11 Did Jesus really rise from the dead?

If Jesus really did rise from the dead that first Easter Sunday, then people everywhere must take his claims to be God very seriously.

The following four facts of history are accepted by the majority of scholars, both religious and secular.

First, Jesus died on a Roman cross on Friday and was buried in a tomb. There can be no doubt, the Roman soldiers were good at their job and they had to confirm Jesus was dead before their boss would release the body. His enemies, the Jewish leaders confirmed he was buried in the tomb of a wealthy man named Joseph.

Second, that tomb was empty on Sunday morning. When Jesus’ enemies wanted to stop people believing he was alive, all they had to do was produce his dead body. They couldn’t. Some argued his followers had stolen his body, but that required getting past the Roman guards, a virtually impossible task. Other ideas have been proposed, but they really don’t stand up to the evidence.

Third, numerous witnesses testified—at great peril to themselves—that they saw Jesus alive multiple times after he had died, that they met with him and even ate with him. Even the most sceptical scholar today accepts that Jesus’ followers really did believe he was alive. One theory said they were having hallucinations, but that doesn’t hold true, because it is hard to believe that over 500 different people, over more than a month, could have had the same hallucination about the same person who they all were quite certain (for good reason) had been killed and buried just days or weeks before.

Fourth, the group of timid followers changed into fearless advocates. One of these, Thomas, was a sceptic, yet he is recorded as travelling to India to tell people about Jesus. Another man, the mortal enemy of Christians, Saul of Tarsus, was convinced he had seen Jesus risen from the dead, and spent the rest of his life travelling through Asia, Greece and Rome, arguing the case for Jesus. Both these men, and many others, were killed because they refused to stop talking about Jesus.

But this leaves open the question, “Why did Jesus have to die and rise again from the dead?” That is the big question we will look at next.

I have relied heavily for the comments above on a book written earlier this year, called “The Story of Reality” by Gregory Koukl. It is available from Amazon in a print or digital edition. There are many similar books but this one is very logical and very easy to read.

10 Who did Jesus say he was?

Jesus really got up the noses of the politicians. He was very popular with the ordinary people, which caused the main group of political/religious leaders (Pharisees) to quickly see him as a big threat to their power base. His words and his actions undermined their authority. Have a look for yourself, read one of the Gospels, particularly Matthew or Luke.

The leaders tried to trick Jesus with loaded questions but every time he saw through their agenda and outsmarted them. They eventually grew so worried that they arrested him on a false charge and even paid people to lie about him in court.

At his trial, the leaders accused Jesus of claiming he was the Son of God. He acknowledged their charge. This was the most serious charge they could make against any man. To the Jews the name of God was holy. To claim equality with God was blasphemy, punishable by death.

Why did the Jewish leaders accuse Jesus of this? Because that is what he had claimed for himself all along. The Gospels tell us that Jesus said he was the Son of God, the giver of eternal life, one who forgives sins, the future judge, the saviour, and much more.

To people today, Jesus’ most controversial statement would be his claim to be the only way to God. “I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life; no one comes to the Father, but through Me" (John 14:6).

How should we take these claims of Jesus? We have already shown that experts today accept Jesus as a real historic person. He is also acknowledged as a great moral teacher and an example to follow. He cared for the poor and needy and he was very critical of those who took advantage of them. His life has inspired millions of people through the ages. But when Jesus claims to be God, is a step too far?

C S Lewis answered this question in the following way;

A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse.

You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

Lewis’ logic is watertight. If Jesus was who he claimed to be, then he is Lord and God, and that has huge implications for all of us today. Read one of the Gospels, ask me for a free copy or find one online, there are several websites.  You can download the Bible for free here  

09 Is Jesus more than just a swear word?

Was Jesus a real person? If so, was he just a man, or was he God in human form? Was he put to death on a Roman cross? Was he buried in a tomb?  Did he come back from the dead?

We need to carefully consider each of these questions because much more hangs on them than we are inclined to think, particularly the last.

Many people dismiss Jesus as a fairy story; they say that he never really lived on this earth. Authorities in Ancient History no longer think that way. Professor Edwin Judge, from Macquarie University in Sydney, is accepted as a world expert in this field. He said in a recent interview;

Ancient historians take for granted the historic existence of Jesus as he is presented in the Gospels. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are accepted as good reliable history sources.

