles proclaimed the resurrection at Pentecost when Jerusalem expected the spread of the report and endeavored to prevent it, while the eyes of their enemies were yet sparkling with rage and madness, while Calvary was yet dyed with the blood they had spilt there.

Do imposters take such measures?

Would they not have waited until the fury of the Jews had been appeased, until judges and public officers had been changed, and until people had been less attentive to their dispositions?

Thank you for watching.

Would they not have taken them away from civilization or to a different area from the place where they could be disproven?

Even with Mormonism, Joseph Smith led his people away from New York.

But the disciples walked right up to the Sanhedrin and said, You crucified your Messiah, and he has been raised.

Now these people are either crazy or they are absolutely convinced they are right.

So the conspiracy theory has no hope of explaining this.

If you're an imposter, you go off to Spain or India and proclaim your miracle, not in Jerusalem, where they have the evidence, the motive, and the means to debunk you.

Since we know the resurrection was proclaimed early on and it was in Jerusalem, it is hard to say that the mythic theory can explain this either.

This was not something we can say would develop later.

If the creed in 1 Corinthians 15 is roughly dated to within three years of Pentecost, that means there were Christians.

Right there in Jerusalem, developing this, which set a foundational belief for Christians to be able to memorize.

So there is no reason to think it was developed later on or far off elsewhere.

Therefore, the mythic theory cannot explain this fact either.

But what about the hallucination theory?

Well, if all we have to go on is this fact, I suppose a miraculous hallucination could convince the disciples to preach the resurrection immediately in Jerusalem.

But it is still doubtful because hallucinations or visions don't really imply a physical resurrection, nor do they fit with group hallucinations, as we discussed earlier.

However, it is possible if all we have is this fact alone.

So just in case we miss something, we'll allow this one to pass.

But the resurrection theory explains this with the most ease because if Jesus was resurrected, of course the disciples had the boldness to proclaim the resurrection.

God would have been on their side, and all the evidence would have been in their favor.

Next fact: the voluntary suffering of disciples and witnesses.

This is an important fact we cannot ignore.

Multiple attestations from Christian and non-Christian sources testify that the early witnesses of the risen Christ were persecuted and martyred for their faith.

Tacitus and Suetonius mention events, and Josephus as well, who even tells us how James was martyred in Jerusalem for his belief that Jesus was the risen Messiah.

Paul also admits the intense persecution early on.

In fact, as scholars like N.T. Wright note, 2 Corinthians was written as a response to the Corinthians who asked Paul to provide some evidence of good fortune to show God was on his side.

Ancient people believed, like some still do today, that if you were suffering persecution, it was evidence you were being punished by God and needed to turn from your ways.

Paul responded with the opposite.

Despite the cultural norms, it was meant to challenge their beliefs about how God worked.

A later epistle from Clement of Rome talked of how Paul and Peter were martyred in Rome for their faith, and Acts records how the early witnesses were persecuted and murdered.

The evidence for this is multiply attested.

So what some people may say is, People die for their faith all the time; why are the Christians any different?

People will and have often died for things that were false, but they don't tend to die for something they know to be false.

We're not talking about Christians who were martyred, but the founders of Christianity who were martyred.

These men and women did not die just for faith, but for something they claimed to have seen with their own eyes.

The root meaning of the word martyr is witness.

Over time, we've expanded the word to mean anyone who dies for their beliefs, but originally it referred to someone who was a witness of an event and died for his truth.

The disciples didn't just die for their beliefs; they died for events they claimed had happened and knew very well they were true or made up.

Liars make lousy martyrs.

When you have nothing to gain, it doesn't make sense to make up or hold to a theory that is going to get you nothing.

The apostles were not getting a whole lot out of their new religion; they were constantly facing persecution from the Jews and threats of death.

Nor did they become wealthy from what they were doing.

If they were doing it because they were insane and wanted a cult following, they did some things that didn't make any sense, like establishing churches in other regions which they did not have total control over.

