Download The Considerable Evidence for the Resurrection of

The Substantial Evidence for the Resurrection of Christ United with Assured Proof
The Considerable Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ
Displayed and Integrated with Secure Proof
By Mike Robinson
Granbury, Texas
Having loved His own which were in the world, He loved them to the end. Often
had they been faithless and now, while addressing them, He knows that they
will all in a few hours forsake Him. Yet He trusts them; He commits His cause to
their keeping. And we must love as He loved.1
The first century Church was in crisis at the very beginning. The Roman governor Pontius Pilate
had ordered the execution Jesus Christ, and many apostles had run and hid from the
authorities. Priests had turned Christ over to the pagan procurator and successfully urged him
to crucify Christ. Evangelists and teachers had surrendered their ministry to be derided and
disallowed in the city streets as well as in the temple. An air of distress and fear hung over the
church.
But something powerful, even colossal, arose to restore the confidence and buoyancy of the
New Testament congregation: the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The task of the church, in the
Christ’s vision, was to preach the good news of redemption to a fallen world as it seeks to make
lawful disciples (Matthew 28:19-20). Jesus sought to purge sin from His people’s record and
reduce wickedness in every corner of the globe through the expanse of the church.
After Christ’s resurrection appearances, the church believed that, in all lands, the first job was to
preach the gospel (the death and resurrection of Christ: 1 Corinthians 15:1-4) and then defend
the faith (1Peter 3:15). Yes, Jesus was unlawfully arrested and sentenced to death. Yes, Jesus
died. But on the third day Christ arose and this truth wouldn’t be diluted by fright and anxiety.
With this offensive posture, the apostolic church would build a robust ark for all those who
came to Christ. The resurrection changed everything.
You can see the resurrection effect in the waning movement of the Sadducees (the priests and
their sect): people who doubled down on manmade religion and their self-centered traditions.
The growth of the church through the resurrection of Christ made the sect of the Sadducees
(priestly) obsolete. The opposite of applied resurrection power one can see in many of the
current cults (Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Moonies, etc.), which feel besieged in a hostile
world. You can identify the modern-day cultists because they fear society is flowing away from
them, and when they complain it’s always an attempt at intra-communal protection because
they think everybody outside their world desires their demise.
One of the problems with cultists, the church points, is that they are too static. They try to seal
off an ark to ride out the tempest, but they end up shutting themselves in. They cut themselves
off from others and the challenge of truth. In contrast, the church is on the move. Christ
mounted the wings of resurrection power and His followers run with a risen Savior. Thus, the
people of God go on offense and swallow the ungodly domain as it transforms it by the word of
God. And the empowering truth of the resurrection is assured and is to be defended (Jude 3).
The world will bring its condemnation. They may even put their sword behind it.
But we know that the highest court has already ruled in our favor. “If God is for
us, who can be against us?” (Romans 8:31). If they reject us, he accepts us. If they
hate us, he loves us. If they imprison us, he sets our spirits free. If they afflict us,
he refines us by the fire. If they kill us, he makes it a passage to paradise. They
cannot defeat us. Christ has died. Christ has risen. We are alive in him. And in
him there is no condemnation. We are forgiven, and we are righteous. “And the
righteous are bold as a lion.”2
The Excessive Elevation of Reason
To whatever degree men discard God’s word they must attempt to substitute it with something
within their own nature. In snubbing God as the ground for truth men suppose that He is, in
fact, replaced by mankind's reason. On every occasion where people banish God from their
analysis, a void is left which must be filled. When analyzing the death of Jesus, if one dismisses
the accounts in the Gospels, one is not only left without the best informational source, one is
caught without a foundation to account for the universal operational features utilized in such an
analysis.
As scholars strive to fill that rational barrenness, they find it necessary to act as magistrate over
God and His word in questions such as:



Does God exist?
Did God speak?
Can one trust God’s word?
To deny God, unsurprisingly, leads to the elevation of man and human reason over God’s
revelation. One sees this in the work of the Jesus Seminar, Bart Ehrman, and Bill O’Reilly.
God’s is the Ultimate Ruler of Reason
I maintain belief [p] Christ’s resurrection because there are good grounds to believe [p].
However, I believe in [p] because the Christian worldview is and must be true since it furnishes
the necessary conditions for intelligibly—the structured necessary categories of understanding.
