Study Questions
Chapter 4
The resurrection
of Christ
We have considered the extravagant claims which Jesus made and the selfless character which he displayed. We now come to examine the evidence for his historical resurrection from the dead.
Clearly, if it is true, the resurrection is enormously significant. If Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead, then he was beyond dispute a unique figure. It is not a question of his spiritual survival, nor of his physical resuscitation, but of his conquest of death and his resurrection to a new plane of existence altogether. We do not know of anyone else who has had this experience. Modern people are therefore as scornful as the philosophers in Athens who heard Paul preach on the Areopagus: ‘When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some of them sneered.’
The argument is not that his resurrection establishes his deity, but that it fits with it. It is only to be expected that a supernatural person would come to and leave the earth in a supernatural way. This is in fact what the New Testament teaches and what, because of this, the church has always believed. His birth was natural, but his conception was supernatural. His death was natural, but his resurrection was supernatural. His miraculous conception and resurrection do not prove his deity, but they are consistent with it.
Jesus himself never predicted his death without adding that he would rise, and described his coming resurrection as a ‘sign’. Paul, at the beginning of his letter to the Romans, wrote that Jesus was ‘appointed the Son of God in power by his resurrection from the dead’ (TNIV), and the earliest sermons of the apostles recorded in the Acts repeatedly assert that it was through the resurrection that God reversed the human court’s verdict on Jesus and completely vindicated him.
In writing about the resurrection, Luke, who is known to have been a painstaking and accurate historian, says that there are ‘many convincing proofs’. We may not feel able to go as far as Thomas Arnold, who called the resurrection ‘the best attested fact in history’, but certainly many impartial investigators have judged the evidence to be extremely good. For instance, Sir Edward Clarke KC wrote to the Rev. E. L. Macassey:
As a lawyer I have made a prolonged study of the evidences for the events of the first Easter Day. To me the evidence is conclusive, and over and over again in the High Court I have secured the verdict on evidence not nearly so compelling. Inference follows on evidence, and a truthful witness is always artless and disdains effect. The Gospel evidence for the resurrection is of this class, and as a lawyer I accept it unreservedly as the testimony of truthful men to facts they were able to substantiate.
What is this evidence? It can be summarized by making four statements.
The body had gone
The resurrection accounts in the four Gospels begin with the visit of certain women to the tomb early on Easter Sunday morning. When they arrived they were stunned to discover that the body of Jesus had disappeared.
A few weeks later the apostles began to preach that Jesus had risen. It was the main thrust of their message. But they could hardly have expected anyone to believe them if the body of Jesus was still in Joseph’s tomb – just a few minutes’ walk away! No. The tomb was empty. The body had gone. There can be no doubt about this fact. The question is how to explain it.
First, there is the theory that the women went to the wrong tomb. It was still dark, and they were overwhelmed with sorrow. The claim is that they could easily have made a mistake.
This sounds plausible on the surface, but it doesn’t stand up. To begin with, it cannot have been completely dark. It is true that John says the women came ‘while it was still dark’. But in Matthew 28:1 it is ‘at dawn’, while Luke says it was ‘very early in the morning’, and Mark distinctly states that it was ‘just after sunrise’.
Furthermore, these women weren’t fools. At least two of them had seen for themselves where Joseph and Nicodemus had laid the body. They had even watched the whole process of burial, ‘sitting there opposite the tomb’. The same two (Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Joses) returned at dawn, bringing with them Salome, Joanna and ‘the other women’, so that if one mistook the path or the tomb, she is likely to have been corrected by the others. And if Mary Magdalene went to the wrong place the first time, she can hardly have repeated her error when she returned in the full light of morning and stayed on in the garden till Jesus met her.
