"Did Jesus rise from the dead?" (Class 9 recap)

On Monday January 12th we met for our ninth class to discuss the case for the historical resurrection of Jesus from the ninth chapter of On Guard. We started off by reviewing the four arguments for the existence of God that we've studied and then began discussing how we'd make a case for Jesus' resurrection. One question we brought up is how can we treat the New Testament (NT) when talking to a non-believer about Jesus' resurrection. If/when we use the NT to show evidence surrounding Jesus' resurrection the non-believer will likely discard the NT because we treat it as holy, inspired, and inerrant and thus he won't view it as a neutral source. And so this is where we need to be able to defend the general reliability of the NT. We also need to remind ourselves what our strategy is for making a case for the historical resurrection of Jesus. Our overall strategy is made up of two steps. In step one we establish evidence that needs to be explained. In step two we evaluate hypotheses to explain the evidence. So in step one we don't necessarily need to make an argument for the inerrancy of Scripture. The non-believer might have questions about certain details in the gospel but we need to focus the attention on the non-controversial, established facts. What are those facts? Well the three facts that most New Testament historians (Christian andnon-Christian) agree with is: The fact of the empty tomb The fact of the post-mortem appearances The fact of the genuine belief of the disciples The next step of the case is to evaluate competing hypotheses to explain the evidences. We briefly discussed the Conspiracy Theory (that the disciples stole the body and lied about Jesus' resurrection) and identified the lack of explanatory power because it basically denies the agreed evidence that the disciples genuinely believed the resurrection and it also doesn't explain why they would make women the discoverers of the empty tomb in their stories. It also is implausible because a first-century Jew would never think of fabricating a resurrection story.  We recognized the importance of viewing these hypotheses from the perspective of a first-century Jew. To them the Messiah was meant to come and establish an earthly kingdom, not get murdered by crucifixion. They also would have thought that the death of a righteous man, like Jesus, would have landed him in the bosom of Abraham; they wouldn't think of him being physically resurrected. In fact, their concept of resurrection was an event at the end of history where all the righteous would be raised. They had no concept of the resurrection of a single person in the middle history. Knowing this helps understand the implausibility of numerous hypotheses like the Conspiracy Theory and the Hallucination Theory. Finally we talked about the hypothesis that the disciples offered: that God raised Jesus from the dead. This hypothesis fits a lot of the evaluation criteria that we discussed. The only challenge with this hypothesis is believing in God and the possibility of miracles. And that's where the first section of the class, on the arguments for the existence of God, come into play! Remember, we're not talking about the resurrection of some anonymous person. The life, death, and ministry of Jesus highlights the resurrection. It charges it with such significance because Jesus made such radical claims to be the Messiah and in equal standing with God Himself. If God really did raise Jesus from the dead then it vindicates all of Jesus' claims. He is who he said he was, "the light of the world, whoever follows [him] will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life" (John 8:12).

"Was Jesus Bodily Raised from the Dead?" Check out this link to a debate on the topic of Jesus' resurrection between William Lane Craig and James Crossley of the Jesus Seminar.

The presentation from Monday is available digitally on the website here. Our next meeting will be the final group study of On Guard! Next time we will meet on January 26th, same place, same time (starting at 6:45pm with coffee, desserts, and fellowship), to discuss the topic "Is Jesus the Only Way to God?" Please read through chapter 10 before then and jot down some thoughts and questions for discussion next time we meet. If you have any questions or thoughts along the way, please feel free to shoot me an email. Also consider inviting a friend, all are welcome!