Paul moved from city to city, raising up believers and then moving on.

If you're trying to establish a cult and a controlled group of people, you do as cults do: you gather your followers, remove them from society where there's a threat they'll be pulled away by reality, and you keep them very close to keep them brainwashed.

The apostles didn't do that; they stayed in populated cities and left their new churches to go start more churches in other cities, which leaves your followers vulnerable to corruption.

If we read the epistles, that is exactly what happened.

The apostles had to revisit them and write letters to correct them constantly.

So it doesn't seem like there was anything to gain from starting Christianity unless it was an elaborate plan to be martyred.

Therefore, the conspiracy theory is hopeless in explaining this one.

The mythic theory doesn't work either because the voluntary suffering has multiple attestations, even from secular authors, and there is nothing that challenges that the disciples were persecuted or that many of them died for the events they reported as true.

If the disciples hallucinated the whole thing, then it is possible they would be willing to take it to the grave, but it would have to be a wild, miraculous hallucination to utterly convince them of it.

As we have seen, such hallucinations are very improbable.

But it is slightly, slightly, slightly possible.

If the resurrection theory is true, then this fact makes perfect sense.

The disciples were willing to suffer because Jesus was resurrected, and it was better to deny men than to deny God, whom they witnessed with their own eyes.

Final fact: the existence of the empty tomb.

Gary Habermas has surveyed the material written by scholars on the resurrection and has found that 75% of them accept the tomb was found empty on Easter morning.

For example, skeptical scholar Jacob Kramer says, By far most exegetes hold firmly to the reliability of the biblical statements concerning the empty tomb.

The evidence for this is simply overwhelming.

However, some scholars, like John Dominic Crossan, do not think Jesus was buried in a tomb but rather thrown in a trench for dogs to eat, because the Romans would not have allowed a proper burial for criminals.

But such a theory flies in the face of a mountain of evidence.

First, Dale Allison, who is skeptical of physical resurrection, points out that the word in the creed in 1 Corinthians 15 for bury would rarely be used for dumping criminals in a trench for dogs to eat.

So the earliest account of the burial of Jesus would be incompatible with Crossan's argument.

We also have multiple attestations that crucified victims were buried, and two different sources say Jesus was buried.

We have archaeological evidence that a crucified victim received a proper burial, and there is no reason to think the Romans would not have allowed this practice.

They were certainly okay with allowing other Jewish practices to go on in Jerusalem, such as temple worship, which they detested because it meant a rejection of Roman gods.

They allowed the Jews to conduct their own trials, have their own temple guards, keep the Sabbath, and so forth.

There is no reason they would not have allowed this as well, and it fits with archaeological and textual evidence.

Jesus' burial not only has multiple attestations, but it meets the criteria of embarrassment since they say he was buried in the tomb of a Sanhedrin member, which would have been dishonoring for his followers.

Such a group had just murdered their Lord, and now they needed to bum a tomb for him from one of its own members?

To the public, this would have looked pretty humiliating, and the fact that they mentioned he was in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea means the tomb was public knowledge and its whereabouts were known.

So the public at any time would have known about it and could have readily debunked it if the tomb was not empty.

But the account of the empty tomb is also embarrassing because it was discovered by women, and we've already discussed this is not something you would have made up.

Matthew also mentions the competing theory that the disciples stole the body.

This is odd because why would Matthew want to mention the competing theory, which could possibly stir up doubt among the people he was trying to convert?

Justin Martyr, writing later, has to respond to this theory because it was the official story the Jews were telling people, which is an interesting admission because it says the body could not be found.

If the Sanhedrin still had the body, they could have had Gentiles bring it out for them and show the tomb was never empty.

But the Christians never had to respond to this charge, so both sides agreed the body was missing.

Finally, we have the Nazareth Inscription, a stone found in the area that has written on it an imperial decree from around 41 AD, which says that the penalty for grave robbing was death.