Above and beyond those truths, because of the illumination from the Holy Spirit, I know [p] in
a certain, undeniable, and indubitable manner. The evidential burden for rational belief in the
resurrection can be set high since it is an essential feature of the Christian worldview; the
worldview that provides the universal functioning categories of intelligibility.
So, regarding the Resurrection, there is worldview proof as well as proof by a preponderance of
evidence.
I believe Christ is alive because:



The preponderance of the evidence supports the resurrection
The Christian worldview is true
Most significantly, God has revealed His truth to me by His grace through the Word and
Spirit
Since a believer and non-believer will assess the evidence differently, under dissimilar
presuppositions, this will affect how each assesses the historical evidence. The divergent ways
in which men interpret evidence is one reason contending at the worldview level is so crucial.
The rational confidence in the truth of a historical account is not always evidentially
established. Non-evidential modus does not imply non-rational. In fact, all knowledge can be
connected back to one’s ultimate commitments—unargued rational pre-commitments. Thus,
there is a direct appeal to the facts as well as the worldview that provides the preconditions
necessary for the discovery, examination, analysis, and communication of facts.
Since God is not only real, but necessary, then the scholar who strives to analyze and evaluate
the killing of Jesus (or any subject) devoid of a divine foundation understands only in terms of
himself. He attempts to comprehend that which is beyond him. This is the case since he is
assessing selected infinite features using his finite mind while he is not in a proper epistemic
position to discern such truth. God is boundless in His knowledge, but humans are limited
creatures who can never provide the infinitely-broad operational features necessarily utilized in
all research. One needs God as one’s ground for reason to account for all the implicit features of
rational analysis.
Scholars researching the resurrection of Christ should not presume the entitlements of the allknowing God. Man is fallen. People have sinned. Acquiescing to the actuality of sin is
requirement for real conversion—one must repent from sin and trust in Christ. The accurate
researcher must consent to his finitude and its limitations. He must understand himself in light
of who God is and what He has revealed. Nevertheless, many academics scrap both. Too often
writers tackling the subject of Christ and His resurrection approach the subject with naturalistic
presuppositions. Naturalism denies the fallen nature of man and effectively makes human
reason the controlling authority, the rational zenith used to analyze the truth of God’s word.
The positions are then reversed, for the reason that God is then at best an unnecessary idea. He
is vulgarly dismissed as a superfluous invasion into naturalism's domain.
Scholarship that ignores God as the foundation for proper enquiry will go in the direction that
man’s fallen reason takes him. This scholarship overtly overlooks both finitude and man’s fallen
nature as it puts an impossible encumbrance on man's reasoning. Indeed, reason is a necessary
but insufficient tool required for historical examination and inquiry. But naturalistic
methodology makes it the locus of preeminence. No sane man should speak against human
reason inasmuch as one must use it while rebuffing it. But only God provides the necessary a
priori conditions for the universal functioning aspects employed in the reasoning process.
The Parameters of Human Reason
Reason is limited by the finitude and sinfulness of mankind. People lack the ontological
capacity to understand and experience all the potentialities within the cosmos and there are
knowledge and ontic realms he cannot experience at all. His rational ability is inadequate to
account for the tools of reason employed to investigate the death of Christ. People cannot
understand everything they encounter and know. All the combined minds of humanity
throughout all history could not understand complete reality, yet selected scholarship stresses
that we should understand God’s word by naturalistic presuppositions. The consequence is an
incoherent and unbiblical view of Christ as well as a jaundiced understanding regarding the
meaning of His life, death, and resurrection. Their presupposition about the reliability of
naturalistic concepts makes it and not revelation their ultimate locus. The logic of these
assumptions ends up excluding Christ from a discussion about His own life and death.
In an analysis of Christ’s death, naturalistic assumptions must give way to the foundation of
intelligibly: God. Naturalistic thought is principally void of any genuine notion of truth or
knowledge. The alternative is a thoroughly scripture-based worldview, which alone provides
the universal necessities required for historical exploration and analysis.
God (y) is a necessary condition for the possibility of historical analysis (x)—since x is the case, it
logically follows that y must be the case.
In this way skepticism regarding Christ’s life and death are overturned using arguments from
ultimate criteria (immutable foundation with universal reign: Christianity—the Christian
worldview vs. a non-theistic worldview (which has a mutable non-universal foundation).
