Resurrection Evidence 2

In the previous article, I explained some of the profound evidence that Jesus actually rose from the dead, based upon historically verified facts and also upon the Gentile mission of the church. Here is another argument that Jesus actually rose from the dead.

Resurrection suddenly means something new

Another convincing, yet subtle, argument was advanced by N. T. Wright in the appendix of Antony Flew’s There is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind. Flew himself, who had recently embraced deism, took Wright’s argument to be evidence that divine revelation actually happened in Jesus. As he said:

I am very much impressed with Bishop Wright’s approach, which is absolutely fresh…. Is it possible that there has been or can be divine revelation? As I said, you cannot limit the possibilities of omnipotence except to produce the logically impossible. Everything else is open to omnipotence. (Flew, p. 213)

N. T. Wright’s argument for the resurrection of Jesus is both subtle and powerful. I’ll present it here in a very abbreviated form.

The gist of the argument is that immediately following the crucifixion of Christ, within a very few years, Christians are known to espouse a novel form of resurrection, one that was new to both the pagan world, from which most of them had come, and the Jewish world, which formed the roots of the Christian movement.

The pagan world, according to Wright, considered the very idea of resurrection from the dead nonsense. Pliny, Aeschylus, Homer, Cicero, “and all sorts of early writers say, ‘Of course, we know resurrection doesn’t happen’” (Flew, p. 196). This attitude on the part of Gentiles also is born out in the New Testament: “When they [Greek intellectuals] heard about the resurrection of the dead, some of them sneered” (Acts 17:32). “People in the ancient world,” says Wright, “were incredulous when faced with the Christian claim, because they knew perfectly well that when people die they stay dead” (Flew, p. 198).

By contrast, the first-century Jewish world had a more varied understanding of resurrection. The Pharisees believed in resurrection, although not the Christian variety: “no first-century Jew, as far as we know believed there would be one person raised ahead of everybody else” (p. 199). First-century Jews who believed in resurrection seem to have gone in one of two directions, neither of which was the Christian idea, according to Wright: “Some said it [resurrection] would produce a physical body exactly like this one all over again, and others said it would be a luminous body, one shining like a star” (p. 199). The Sadducees, another important Jewish sect, did not believe in resurrection at all. In fact, they seem not even to have believed in life after death (Matthew 22:23-33).

While there appear to be other first-century Jewish beliefs about resurrection, none of them, according to Wright, were like the early Christian belief about resurrection. He traced seven ways in which the early Christian belief differed fundamentally from Jewish beliefs and from Gentile non-belief. For example, the early Christian belief, and he stressed that this was very early, was in the transformation of the physical body, not the recycling of the previous body. The Christian belief, including the Apostle Paul’s and other very early Christians of whom we have records, is in “a new type of embodiedness that is definitely bodily in the sense of being solid and substantial, but seems to have been transformed so that it is now not susceptible to pain or suffering or death. And this is quite new. That picture of resurrection is not in Judaism” (Flew, p. 199).

Wright traces six other significant innovations in Christian belief about resurrection, the last of which is the remarkable unity of belief among the earliest Christians as regards resurrection. Modern, skeptical arguments assert that the belief that Jesus rose from the dead started to crop up after 20 or 30 years of Christianity. After Christianity had been around for a while, say a generation, people began passing around the noble myth that Jesus rose from the dead, so the idea goes. However, this supposition is contrary to the historical evidence, as Wright’s thesis cogently and compellingly tells:

All this forces us as historians to ask a very simple question: why did all the early Christians known to us from the earliest times for which we have evidence, have this very new, but remarkably unanimous, view of resurrection? That is a genuinely interesting historical question in its own right. Of course, all the early Christians known to us would say, “We have this view of Resurrection because of what we believe about Jesus.” Now, if the idea that Jesus had been raised from the dead only started to crop up after 20 or 30 years of Christianity, as many skeptical scholars have supposed, you would find lots of strands of early Christianity in which there really wasn't much place for resurrection—or, if you find resurrection, it might have been a different shape from the very specific one it has in early Christianity. Therefore, the wide extent and unanimity of early Christian belief in Resurrection force us to say that something definite happened way back early on, that has shaped and colored the whole early Christian movement. (Flew, pp. 201-202)

Wright is stating that virtually all of the early Christians, that is, those writing during the middle of the first century and before, were agreed on the novel type of resurrection, unique among Gentiles and Jews alike. Why? Because they all believed in the resurrection of Jesus, as unpopular and outrageous as it was. This is compelling evidence that his resurrection was not a later addition to the Christian faith; rather it was part and parcel of the foundation of the Christian faith from the very beginning.

The evidence that supports the reality of Jesus’s resurrection—and there are many other arguments than those presented in these two posts—leads us to the most reasonable inference based on the historical facts, namely that Jesus rose from the dead and then appeared to some of his followers. If we understand that “you cannot limit the possibilities of omnipotence except to produce the logically impossible,” as Antony Flew stated (as quoted on page 207), we are in a position to recognize that the resurrection of Jesus has great explanatory power as regards several incongruous historical facts. It also takes the direct evidence in the New Testament record at face value.

All of this is evidence that Jesus actually did rise from the dead. The significance of the resurrection is the subject of my next blog article.

This post is an excerpt from my book, Is Jesus Real?

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