Besides, it wasn’t mere sentiment that brought them to the tomb so early in the morning. They had a job to do. They had bought spices and were going to complete the anointing of their Lord’s body, since the timing of the burial so close to the Sabbath had meant that they couldn’t complete the task properly two days previously. These devoted and businesslike women were not the kind to be easily deceived or to give up on what they had come to do. Again, even if they mistook the tomb, would Peter and John, who ran to verify their story, make the same mistake, and others who doubtless came later, including Joseph and Nicodemus themselves?
The second explanation of the empty tomb is the coma theory. Those who uphold this view maintain that Jesus did not actually die on the cross, but only lost consciousness. He then revived in the tomb, left it and later made himself known to the disciples.
This theory simply bristles with problems. It is thoroughly perverse. The evidence entirely contradicts it. Pilate was indeed surprised that Jesus was already dead, but he was sufficiently convinced by the centurion’s assurance to give Joseph permission to remove the body from the cross. The reason the centurion was so certain is that he must have been present when ‘one of the soldiers pierced Jesus’ side with a spear, bringing a sudden flow of blood and water’. So Joseph and Nicodemus took down his body, wrapped it in strips of linen and laid it in Joseph’s new tomb.
Are we then seriously to believe that Jesus had just temporarily lost consciousness? That after the rigours and pains of trial, mockery, flogging and crucifixion he could survive thirty-six hours in a stone tomb with neither warmth nor food nor medical care? That he could then rally sufficiently to perform the superhuman feat of shifting the boulder which was in front of the mouth of the tomb, and this without disturbing the Roman guard? That then, weak and sickly and hungry, he could appear to the disciples in such a way as to give them the impression that he had vanquished death? That he could go on to claim that he had died and risen, could send them out all over the world and promise to be with them to the end of time? That he could live somewhere in hiding for forty days, making occasional surprise appearances, and then finally disappear without any explanation? Such a view is incredible.
Thirdly, there is the idea that thieves stole the body. There is no shred of evidence for this supposition. Nor is it explained how thieves could have fooled the Roman guard. Nor can one imagine why thieves should have taken the body, but left the strips of linen it was wrapped in, nor what possible motive they could have had for doing such a thing.
Fourthly, it has been argued that the disciples removed the body. This, Matthew tells us, is the rumour which the Jewish authorities spread right from the start. He describes how Pilate, having given permission to Joseph to remove Christ’s body, received a deputation of chief priests and Pharisees, who said:
Sir, we remember that while he was still alive that deceiver said, ‘After three days I will rise again.’ So give the order for the tomb to be made secure until the third day. Otherwise, his disciples may come and steal the body and tell the people that he has been raised from the dead. This last deception will be worse than the first.
Pilate agreed. ‘Go, make the tomb as secure as you know how,’ he said, and so they ‘made the tomb secure by putting a seal on the stone and posting the guard’. Matthew goes on to describe how the stone, the seal and the guard could not prevent the resurrection, and how the guard went into the city to report to the chief priests what had happened. After consultation they bribed the soldiers and told them:
You are to say, ‘His disciples came during the night and stole him away while we were asleep.’ If this report gets to the governor, we will satisfy him and keep you out of trouble. So the soldiers took the money and did as they were instructed. And this story has been widely circulated among the Jews to this very day.
But the story does not hold water. Is it likely that a highly disciplined detachment of guards, whether Roman or Jewish, would all fall asleep on duty? And if any of them stayed awake, how did the women get past them and roll back the stone?
Even supposing the disciples could have succeeded in removing the body of Jesus, there is a significant psychological consideration which is enough to pour cold water on the whole theory. We learn from the first part of the Acts of the Apostles that the resurrection was what they concentrated on in their early preaching. ‘You killed him, but God raised him, and we are witnesses,’ they kept saying. Are we then to believe that they were proclaiming what they knew to be a deliberate lie? If they had themselves taken the body of Jesus, to go on and preach that he had been raised from the dead would be knowingly to spread a planned deception. But the thing is that they didn’t only preach it; they suffered for it. They were prepared to go to prison, to be flogged – and even to be put to death. And for what? Something they knew to be a blatant untruth?
