<\/p>\n
If you had to summarize what Christians believe in as few words as possible, you could do worse than “He is risen.”<\/p>\n
In fact, the resurrection is so central to the faith that believers and nonbelievers alike often lose sight of it. In arguing over what Jesus said and what he meant by it and whether or not his moral prescriptions make sense in our “enlightened” 21st century, it’s easy to skip over the one simple, historical question at the heart of it all.<\/p>\n
Even ex-evangelists like Ehrman accept that Paul genuinely believed he had an encounter with the risen Jesus.<\/p>\n
Did the first-century Jewish leader known as Jesus of Nazareth, executed by Roman authorities in Judea circa A.D. 33, come back from the dead?<\/p>\n
If he didn’t, Christianity is nothing more than a nice set of lessons and aphorisms. If he did, well, even the staunchest anti-Christian has some explaining to do.<\/p>\n
He is risen.<\/em> It’s such an embarrassingly outlandish claim, and so obscured by the mists of time, that it is easy to see why even some Christians are tempted to hedge and say it’s a metaphor.<\/p>\n But when you look at the evidence, the \u201cit\u2019s just a story\u201d line gets harder to maintain.<\/p>\n Here are eight reasons why. Have a blessed Easter.<\/p>\n If Jesus\u2019 body were still in the grave, Christianity ends before it begins. The movement started in Jerusalem, within weeks of the crucifixion, under hostile scrutiny. Had the authorities been able to produce a body, they certainly would have.<\/p>\n Even the non-Christian historian Michael Grant acknowledged that historians, applying normal standards, cannot simply dismiss the empty tomb<\/a>. The earliest counterclaim (first reported in the Gospel of Matthew<\/a>) \u2014 that the disciples stole the body \u2014 concedes the point: The tomb was empty.<\/p>\n All four Gospels agree on an awkward detail: Women discovered the empty tomb first.<\/p>\n As even skeptical scholar Bart D. Ehrman has pointed out,<\/a> this is not the kind of detail early Christians would be likely to invent in a culture where female testimony carried less weight. If you\u2019re crafting a persuasive story, you don\u2019t start here.<\/p>\n Before the Resurrection, Jesus\u2019 followers were scattered, afraid, and in hiding. Afterward, they were publicly proclaiming that he had risen \u2014 at real personal cost, knowing it could mean persecution or even martyrdom.<\/p>\n New Testament scholar E.P. Sanders \u2014 hardly anyone’s idea of a biblical fundamentalist \u2014 wrote<\/a>: \u201cThat Jesus\u2019 followers (and later Paul) had resurrection experiences is, in my judgment, a fact. What the reality was that gave rise to the experiences I do not know.\u201d<\/p>\n In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul presents a creedal formula about Jesus\u2019 death and Resurrection that predates the Gospels:<\/p>\n For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve (1 Corinthians 15:3-5, NIV).<\/em><\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n New Testament scholar James D.G. Dunn<\/a> dates this material to within just a few years of the crucifixion. That\u2019s far too early for legend to develop, with no time for stories to evolve, circulate, and displace living eyewitnesses who could correct them.<\/p>\n We don\u2019t just have one Resurrection story. We have multiple early accounts<\/a> and traditions, including the four detailed narratives presented by the Gospels.<\/p>\n According to Richard Bauckham<\/a>, the Gospels are best understood as closely tied to eyewitness testimony. Why? Because they read like accounts anchored to real people \u2014 named witnesses, stable core details, and traditions formed while eyewitnesses were still alive to check them.<\/p>\n Two of the most important early Christians weren\u2019t early believers at all: James and Paul the apostle.<\/p>\n Even ex-evangelists like Ehrman accept<\/a> that Paul genuinely believed he had an encounter with the risen Jesus. You can argue about what it was, but not that it didn’t happen.<\/p>\n Christianity didn\u2019t grow slowly as a tale imported from some distant region. It took off in Jerusalem, the very place where Jesus had been publicly executed and buried \u2014 and the place where its radical claims could most readily be checked, challenged, and shut down.<\/p>\n New Testament scholar Larry Hurtado has shown<\/a> how rapidly early devotion to the risen, divine Jesus emerged \u2014 far earlier than standard models of religious evolution would predict.<\/p>\n It\u2019s common to argue that Christianity borrowed the resurrection from pagan myths \u2014 usually that of Mithras, deity of a Greco-Roman mystery cult.<\/p>\n But the parallels don\u2019t hold. The confusion comes from the fact that Mithraic imagery includes themes of cosmic renewal and salvation tied to the famous bull-slaying scene<\/a> \u2014 language that can sound, at a distance, like death and rebirth. In the actual myth, however, Mithras does not die and return to life; rather, killing the sacred bull creates new life and order. He is a conquering figure, not a dying and rising savior.<\/p>\n Scholar of religion<\/a> Tryggve N.D. Mettinger \u2014 himself no Christian apologist \u2014 concluded that while some ancient myths involve dying and rising figures, none match<\/a> the Jewish, historical, bodily resurrection claim of Christianity.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If you had to summarize what Christians believe in as few words as possible, you could do worse than “He is risen.” In fact, the resurrection is so central to the faith that believers and nonbelievers alike often lose sight of it. In arguing over what Jesus said and what he meant by it and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5863,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-5862","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-conservative-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/conservative-politics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5862","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/conservative-politics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/conservative-politics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/conservative-politics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/conservative-politics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5862"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/conservative-politics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5862\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/conservative-politics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5863"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/conservative-politics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5862"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/conservative-politics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5862"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/conservative-politics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5862"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}1. The tomb really was empty<\/h2>\n
2. The first witnesses were the least credible<\/h2>\n
3. The disciples’ behavior doesn\u2019t make sense otherwise<\/h2>\n
4. The earliest testimony is too early to be legend<\/h2>\n
5. There are multiple, overlapping eyewitness claims<\/h2>\n
6. Skeptics and enemies didn’t stay that way<\/h2>\n
7. It spread fast, in the place where it could most easily be disproved<\/h2>\n
8. The \u201cpagan copycat\u201d theory falls apart under scrutiny<\/h2>\n