Over 2 billion people around the globe will tomorrow celebrate the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. While this is not a religious website by any means, the story of Jesus —particularly his death on a Roman crucifix and return to life three days later —is the best known and mass circulated over the last two thousand years. But is the story fact or fiction?
First things first. I am a Christian and do believe in the Resurrection. But that wasn’t always the case.
In my late teens and early twenties I was an avowed atheist. I considered the story the Resurrection of Jesus to be complete rubbish. Yet it is that story which is today the cornerstone of my faith — as it is for all Christianity.
And despite my faith and my confession, I am still at times wracked with doubt. The story seems to hard to believe. I must be a fool. A man coming back to life after three days just doesn’t make sense. That’s something the strongest believer and the most ardent skeptic can both agree on.
I totally get the skepticism. If it weren’t for some powerful supernatural experiences I’ve had, it would all be quite easy to forget the whole thing. At times I struggle with great doubts. An internal warfare takes place within me. The simplest way I can describe it as is a crisis of faith.
Over the course of the last two weeks I’ve been going through one such crisis. I’ve felt overwhelmed working to get Dad Was Right out to the world, moving my business in a new direction, and at times feeling profoundly alone. It made me question everything. My writing. My work. My relationships. And yes, my faith.
Wednesday night I wanted to go to the movies. But instead of finally taking in a showing of Logan, I wound up buying a ticket for The Case for Christ based on Lee Strobel’s book of the same name. As the movie started I quickly found that the story of Lee Strobel spoke directly to both my mind and my spirit.
An ambitious journalist at the Chicago Tribune and a staunch atheist, Strobel set out to debunk Christianity after his wife’s conversion. He figured if he could prove that Jesus never died and rose again from the grave, then the entire religion was based on a lie.
He was right. If the Resurrection didn’t happen, then there was no spiritual basis for Christianity at all.
Yet a funny thing happened. Lee Strobel’s investigation couldn’t disprove the Resurrection. Instead it led him to faith in Jesus and his own conversion as a follower of Christ.
As someone who has enjoyed the study of history and been around politics my whole life, I too like to know what really happened in the past and am quite skeptical of many claims. Therefore I found Strobel’s investigation and his journey quite fascinating and to obviously relatable.
It also helped me overcome my crisis of faith and restore my confidence in the accuracy of the story of the Resurrection of Jesus.
As fantastical as it may seem, the story of the Resurrection while conveyed to us by multiple human and therefore flawed accounts, is backed up by an incredible amount of evidence. It’s the evidence that blows my doubts and objections out of the water.
Couldn’t the story of Jesus be completely made up?
Of course it could be a made up story. Anything is possible right? So if the story of Jesus is possibly fiction, then it stands to reason that the story of Jesus is possibly true.
The real question to consider isn’t whether or not whether something is possible, but rather if it is probable. There is plenty of evidence to support that a man named Jesus from the area of Galilee lived about two millennia ago.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean the stories told about him — the four gospels — are true and accurate.
If the gospels are works for fiction, then they would surely fit the storytelling conventions of the 1st Century Jewish, Greek, and Roman cultures. They don’t.
While you and I are inundated with books, movies, and television shows that seem realistic, even if they are set in a galaxy far, far away, that wasn’t how stories were written or told back then. Realistic fiction is a relatively new and didn’t exist at the time of Jesus or the writing of the gospels.
C.S. Lewis the scholar and author who gave up his atheism for Christianity, stated this very clearly.
I have been reading poems, romances, vision literature, legends and myths all my life. I know what they are like. I know none of them are like this. Of this text there are only two possible views. Either this is reportage…or else, some unknown writer….without known predecessors or successors, suddenly anticipated the whole technique of modern novelistic, realistic narrative.
That still doesn’t mean the story of the Resurrection is true.
Oddly, enough it is the details of the gospels relating to the Resurrection that push the story much more into the realm of fact than fiction.
First, the followers of Jesus didn’t stick around to see what would happen after he was sent to the cross, let alone to steal his body and create the gospel narrative.
Jesus was dead and they didn’t want to be picked up by the Romans and executed as well. Of his apostles, only John was present at the Crucifixion. They others were nowhere to be seen. They’d run for the hills.
But then the craziest thing happened.
All of a sudden the very same men who had abandoned Jesus and denied they were his follower (Simon Peter I’m looking at you) stood up to preach and spread the story of Jesus like there was no tomorrow. Which was literal. They told the story of Jesus and the Resurrection to the point of their own death for doing so.
Why would the people who denied a relationship with Jesus before he was sent to the cross because they feared imprisonment and death do a complete 180 and proclaim their relationship with Jesus after he was killed?
That big of a change in mind and discovery of such amazing courage that once didn’t exist is incredible, if not impossible to believe.