This simply does not ring true. It is so unlikely as to be virtually impossible. If anything is clear from the Gospels and the Acts, it is that the apostles were sincere. They may have been deceived, if you like, but they were not deceivers. Hypocrites and martyrs are not made of the same stuff.
The fifth and perhaps the least unreasonable (though still hypothetical) explanation of the disappearance of Christ’s body is that the Roman or Jewish authorities took it into their own custody. They would certainly have had sufficient motive for doing so. They had heard that Jesus had talked about being raised from the dead, and were afraid that someone would pretend it had happened. So (the argument runs), in order to forestall trickery, they took the precaution of confiscating the corpse.
But when it is examined, this hypothetical reconstruction of what happened also falls apart. We have already seen that, not long after Jesus’ death, the Christians were boldly proclaiming his resurrection. The news spread rapidly. This new movement threatened to undermine the foundations of Judaism and to disturb the peace of Jerusalem. The Jews feared conversions; the Romans were apprehensive about riots. The authorities had one obvious course of action available to them. They could produce the remains of the body and publish a statement of what they had done.
Instead, they were silent and resorted to violence. They arrested the apostles, threatened them, flogged them, imprisoned them, belittled them, plotted against them, and even killed some of them. But all this was entirely unnecessary if they had in their own possession the dead body of Jesus. The church was founded on the resurrection. Disprove the resurrection, and the church would have collapsed. But they couldn’t, because they didn’t have the body. What the authorities didn’t say is as clear a pointer to the truth of the resurrection as what the apostles did say.
What the authorities didn’t say is as clear a pointer to the truth of the resurrection as what the apostles did say.
These are the theories which have been invented to try to explain the emptiness of the tomb and the disappearance of the body. None of them is satisfactory. None of them can be backed up by any historical evidence. Since there is no adequate alternative explanation, is it not entirely reasonable to prefer the uncomplicated and restrained account we find in the Gospels, setting out the events of the first Easter Day? The body of Jesus was not removed by people; it was raised by God.
The graveclothes were undisturbed
It is a remarkable fact that the accounts which say that the body of Jesus had gone also tell us that the strips of linen used to wrap the body had not gone. It is John who lays particular emphasis on this fact, for he went with Peter on that dramatic early morning race to the tomb. The account he gives of this incident (20:1–10) bears the unmistakable marks of first-hand experience. He got there before Peter, but on arriving at the tomb he did no more than look in, until Peter came and entered it. ‘Finally the other disciple, who had reached the tomb first, also went inside. He saw and believed.’ The question is: what did he see which made him believe? The story suggests that it was not just the absence of the body, but the presence of the strips of linen and, in particular, the fact that they were undisturbed.
Let us try to reconstruct the story. John tells us (19:38–42) that, while Joseph asked Pilate for the body of Jesus, Nicodemus ‘brought a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about seventy-five pounds. Taking Jesus’ body, the two of them wrapped it, with the spices, in strips of linen. This was in accordance with Jewish burial customs.’ That is to say, as they wound the linen ‘bandages’ round his body, they sprinkled the powdered spices into the folds. A separate cloth will have been used for his head. In this way they wrapped his body and head completely, leaving just his face and neck bare, according to oriental custom. They then laid the body on a stone slab which had been hewn out of the side of the cave-tomb.
Now supposing we had been present in the tomb when the resurrection of Jesus actually took place. What would we have seen? Should we have seen Jesus begin to move, and then yawn and stretch and get up? No. We do not believe that he returned to this life. He did not recover consciousness after a faint. He had died, and he rose again. His was a resurrection, not a resuscitation. We believe that he passed miraculously from death into an altogether new sphere of existence. What then should we have seen, had we been there? We should suddenly have noticed that the body had disappeared. It would have been transformed into something new and different and wonderful. It would have passed through the graveclothes, as it was later to pass through closed doors, leaving them untouched and almost undisturbed. Almost, but not quite. For the strips of linen, under the weight of all those spices, once the support of the body had been removed, would have subsided or collapsed, and would now be lying flat. A gap would have appeared between the strips of linen used for the body and the cloth wrapped around the head, where his face and neck had been. And the head cloth itself, because of the complicated criss-cross pattern of the bandages, might well have retained its concave shape, a crumpled turban, but with no head inside it.