The skeptic accepts the reality of historical analysis, the necessary condition of which is God.*
This problem seems to be disabling for the semi-skeptical program of Aslan, Ehrman, and other
trendy critics. This is the case not merely because of skepticism’s dubious coherence, but
because of its ontological limitation—it lacks a source that is lofty and majestic enough to
provide universal immutables utilized in historical analysis. In rational pursuits, including
historical investigation, there is no ontic cheating: you either have the goods or you do not. If
one’s worldview lacks the resources to account for the universal operating features of reason, it
is incapable of underwriting such an enterprise.
*God furnishes all the a priori essentials; the necessary epistemic equipment utilized in all analytical pursuits. God has
the ontic attributes of omniscience, immutability, and omnipotence (He has universal range and influence) enabling
Him to be the ground for the universal and immutable laws of logic that are utilized in all thought and analysis. Any
position that rejects the true God, as the epistemic (knowledge) base, not only leaves an unnerving fissure, but
hopelessly fails. Consequently, whatever evidence one discovers must be discerned and processed with the rational
implements that arise from Christian theism and the worldview that emanates from God. The true God is the
primordial requirement for all investigation, proof, evidence, and analysis. He is the a priori verity condition for the
intelligibility of reality. The immaterial, transcendent, and immutable God supplies the indispensable preenvironment for the use of immaterial, transcendent, universal, and immutable laws of logic (law of identity: A = A;
law of non-contradiction: A~~A). Atheistic thought, because it rests upon mutable and non-universal ground, cannot
furnish the necessary preconditions for the immutable universal laws of logic; therefore it results in futility because of
its internal weakness.
Often the Bible uses evidential arguments. For example, when scripture declares in Psalm 19
that the heavens declare the glory of God, it is denoting how God’s glory is manifested in the
natural world. It is proven by nature itself. Evidence and proof are everywhere. If you offer an
evidential assertion, you should have real evidence to posit such. Equally, there is no amount of
evidence that is adequate in and of itself to persuade a non-believer of the truth of Jesus Christ.
Prayer must be undertaken and the law and gospel must be presented, but God’s grace is the
ultimate lorry for salvation of a soul.
The Assured Resurrection of Jesus
Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you
received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast
to the word I preached to you—unless you believed in vain. For I delivered to
you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in
accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the
third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas,
then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one
time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep (1 Corinthians
15:1-6).
He observed that it was not possible for the apostles “to continue to reaffirm the
truth time after time, if in fact Jesus wasn’t resurrected from the dead” (Simon
Greenleaf, onetime skeptic; Law School professor at Harvard: wrote the longused text book for ascertaining legal evidence).
Selected facts concerning the resurrection of Jesus Christ:
1. Numerous eyewitnesses testified under the threat of death that they saw the
risen Jesus, including 500 people at one time (1Cor. 15).
To whom also he showed himself alive after his passion by many infallible
proofs, being seen of them forty days, and speaking of the things pertaining to
the kingdom of God (Acts 1:3).
2. All the apostles, except John, died a horrible death knowing they observed
Jesus alive from the dead. Hundreds more died because they would not recant
the fact that they had seen the risen Jesus. Not one apostle recanted to save
himself from a torturous death.
3. The resurrection was proclaimed in the city of Jerusalem where the trial,
crucifixion, and resurrection took place. If Jesus had not risen from the dead, his
enemies only had to produce his body and this new religion that they hated
would be terminated before it started.
4. The conversion of the opponents of Christianity, including many Jewish
Priests and Pharisees (Acts 6:7, 15:5, 20:21), can best be explained by the
resurrection of Christ. The risen Jesus converted many of those who executed
Him because of the overwhelming evidence of His resurrection and His many
appearances.
On the first day of the week, very early in the morning, the women took the
spices they had prepared and went to the tomb. They found the stone rolled
away from the tomb, but when they entered, they did not find the body of
the Lord Jesus. While they were wondering about this, suddenly two men in
clothes that gleamed like lightning stood beside them. In their fright the
women bowed down with their faces to the ground, but the men said to
them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here; he
has risen! Remember how he told you, while he was still with you in
Galilee” (Luke 24:1-6).
