Two Questions Unbelievers Often Ask About The Resurrection
by Lee Strobel

Aren't the Gospels really just a combination of myth and wishful thinking?

I used to believe that the historical documents that comprise the New Testament and describe the Resurrection were irreparably flawed because they had been written so long -- perhaps 100 years -- after the events. As a professor told me in college, legend and wishful thinking developed during this interim period and hopelessly distorted the record of who Jesus was and what He did.

But as a journalist I found that many scholars are concluding there never was such a big gap between the life of Jesus and the belief that He's the resurrected Son of God. The key to this is establishing an accurate date for when the Book of Acts was written and then to work backwards to figure out when the Resurrection accounts were recorded.

Jesus was crucified in 30 or 33 A.D. In his book Scaling the Secular City, scholar J.P. Moreland cites half a dozen compelling reasons to conclude that the Book of Acts, which is the story of the early church, was written before the early 60s A.D.

For instance, the three main figures in Acts -- Peter, Paul, and James -- were all put to death between 61 and 65 A.D., but there's no mention of that in Acts, which gives many other details of their lives. And Acts doesn't discuss Emperor Nero's persecution of the church in the mid-60s or the war between the Jews and Romans, which broke out in 66 A.D. Surely all of this would have been included if Acts had been written after these events, so it must have been written before them.

We already know Acts was authored by the historian Luke, and that it's the second of a two-part work. The first part is the Gospel of Luke, which affirms Jesus as the resurrected Son of God, and so we know that it was written earlier than Acts.

And most historians agree that Mark's Gospel -- also testifying that Jesus is the resurrected Son of God -- was written before Luke because Luke apparently incorporated some of Mark's material into his own. Consequently, Mark's account is even closer to the events of Jesus' life. In fact, there's evidence that a key source that Mark included when writing about the empty tomb can be dated no later than 37 A.D.

Now the gap has been narrowed so much that there's nowhere near enough time for legend to have corrupted the historical record. Oxford University's renowned scholar of ancient Roman and Greek history, A.N. Sherwin-White, concluded that even the passage of two generations wouldn't even be enough time for legend to wipe out a solid core of historical facts.

What's more, there's a creed of the early church that the apostle Paul includes in First Corinthians and which confirms that Jesus was put to death for our sins, was buried, and rose again on the third day, as was predicted in Scripture. Based on a variety of factors, some scholars date this creed to as early as 24 to 36 months after the crucifixion -- and the eyewitness accounts that underlie it go right back to the cross itself. In historical terms, this is like a hot news flash!

When Paul mentioned in First Corinthians that the resurrected Jesus appeared to 500 people at once, he specifically stated that many of them were still alive at the time he was writing. In effect, he was saying, "Hey, this happened so recently that these witnesses are still around -- ask them yourself if you don't believe me, and they'll tell you it's true!"

That's how assured he was, just as we can have confidence in the reliability of the biblical accounts of the Resurrection.

Weren't the eyewitnesses to Christ's resurrection just hallucinating?

Not only was Jesus' tomb empty, but over a period of 40 days He appeared alive a dozen different times to more than 515 individuals -- to men and women, to believers and doubters, to tough-minded people and tender-hearted souls, to groups, to individuals, sometimes indoors, and sometimes outdoors in broad daylight.

He talked with people, He ate with them, He even invited one skeptic to put his finger into the nail holes in His hands and to put his hand into the spear wound in His side in order to verify that it was really Him. This experience was so life-changing that the disciple Thomas ended up proclaiming to his violent death in south India that Jesus had, in fact, been resurrected.

I've covered scores of criminal trials as a legal affairs journalist, and I've never seen one with anywhere near 515 eyewitnesses. To put this into perspective, if you were to call each one of them to the stand to be questioned and cross-examined for just 15 minutes each, and you went around the clock without a break, it would take you from breakfast on Monday until dinner on Friday to hear them all. After listening to nearly 129 straight hours of eyewitness testimony, who could possibly walk away unconvinced?

Of course, as a skeptic I tried to poke holes in their stories. For instance, could these appearances have been hallucinations? Dr. Gary Collins -- president of a national association of psychologists, a university professor of psychology for 20 years, and the author of more than 40 books on psychology-related subjects -- says this just isn't possible.

Hallucinations, he said, are like dreams -- they're individual events that can't be shared between people. One expert said that 500 people sharing the same hallucination would be a bigger miracle than the Resurrection itself!

But I wasn't ready to give up yet. If these weren't hallucinations, perhaps they were an example of what psychologists call "group think" -- a kind of wishful thinking where people in a group subtly encourage one another through the power of suggestion to see something that's not there.

But Collins said this wouldn't be possible either because the circumstances were completely wrong. The disciples weren't anticipating a Resurrection, which would have been totally alien to their Jewish beliefs, so they weren't primed for this sort of "group think" to occur. In addition, Jesus ate with them, talked back and forth with them, and appeared numerous times before all kinds of people in different emotional states -- all of which runs contrary to the "group think" theory.

Besides, what about the empty tomb? If the eyewitnesses had merely talked themselves into imagining a vision of Jesus, then His body would still have been in the tomb -- and surely the Romans would have produced it.

One thing is certain, said Craig: "On separate occasions different groups and individuals had experiences of seeing Jesus alive from the dead. This conclusion is virtually indisputable."

The Verdict of History

Since every shred of historical documentation for Jesus rising from the dead is evidence for our own eventual resurrection, then we can face the future with confident expectancy. The hope that Christians will overcome the grave and spend eternity with God is not the desperate longing of people too afraid to face their own mortality. Instead, it's a rational and logical conclusion based on the compelling testimony of history.

"No intelligent jury in the world," said Lord Darling, the brilliant Chief Justice of England, "could fail to bring in a verdict that the Resurrection story is true."

And we can proceed with bold assurance, thanks to the evidence of history that establishes with convincing clarity how Jesus not only preceded us in death but also came back from the dead and blazed the trail to heaven. "I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God," said the apostle John, "so that you may know that you have eternal life."