A careful study of the text of John’s narrative suggests that it is just these three characteristics of the discarded graveclothes which he saw. First, he saw the strips of linen ‘lying there’. The word is repeated twice, and the first time it is placed in an emphatic position in the Greek sentence. We might translate, ‘He saw, as they were lying (or ‘collapsed’), the strips of linen.’ Next, the head cloth was ‘still lying in its place, separate from the linen’ (TNIV). This is unlikely to mean that it had been bundled up and tossed into a corner. It lay still on the stone slab, but was separated from the body cloths by a noticeable space. Third, this same head cloth was ‘lying in its place...’ This last word has been translated ‘twirled’, a word which aptly describes the rounded shape which the empty head cloth still preserved.
It is not hard to imagine the sight which greeted the eyes of the apostles when they reached the tomb: the stone slab, the collapsed graveclothes, the shell of the head cloth and the gap between the two. No wonder they ‘saw and believed’. A glance at these graveclothes both proved the reality of what had happened and indicated the nature of the resurrection. The strips of linen hadn’t been touched, folded or manipulated by any human being. They were like a discarded chrysalis from which the butterfly has emerged.
That the state of the graveclothes was intended to be visible, corroborative evidence for the resurrection is further suggested by the fact that Mary Magdalene (who had returned to the tomb after bringing the news to Peter and John) ‘bent over to look into the tomb and saw two angels in white, seated where Jesus’ body had been, one at the head and the other at the foot’. Presumably this means that they sat on the stone slab with the graveclothes between them. Both Matthew and Mark add that one of them said, ‘He is not here; he has risen, just as he said. Come and see the place where he lay.’ Whether or not we believe in angels, these allusions to the place where Jesus had been laid down, emphasized both by where the angels were and by what the angels said, at least confirm what the Gospel writers thought. The position of the strips of linen and the absence of the body were both witnesses together to his resurrection.
Jesus was seen
The Gospels include some extraordinary stories of how Jesus appeared to his disciples after his resurrection. We are told of ten separate appearances of the risen Lord to what Peter calls ‘chosen witnesses’. It is said that he appeared to Mary Magdalene, to the women returning from the tomb, to Peter, to two disciples on the road to Emmaus, to the ten gathered in the upper room, to the eleven including Thomas a week later, to ‘more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time’, probably on the mountainside in Galilee, to James, to some disciples including Peter, Thomas, Nathanael, James and John by the side of Lake Galilee, and to many on the Mount of Olives near Bethany at the time of the ascension. Paul adds himself at the end of his list of those who saw the risen Jesus in 1 Corinthians 15, referring to his experience on the Damascus Road. And since Luke tells us at the beginning of the Acts that Jesus ‘presented himself to them and gave many convincing proofs that he was alive’ and ‘appeared to them [the apostles] over a period of forty days’, there may well have been other appearances, of which no record has survived.
We cannot lightly dismiss this body of living evidence about the resurrection. We must find some explanation of what these accounts are telling us. Only three are possible. One is that they were inventions; the second that they were hallucinations; the third that they were true.
Were they inventions? There is no need to devote much space to repudiating this suggestion. The resurrection appearances cannot be deliberate inventions. For one thing, the narratives are restrained and simple; for another, they are graphic and brought to life by the detailed touches which sound like the work of an eyewitness. The stories of the race to the tomb in John 20 and of the walk to Emmaus in Luke 24 are too vivid and real to have been invented.