1. Ancient hostile sources and extra-biblical writers record the matching facts of
Christ’s death and empty tomb including Josephus in his Testimonium Flavianum
recorded below:
Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man; for he was a
doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over
to him both many of the Jews and many of the Gentiles. He was [the] Christ. And when Pilate,
at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, those that
loved him at the first did not forsake him; for he appeared to them alive again the third day; as
the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him.
And the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day.3
6. The continuous defense of the resurrection in front of Roman government
officials from Paul to Tertullian was unchallenged by Rome and all ancient
historians. No plausible explanation, other than the resurrection, existed or the
precise government records could have been employed to refute the Christian
claims.
7. Jesus’ tomb was secured and guarded by well-trained Jewish and Roman
guards. The tomb had a Roman seal to prevent tampering, with the threat of
execution for breaking the seal, yet the tomb was empty. Every ancient historical
source that discusses the subject verifies that the tomb was empty.
Gary Habermas concerning the uniqueness of Christ: “The reports of Buddha and Krishna come
hundreds of years afterward [after the Resurrection of Christ]. No other major religious founder
in ancient times was ever crucified. Further, it cannot be demonstrated that there is even a
single pagan resurrection account prior to Jesus, whether mythological or historical.”4
The only logical explanation for these historical events that can be given is that
God resurrected Jesus (George Eldon).
The Real Battle
Moreover, the real analytical fight is between presuppositions. The Christian presupposes God
who raised Christ from the dead and provides all the required preconditions for the laws of
logic that allow one to investigate anything, including the resurrection. Atheism is absent an
accounting of such a priori truth conditions.
God has never left himself without a witness to men. He witnessed to them
through every fact of the universe from the beginning of time. No rational
creature can escape this witness. It is the witness of the triune God whose face is
before men everywhere and all the time. Even the lost in the hereafter cannot
escape the revelation of God. God made man a rational-moral creature. He will
always be that. As such he is confronted with God. He is addressed by God. He
exists in the relationship of covenant interaction. He is a covenant being. To not
know God man would have to destroy himself. He cannot do this. There is no
non-being into which man can slip in order to escape God’s face and voice. The
mountains will not cover him; Hades will not hide him. Nothing can prevent his
being confronted “with him with whom we have to do.” Whenever he sees
himself, he sees himself confronted with God.5
It makes more sense to believe first century Jewish eyewitnesses than twenty-first century
occidental skeptics. Matthew wrote the following, as a witness, two decades after the
resurrection of Jesus Christ:
But the angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you seek
Jesus who was crucified. He is not here, for he has risen, as he said. Come, see the
place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples that he has risen from
the dead, and behold, he is going before you to Galilee; there you will see him.
See, I have told you” (Matthew 28:5-7).6
Sufficiency and Proof: God
The issue isn’t only about evidence for the Bible and God. The sure proof for the Bible is that
without God’s word, one cannot account for evidence because God is the precondition for
unchanging logical norms that must be utilized in marshaling and pondering evidence. Nontheistic systems of thought fail to supply the necessary a prior conditions for logical norms.
Humanity and the physical world are in a constant state of flux. A changing, material-only
conglomeration of the sum of human intelligence cannot provide the needed a priori conditions
for the unchanging laws of thought. The laws of thought require a transcendent and unchanging
foundation.
Without using unchanging logical norms, one cannot even deny that logical norms are
mandatory for the judgment of evidence. Without the transcendent and immutable God, who
holds universal power and knowledge, one cannot justify transcendent, immutable, and
universal laws of logic utilized in looking at any evidence—humanity and the material cosmos
are mutable and lack universal power.
There is nothing a skeptic can assert without ultimately relying on theism, since theism
furnishes the preconditions for fixed logical norms. God is the preexisting foundation for all
deliberation and assertion.
• Examination and analysis of evidence presuppose the universal operational features
of rationality.
• The universal operational features of rationality presuppose God.
• Examination and analysis of evidence presuppose God.
The Consuming Truth of Theism
Men and the thoughts of men change, but the universal operational features of rationality do
not change. This demands that the universal operational features of rationality could not have
been derived from the brains of humans or our always-changing physical world. Something
that is immutable cannot come from that which is mutable. This notifies us that atheism cannot
provide the necessary preconditions for the intelligibility of our world. So every time an
unbeliever attempts to disprove the Lord God, they are just tossing dirt clods at a mountain.
The denial of God presupposes God and only adds to that epistemic actuality.