Some people once believed Jesus was a figure of the imagination. Nobody argues that now, certainly no historians do.

Strangely, many of the same people who deny Jesus existed never question the existence of Plato or Julius Caesar, despite the fact there is far more written evidence, for Jesus than for either of these historic figures, or for any other figure of ancient history for that matter. These pieces of evidence for Jesus are also from copies of manuscripts dated a lot closer in time to the actual events, than evidence for other figures in ancient history.

Jesus is mentioned as a real person in the writings of at least two reputable historians of that time, Josephus (37 to 100 AD) and Tacitus (56 to 120 AD).

The main historic evidence for Jesus life is in the four Bible books mentioned by Professor Judge, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Despite what you may read or see in the media, these four Gospels are reliable history. That is Professor Judge’s point.

They were separate records, written by different people for different audiences, comparatively soon after the events they portray. It was many years later that these books were collected together to become part of the Bible.

The four Gospels are not just biographies. They were written to explain the purpose of Jesus’ life, of his death and his resurrection. Read them and you will see exactly who Jesus claimed to be. Read them to find hope, to help you answer your questions about life after death.

08 Believing in life after death

We were all shocked a few years ago when the cricketer Phillip Hughes was hit in the neck by a ball and later died. Following that tragic event, several Australian cricketers developed a habit of raising their bats and looking up. This gesture was accepted as their way of saying that Hughes was looking down on them from “up there”. Is there any basis for this very common belief?

Until they are faced with the reality of death, most people don’t seriously consider if there is something beyond. Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple computers, the iPod, iPhone, iPad, and of Pixar Animation Studios, didn’t think there was when he gave a speech at Harvard University in 2005. He said;

Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Steve Jobs was saying that we should live a useful life for a few years, and then get out of the way, because there is nothing after you die.

Five years later, talking to his biographer shortly before he died of cancer, he had mixed feelings. Facing the threat of impending death he could no longer be so glib about it.

Sometimes I believe in God, sometimes I don't. I think it's 50-50 maybe. But ever since I've had cancer, I've been thinking about it more. And I find myself believing a bit more. Maybe it's because I want to believe in an afterlife. That when you die, it doesn't just all disappear. The wisdom you've accumulated. Somehow it lives on.

Then he paused for a second and he said, 'Yeah, but sometimes I think it's just like an on-off switch. Click and you're gone.' He paused again, and he said, 'And that's why I don't like putting on-off switches on Apple devices.’

What decision he came to in the end we will never know in this life but it is clear that the prospect of death prompted him to question his former beliefs. This too is evidence that continued life beyond the grave is a deep-seated longing of the human heart; a hunger for something that really exists.

When we face death, many of us wonder to ourselves if there is something more.

But we don’t have to wonder. There is good evidence for life after death; it is found in the historic, bodily resurrection of Jesus. His resurrection was proof that death no longer has the last word. This is really what Christianity is all about.

07 We all believe in God but we refuse to believe.

Belief in God is part of our make-up, but most of us choose to reject it. How can I make such a statement?

We all have an inbuilt sense of right and wrong. Our conscience is indirect evidence for the existence of God because we cannot explain where our knowledge of good and evil comes from without accepting that it came from God.

C. S. Lewis explained this well. He was a very famous scholar and the author of many books, including the Narnia series.

Lewis was an atheist. In his book, “Mere Christianity”, Lewis explains his change to belief in God.

"My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?”

Lewis realised he had a built-in moral framework, which did not come from the world of nature. We don’t blame a cat for killing a bird; it is in its nature. But we call a boy cruel if he starts killing birds for fun. Where does our sense of right and wrong, of justice, come from? There is no evidence to suggest that it somehow evolved.

“Of course, I could have given up my idea of justice by saying that it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too--for the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my private fancies”.

“Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist--in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless--I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality--namely my idea of justice--was full of sense. Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple”.

Much against his will, Lewis had to admit that his moral sense came from outside of himself. The core of it was common to all of humanity but was not found in any other creatures. It had to come from the creator of humanity; it had to be God-given. So Lewis reluctantly believed that God was God, and he became a Christian.

We may not be able to think as clearly as Lewis but we can all think well enough to see that reason and conscience are consistent with a belief in God and cannot be explained without him.