Besides, if they are inventions, they’re certainly not very good ones. If we had wanted to concoct the resurrection, we could probably have done much better ourselves! We should have been careful to avoid the complicated jigsaw puzzle of events which the four Gospels together produce. We should have got rid of, or at least watered down, the doubts and fears of the apostles. We should probably have included a dramatic account of the resurrection itself, describing the power and glory of the Son of God as he snapped the chains of death and burst out of the tomb in triumph. But no-one saw it happen, and we have no description of it. Again, we would have chosen someone with a better reputation than Mary Magdalene as the first witness.
Actually, there is an even weightier objection to the theory of invention than the naïve simplicity of the narratives. It is the obvious fact, which we have already mentioned, that the apostles, together with the Gospel writers in particular and the early church in general, were utterly convinced that Jesus had risen. The whole New Testament breathes an atmosphere of certainty and conquest. Its writers may have been, if you like, tragically misled; they were definitely not deliberately misleading.
If these accounts were not inventions, were the appearances themselves hallucinations? This opinion has been widely held and confidently expressed; and of course hallucinations are not an uncommon phenomenon. A hallucination is the ‘apparent perception of an external object when no such object is present’, and is associated most frequently with someone who is suffering from some form of mental ill health. Most of us have known people who see things and hear voices, and live sometimes or always in an imaginary world of their own. It is simply not credible to claim that the apostles were unbalanced people like this. Mary Magdalene may have been, but hardly blustering Peter and doubting Thomas.
It is true that hallucinations can occur in people who are otherwise quite ordinary and normal, but such cases are usually associated with two particular characteristics. First, they happen as the climax to a period of exaggerated wishful thinking. Second, the conditions of time, place and mood are favourable. There must be both a strong inward desire and a set of predisposing outward circumstances.
When we look at the Gospel narratives of the resurrection, however, both these factors are missing. Far from wishful thinking, it was just the opposite. When the women first found the tomb empty, they were ‘trembling and bewildered’, they fled from the scene and they were ‘afraid’. When Mary Magdalene and the other women reported that Jesus was alive, we read that the apostles ‘did not believe the women, because their words seemed to them like nonsense’. When Jesus himself came and stood among them ‘they were startled and frightened, thinking they saw a ghost’, so that Jesus ‘rebuked them for their lack of faith and their stubborn refusal to believe’. Thomas was adamant in his refusal to believe unless he could actually see and touch the nail-wounds. When Jesus later met the eleven and others on a mountain in Galilee, ‘they worshipped him; but some doubted’. There was no wishful thinking here, no naïve credulity, no blind acceptance. Far from being gullible and easily led, the disciples were cautious, sceptical and ‘slow to believe’. They were not susceptible to hallucinations. Nor would strange visions have satisfied them. Their faith was grounded upon the hard facts of experience that could be verified.
Not only this, but the outwardly favourable circumstances were missing too. Had the appearances all taken place in one or two particularly sacred places, hallowed by memories of Jesus, and had those who saw him been expecting to do so, our suspicions might well be aroused. If we had only the story of the appearances in the upper room, we should have good reason to doubt and ask questions. It’s not hard to imagine the eleven disciples gathering in the special place where Jesus had spent some of his last hours with them. We can picture them keeping his place vacant, talking together over old times and remembering his promises to return. It’s not too much of a leap to think of them beginning to wonder if he might come back after all, and then hoping that he would, until the eagerness of their expectation was rewarded by his sudden appearance. It would be a cruel delusion, yes, but an understandable one.
But this was not the case. Indeed, an investigation of the ten appearances reveals a striking variety in the circumstances of person, place and mood in which they occurred. He was seen by individuals alone (Mary Magdalene, Peter and James), by small groups and by more than five hundred people together. He appeared in the garden of the tomb, near Jerusalem, in the upper room, on the road to Emmaus, by the lake of Galilee, on a Galilee mountain and on the Mount of Olives.