Facts Concerning Christ’s Resurrection
Today, I would say the claim concerning the resurrection is more impressive
than any by the religious competition7 (former atheist Anthony Flew).
It’s worth noting that the apostles saw the risen Christ, touched the risen Christ, and died
tortuous deaths proclaiming the truth of the resurrection. They did this when all they had to do
was deny it to avoid persecution and death. Yes, many people die for lies, but no collective,
diverse group of people die for a lie when they have sure knowledge that it is a lie.
Christ the Lord is risen today, Sons of men and angels say. Raise your joys and
triumphs high; Sing, you heavens, and earth reply (Charles Wesley).
Furthermore, all known ancient documents that refer to the subject report an empty tomb. Even
though the manner in which one accepts or rejects the evidence on the historicity of the ancient
documents and other papyrus is controlled by one’s presuppositions. Yea, the facts are mighty.
The evidence is there, and it is impressive, but there is an important distinction between proof
and persuasion.
The Variance of Presuppositions
The historical and biblical testimony concerning the resurrection of Christ is compelling truth to
believers. Those outside the faith have a different set of presuppositions and this leads to
problems when one employs biblical proof outside the epistemic credentials of the Christian
worldview. The scriptures do not instruct one to press only the brute prima facie evidence, but to
press the a priori necessity of the truth of Christianity. The job of the Christian isn’t merely to
demonstrate the probability that God exists through displaying the brute evidence outside the
Christian worldview, but to demonstrate that God lives. God is the verity condition for all
argument, proof, evidence, verification, reason, and knowledge itself. It is impossible for God
not to exist forasmuch as He is the ontic truth condition for all intelligent exchanges. Evidence,
yes. Massive probability, yes. But more—every argument concerning evidence and probability
require God.
Resurrection Evidence Is Magnificent
Evidence is indeed wonderful. The Christian faith has an abundance of evidence to support its
claims. In truth, there is nothing but evidence for the God of the Bible. Every star and every
atom declares the majesty of God (Psalm 19:1). We see the evidence of God’s fingerprints in
every corner of the universe. Mankind discovers the proof and affirms many of the facts that the
Bible records and announces. The greatest miracle is the resurrection of Jesus. Jesus Christ is
alive! He is the only religious leader in history to rise from the dead. He is the only one who
promised a resurrection, and He kept His promise. You can visit the tombs of all the deceased
religious leaders and find their remains still in the grave.
Dovtastic shares his visit to Mohammad’s grave: “During my trip this year on Hajj I had the
great honor to visit our Prophet Mohammed’s … grave in the Ottoman front portion of the
Masjid Al Nabawi. This beautiful masjid holds one million people in Medina and when the
grave is open for visitation, 1000s of people are passing through every minute.” 8 This man and
millions others have seen the occupied grave of Islam’s founder, proving that Mohammad
remained dead. You can visit the graves of leaders like Mary Baker Eddy, Joseph Smith, and
Muhammad from your computer by watching a video of the gravesite on Youtube. They and all
the others died and stayed dead; their occupied tombs attest to it. Jesus, however, is alive. His
grave is empty. When people visit His grave it’s vacant.
Jesus said, “All power on earth and heaven has been given to me” (Matthew 28:18). No force
could have kept Him down. The Romans killed Him, put Him in a cave tomb, and placed huge
boulder at a downward angle in front of the cave, pasted Caesar’s seal on the crypt, and posted
Roman guards to protect the tomb. They were only trying to prevent the inevitable. Jesus had
the power to rise, and nobody could stop Him. God used Christ’s resurrection and His
appearances before His disciples, and He used the subsequent preaching of the apostles, to win
many of Christ’s enemies to salvation. The Bible tells us that “the word of God spread, and the
number of the disciples multiplied greatly in Jerusalem; and a great many of the priests were
obedient to the faith” (Acts 6:7). Scripture also records that some Pharisees converted to
Christianity (Acts 15:5).
Notes
1.
2.
3.
Fuller, Richard. Dictionary of Burning Words by Brilliant Men.
John Piper, John. The Passion of Jesus Christ.
Josephus, Flavius. Antiquities 18.3.3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
Craig, William. God is Good.
Van Til, Cornelius. The Defense of Faith.
Thiede, Peter. Eyewitnesses to Jesus.
Flew, Anthony. There is a God.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fra2HXFY31Y