But if you’d seen your friend and your teacher walking around and talking three days after you saw him die, wouldn’t that change everything for you? The saying goes that “seeing is believing.” They saw and suddenly they believed.
How do we know these witnesses were reliable?
In the world of the 1st Century, women were second class people. They were not considered reliable witnesses. In fact their testimony was not admissible in court.
Yet in each of the gospel accounts, it is women who discover the empty tomb of Jesus, not his male disciples.
This may seem like a minor or contradictory point, but it actually adds to the credibility of the accounts.
First, if the disciples were going to make up a story about their rabbi rising from the dead, they would have used more credible witnesses. They would have given themselves a better role in the tale. They would have told everyone that they had found the tomb empty, just as Jesus had predicted. They would have sidelined the women.
But that’s not the story that’s told.
The men didn’t go to the tomb until after the women told them that Jesus’ body wasn’t there. These guys weren’t waiting for Jesus to rise on the third day, despite him telling them that a few times. They thought that the movement he was launching had ended that Friday on the cross on Calvary.
Second, and this might also seem contradictory, but the four gospel accounts vary to some degree about which women were at the tomb that Sunday morning and what exactly happened.
Obviously the gospel writers couldn’t get their stories straight. But that makes the eye witness accounts even more credible historically.
In court testimony and police investigations, eye witness accounts of the same event will always have a degree of discrepancy. That’s because we each process and recall things a bit differently.
When the stories of the witnesses match too closely, that’s when authorities know there’s an issue here. When a group of people decide to “get their story straight” it becomes noticeable. It’s the central event witnessed that’s important even as some specific details will not always be consistent.
But didn’t all of these people want Jesus to live again?
It’s a fairer statement to say that the followers of Jesus didn’t want him to die.
When Jesus told them he would die and rise again on the third day, Peter protested this. It earned him a stern rebuke from Jesus. Peter didn’t understand the ultimate purpose behind the sacrifice Jesus was going to make.
As I already stated, his followers weren’t hanging around the tomb waiting for the stone to be rolled away and Jesus to walk out. They had scattered and gone back to work. Even if they wanted Jesus to come back to life, they weren’t expecting it.
And as it turns out, the person who wound up writing what makes up most of the New Testament was far from someone who wanted Jesus to return to life.
Saul of Taurus, who would become the apostle Paul, was committed to stamping out the followers of Jesus. He held the coats of the men who stoned the apostle Stephen to death. He arrested and persecuted Christians. He wanted them to shut up about Jesus and the Resurrection. If they didn’t, he’d make sure they’d pay the price.
Then this tormentor of the early Christians changed. He went from being Christianity’s chief persecutor to it’s primary promoter. He planted churches all over the Roman Empire. He couldn’t shut up about Jesus and the Resurrection. He wound up being executed for the professing his belief in the resurrected Jesus.
Paul also wrote in one of his letters that the risen Jesus had been seen by over 500 people after his death. Many of them he noted were still alive for skeptics to go and talk to. That’s a lot of eye witnesses to debunk.
What if Jesus survived the cross?
Jesus surviving the crucifixion could explain why people saw him after they thought he was dead, right?
There’s only one huge problem with this: Who survived a Roman crucifixion? The list of names adds up to about zero.
First, Jesus was scourged by Roman soldiers. This wasn’t just a whipping. It was done with a cat of nine tails. Each strand of the whip with bone and metal attached to it. When it hits the victim, it tears the flesh and muscle from the body.
Then Jesus was nailed to his cross. The way the arms and the chest muscles are pulled for a victim of crucifixion, it makes it nearly impossible to breathe. The victim would need to pull themselves up with the strength of their impaled hands and legs to take a breath.
Even if Jesus had survived such torture, the Roman soldiers wouldn’t have let him live and be carried away. The penalty for letting a prisoner escape was death. The Romans were some of the most efficient killers the world has ever known. They made sure Jesus died on that cross, stabbing him with a spear to ensure he was dead.
When his side was pierced with a spear by the Roman soldiers, blood and water came out. This was likely pericardial fluid that would have occurred during asphyxiation.
It’s safe to say that if Pontius Pilate sentenced Jesus to die by means of crucifixion, Jesus died by crucifixion.
That’s just the beginning of the story.
Three days later Jesus rose from the dead. He did this for a purpose. It was part of a plan.
He went willingly to the Cross because God wanted to have a relationship with his human creations and to fix the broken world he created.
One act of selfless sacrifice and obedience
It’s a beautiful story and one celebrated and remembered on Easter Sunday.
And yes it’s a fantastical story and one that is at times extremely hard to believe.
But if we can believe that God created the expanse of the universe and every sub-atomic particle within, then can’t we also believe that He’d give up his son Jesus so that all of his creations could be restored and reconciled to him?