If there was variety in person and place, there was also variety in mood. Mary Magdalene was weeping; the other women were afraid and astonished; Peter was full of remorse, and Thomas of scepticism. The Emmaus pair were distracted by the events of the week and the disciples in Galilee by their fishing. Yet through their doubts and fears, through their unbelief and preoccupation, the risen Lord made himself known to them.
It is unreasonable to dismiss these appearances of Jesus as hallucinations being experienced by people with disturbed minds. So, if they were neither inventions nor hallucinations, the only alternative left is that they actually happened. The risen Lord was seen.
The disciples were changed
Perhaps the transformation of the disciples of Jesus is the greatest evidence of all for the resurrection, because it is entirely uncontrived. They do not invite us to look at themselves, as they invite us to look at the empty tomb and the collapsed graveclothes and the Lord whom they had seen. We can see the change in them without being asked to look. The men who figure in the pages of the Gospels are new and different men in the Acts of the Apostles, the New Testament book which tells the story of the first Christians. The death of their Master left them despondent, disillusioned, and near to despair. But in the Acts they emerge as those who risk their lives for the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and who turn the world upside down.
What has brought about such a change? How can we account for their new faith and power, joy and love? There’s no doubt that the events of Pentecost and the coming of the Holy Spirit had a lot to do with it. But the Holy Spirit came only when Jesus had risen and returned to heaven. It is as if the resurrection was the key which unlocked extraordinary moral and spiritual power. Two examples stand out.
The first is Simon Peter. The story of the trial and death of Jesus has been a complete nightmare for him. He has denied Christ three times. He has cursed and sworn as if he had never known the gentle influence of Jesus in his life. He has gone out into the night to weep bitterly. When Jesus is dead, he joins the others in the upper room, behind barred doors ‘for fear of the Jews’, and is utterly dejected.
But when we turn over one or two pages in the Bible, we see him standing, perhaps on the steps outside the very same house in Jerusalem, preaching so boldly and so powerfully to a vast crowd that three thousand people believe in Christ and are baptized. We turn on to the next chapters of the Acts and we watch him defying the very Sanhedrin who had condemned Jesus to death just a few weeks earlier, happy to be counted worthy to suffer shame for his name, and later calmly sleeping in his cell on the night before his expected execution.
He is a new man. The shifting sands have been blown away; true to the meaning of his nickname, ‘Peter’, he is a real rock now. What has made the difference?
Or take James, who later occupied a position of leadership in the Jerusalem church. He is one of ‘the brothers of the Lord’, who are represented throughout the Gospels as not believing in Jesus: ‘Even his brothers did not believe in him.’ But when we reach the first chapter of the Acts, the list which Luke gives of the disciples gathered together ends with the words ‘and...his brothers’. James is evidently a believer now. What has made the difference? What convinced him? Perhaps we have the clue we are seeking in 1 Corinthians 15:7 where Paul, cataloguing those who had seen the risen Jesus, adds ‘he appeared to James’.
It was the resurrection which transformed Peter’s fear into courage, and James’s doubt into faith. It was the resurrection which changed the Jewish Sabbath into the Christian Sunday. It was the resurrection which changed Saul the Pharisee into Paul the apostle, the fanatical persecutor into a preacher of the very faith he previously tried to destroy. ‘Last of all’, Paul wrote, ‘he appeared to me also.’
These are the strands of the evidence for the resurrection. The body had disappeared. The graveclothes remained undisturbed. The Lord was seen. And the disciples were changed. There is no adequate explanation of these events other than the great Christian affirmation: ‘The Lord is risen indeed.’
Over these last three chapters we have undertaken a careful investigation of the most absorbing personality of history, a modest carpenter from Nazareth who became a peasant preacher and died a criminal’s death.
Added together, the weight of all this evidence is pretty impressive. It paves the way for the last step of faith where we come to bow before Jesus and say, along with doubting Thomas, ‘My Lord and my God.’