Jesus Was Resurrected

    As I've discussed, we know when the New Testament authors are reliable:

The Event or Concept Must Be Important.

    Uniquely among religions, Christianity directs us to look at one specific event. If Jesus was resurrected, then Christianity is probably true. We would certainly be required to study it in detail before deciding that it is wrong. If Jesus was not resurrected, Christianity is certainly false. You would be better off being a Muslim or a Jew, or perhaps something else. Some would say that Jesus has great value as a moral teacher, regardless of whether or not he was resurrected. This is simply false. If the apostles lied about the resurrection, then nothing in the New Testament can be trusted or be considered a useful moral guide. Without the resurrection, Christianity collapses.

There Must Be General Agreement among the Authors.

    Every author agrees about the truth of the resurrection. Every Gospel story leads up to it, with it as its conclusion. The letter writers speak of it frequently.

    Therefore, Jesus was resurrected.

Objection 1:

    You may say, "Hey..... Wait a minute....." In fact, I would expect most non-Christians to say this. The reason is simple. You are not able to accept the possibility of miracles. Reread the discussion of miracles for my response.

Objection 2:

    In my section on the reliability of the New Testament authors, I defend the statement that they would not make a mistake about an important event like this. However, because of its prevalence, I should specifically discuss the swoon theory. This theory states that Jesus didn't die, but went into a coma or something like it. He was then buried. Once he recovered, he showed himself to the disciples. They proceeded to horribly misinterpret the situation. There are two problems with this. The first is that Jesus would not stand for it. His disciples would be lying in his name. Read the Gospels, and you will see how Jesus would not be willing to do this. The second problem is that crucifixion is not something that you can just recover from in three days. If Jesus survived, he would be a crippled wreck of a man, which is not the sort of figure that would inspire the awe and devotion of his followers.

    I also should mention the hallucination theory. In this one, the five hundred or more people who saw him after his death were hallucinating. This contradicts everything that we know about hallucinations. They do not occur to large groups of people. This "hallucination" hung around for forty days, held conversations, ate, the whole shebang. A person who believes this theory has to invent a miracle in order to disprove a miracle. It does not gain them anything, and is not really plausible enough to warrant much discussion.

This page was last changed on 2011/08/27