This is interesting because it is very severe for how Romans punish thievery.

The Romans would not normally give such a high penalty for stealing something, but this would make sense with the rise of Christianity and what Suetonius tells us: in Rome, there were riots among the Jews on account of Crestus, which was a common Roman mispronunciation of Christ.

Eventually, Claudius expelled all the Jews because of it.

If some Jews in Rome were preaching that Christ was resurrected and riots resulted from it, and the tomb was not empty, there would be no need for an imperial decree because they could just produce the body.

But because the only alternative explanation was that the body was missing because it was stolen, Rome's only option would be to issue a decree to try to combat the accounts of a missing body.

If there was a body, then Rome could have just dispelled the riots with the body and not have to indirectly admit the body went missing.

So it appears that from all sides, the body was missing.

Either way, there is no evidence the empty tomb was just a fabrication, and this is why most scholars today accept the tomb was found empty.

All the evidence simply favors it.

So if the body was stolen, who did it?

Would Rome?

Of course not, because they would not have cared.

How about the Jewish leaders?

Why would they?

They wanted Jesus crucified, shamed, buried, and forgotten.

The last thing they wanted was suspicion of him coming back to life.

Of course, the Sanhedrin claimed it was the disciples, but that is unlikely.

The rabbi had just been crucified, and their movement was dispersed and shamed.

They were in fear that Jewish authorities would come after them as well.

There is no reason to think they would have been in the position to steal a body and create a mass hoax.

Second, if they had stolen the body, there is little reason to think they would have reported the theory that Jewish leaders were spreading if it was true.

The last thing they would have wanted was to help spread the rumor they had stolen the body.

And if they had stolen the body, they would not have reported to their shame and dishonor that they had not believed the reports of the women when they found the empty tomb, nor would they have embarrassingly reported that they had not understood that Jesus had predicted his rise.

These were very embarrassing and shameful things to report.

Later Christians would not have made this up and attacked the honor and authority of their leaders, nor would the disciples, unless they wanted to shame themselves.

Most of all, where would they have taken the body?

A common overlooked fact is that this was Passover, and the city was flooded with pilgrims.

They would have been seen, and they would have been caught.

It would have been very hard to pull off, especially getting the body out of the Sanhedrin section of town.

So for the conspiracy theory to work, you need to posit that the disciples were in fear for their lives, yet somehow decided to steal the body and fake a resurrection, even though none of them were expecting that.

Then they managed to get the body out of the Sanhedrin section of town, where the tombs were, and hide it in an overcrowded city.

The entire theory becomes overwhelmingly unlikely.

The hallucination theory doesn't work either.

Did the entire population of Jerusalem hallucinate?

So the theory that it was not really discovered empty fails as well.

What about the mythic theory?

Some have tried to claim the empty tomb was made up later because it is not specifically mentioned in the creed Paul gives us in 1 Corinthians.

Well, this just ignores the amount of evidence we already gave and that the empty tomb and physical resurrection are both mentioned in the early passion narrative found in Mark.

But most of all, it overlooks what the creed in 1 Corinthians says.

It states that he was buried and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures.

He was buried and raised; it is pretty obvious that what was buried is what was raised, and therefore the tomb would have been empty.

As N.T. Wright says, The fact that the empty tomb itself, so prominent in the Gospel accounts, does not appear to be specifically mentioned in this passage is not significant.

The mention here of 'buried' and 'raised' need no more to be amplified in that way than one would need to amplify the statement 'I walk down the street' with the qualification 'on my feet.'

So the mythic theory fails here as well.

But there is one theory that can account for all the data: it is the theory that Jesus was raised and vindicated by God.

No other theory out there can account for all the data.

The mythic theory fails because we only argued from facts that we know are early and could not have been made up.

The conspiracy theory could not account for the quality of the testimonies of the disciples, the empty tomb, or why skeptics would join a small, persecuted minority.

