Did the Apostle's Invent the Resurrection? Series Conclusion:

In this investigative series, we have examined the cumulative evidence for the resurrection by exploring four central questions:

Question 1: Did later pagan influence add a resurrection story to the Jesus tradition?

Question 2: Did Jesus’s disciples in Palestine invent a false resurrection story?

Question 3: What happened to Jesus’s body?

Question 4: Does the resurrection claim meet any criteria for a credible hypothesis?

It is easy to simply claim that, through error or deliberate intention, a group of people spread a false story about Jesus rising from the dead. But we have seen that it is difficult to find a convincing, rational, non-miraculous explanation for the tradition of Jesus’s resurrection. If Jesus did not rise, the alternative explanations for the existence of the story look something like this:

But these possibilities raise questions that do not have convincing explanations:

• Question 1: Who were these myth-makers, and how did they get others to believe their bizarre story?

• Question 2: Which non-followers of Jesus would have hidden his body and concocted the resurrection story? Why would they have done this?

• Question 3: How could so many of Jesus’s first disciples have been fooled into believing that their dead leader had returned to some form of physical life?

• Question 4: Why would his disciples deliberately fabricate a bizarre fraudulent tale, which they continued to defend in the face of increasing persecution and even death?

In addition, the startling proclamation of Jesus’s resurrection does not stand in isolation: instead, it is consistent with a host of details about Jesus’s life and teachings as recorded in the gospel traditions and early church history, together with Old Testament prophecy, all of which form a coherent and harmonious unity only if Jesus did rise from death. As scholar N. T. Wright argues:

“The proposal that Jesus was bodily raised from the dead possesses unrivalled power to explain the historical data at the heart of Christianity” (Resurrection, 718).

In this regard, it is important to note the challenge that historians Schermer and Grobman have issued to people who deny central aspects of the World War II Holocaust:

“It is not enough for deniers to concoct an alternative explanation that amounts to nothing more than denying each piece of free-standing evidence. They must proffer a theory that not only explains all of the evidence but does so in a manner superior to the present theory” (Denying History, 172).

Similarly, if the Christian belief in Jesus’s resurrection was not the result of his actually rising, we must be able to offer one coherent alternative hypothesis, supported by sufficient evidence, that can convincingly account for the following widely accepted facts:

• Jesus was crucified.

• His death was very quickly believed to have atoning value.

• His followers became inspired and active within a short time of his death.

• Paul, the Jewish persecutor of Jesus’s followers, soon came to believe that Jesus had risen.

• Jesus was the only contemporary Jewish figure ever to be elevated to equality with God.

While it is possible to construct separate hypotheses to account for some of these individual facts, our investigation has not found one hypothesis that can adequately account for them all. The simplest claim that renders all these events credible is that Jesus did indeed rise after death. When this key piece of the puzzle is rejected, the others fly apart into fragments that can only be explained by separate, often conflicting, hypotheses with little or no supporting evidence.

It is interesting to note the results of a 1985 public debate on the resurrection between theologian Gary Habermas and notoriously staunch atheist Anthony Flew: both of the panels (three out of five professional debate judges and four out of five philosophers) judged that Habermas’s arguments were more convincing. (See Habermas and Flew, Did Jesus Rise.) In 2004 Anthony Flew cause quite a stir when he declared that he now believed in the existence of a Creator God.

Of course, the modern mind instinctively rejects the outrageous claim that a man could rise from death, and it might seem that the only reasonable response is to deny the possibility of such a supra-natural event. But what is this decision based on? Is it the inevitable result of scientific knowledge and rigorous laws of logic, or is it merely a preferred opinion? Historian C. Behan McCullagh warns that when we assess evidence, our conclusion rests on the following three unspoken assumptions:

• that our perceptions provide an accurate impression of reality

• that reality is structured according to the concepts by which we describe it

• that our rules of inference are reliable means of arriving at new truths about reality.

(See Justifying Historical Descriptions, 1.)

As McCullagh points out, rejecting any one of these assumptions “would introduce a quite massive dislocation into our system of beliefs about the world.” However, he also correctly observes that the validity of these underlying assumptions is not provable because we do not have access to reality apart from our beliefs and experiences of it. So can we safely rely on these assumptions that determine our thinking? Perhaps reality is not structured according to our concepts, and perhaps our rules of inference are not “reliable means of arriving at new truths about reality.” Perhaps Jesus’s resurrection really was a “massive dislocation” of our understanding of the world. Interestingly, Andrew Chester uses this same term when he describes the Apostle Paul’s experience of the risen Jesus as a “dramatic, socially and cognitively dislocating experience” (Messiah and Exaltation, 394–95).

Our personal assessment of Jesus’s resurrection therefore ultimately rests on untestable assumptions that we subconsciously make about the nature of reality. And only one fact makes the resurrection impossible to accept: that rising after death contravenes the laws of nature. However, while it is certainly contrary to nature that a person can rise from death, if that person was the Son of God, it would more surprising if God did not raise him up. Then instead of being rationally unacceptable, the unique and supra-natural event of Jesus’s resurrection would be a logical part of God’s cosmic redemptive plan for humankind as set out in the Old and New Testaments, forming the core of the Christian faith.