The hallucination theory could only work if you posit some pretty miraculous hallucinations to cause the disciples to change their ideas, skeptics to convert, and posit crazy ideas no one was expecting or looking for.

It has to posit such a wild hallucination that it would take a miracle itself.

Only the theory that was reported can account for all the data.

Because of that, it has explanatory scope, meaning it can explain all the data with the least amount of effort.

It has explanatory power; it provides illumination as well, which means it can explain other areas of history, like the rise of Christianity and the belief in physical resurrection.

In fact, this means three pieces of the criteria that historians use when judging a historical hypothesis are filled.

Behan McCullough, who has outlined the criterion for weighing historical theories, accepts that the resurrection hypothesis meets these three things better than any other hypothesis, but claims it fails the other two pieces of criterion.

This Christian hypothesis is of greater explanatory scope and power than other hypotheses that try to account for the relevant evidence, but it is less plausible and more ad hoc than they are.

So McCullough accepts the resurrection meets three out of five of the criteria for historical investigation but fails the other two.

However, there have been replies to challenge this.

Dr. Travis Campbell asks why the resurrection theory is ad hoc.

To be ad hoc, according to McCullough, means a number of new suppositions are made by a hypothesis that are not already implied in existing knowledge.

So the hypothesis adds extra assumptions in order to explain the data that are not already present.

But Dr. Campbell points out that the resurrection theory only adds one extra assumption, not multiple.

It is difficult to see why the resurrection hypothesis is extraordinarily ad hoc; it requires only one new supposition: that God exists.

Surely rival hypotheses require many new suppositions.

The hallucination theory requires us to say group hallucinations plus multi-sensory experiences happened on multiple occasions and that they were so powerful that the disciples took it to their death, preaching something that only brought them poverty and turmoil, as well as a crazy mass city hallucination that there was an empty tomb.

The conspiracy theory wants us to believe a bunch of frightened followers of Jesus stole a body in secret in an overcrowded city to make up a story they were not expecting or that was not in line with Jewish messianic expectations in order to get themselves murdered, and that some of the skeptics decided to join their poor, persecuted movement for no reason at all.

The mythic theory expects us to believe an extra assumption for each fact that it was actually made up later, in spite of hard evidence that these facts were very early and unlikely to have been made up.

The resurrection theory only wants us to add the assumption that God exists, which is not ad hoc.

If we combine the resurrection argument with other arguments we've already presented that infer theism, since we've already argued for theism, the resurrection hypothesis would hardly be ad hoc.

Moreover, for the person who is already a theist, the resurrection hypothesis does not even introduce the new supposition of God's existence, since that is already implied by existing knowledge.

So the resurrection hypothesis cannot be said to be ad hoc simply by virtue of the number of suppositions it introduces.

What about plausibility?

A historical theory is plausible if other areas are known with confidence and suggest the same theory yours is suggesting.

So if other things suggest the same conclusion as your theory, that would make your theory plausible and in line with other beliefs.

But as we've already suggested, why would the resurrection theory not be plausible if we have other arguments to infer theism?

As William Lane Craig says, only if the naturalist has good reasons to think that God's existence is implausible or his intervention in the world is implausible could he justifiably regard the resurrection hypothesis as implausible.

So if one insists on assuming naturalism is true and leaves no reason for theism as a possibility, then they can say the resurrection theory is implausible.

But that is arguing from a presupposition and not being open to evidence, regardless of how one feels about it.

We can say that in conjunction with other arguments, the resurrection hypothesis is not ad hoc, nor is it implausible, since it has already been shown that God exists.

Thus, we can see why Anthony Flew was bold enough to say the resurrection has more evidence than any other miracle claim.

The resurrection is the only theory that can explain all the data, and it can do so while not being ad hoc or implausible.

The evidence infers that God has acted in the world to raise Jesus from the dead, as Paul of Frederickson admitted: they must have seen something, and all the evidence favors that what they saw was the risen Savior.