Is the Resurrection of Jesus a Historically Validated Event?

     One Sunday evening after church in 1997, an older man (now deceased) who was a friend of mine at church asked me, “Adam, what’s the most important teaching in Christianity?” He probably said this out of concern about my intense interest in so many different things in the Bible. I quickly laid out a few answers off the top of my head but I clearly wasn’t sure what the correct answer was. Brother GL replied, “The resurrection of Jesus Christ!” And his words resonated within me ever since that day. It should have been obvious. But I was new at this.

It's true. Paul wrote, “And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain.” (1 Corinthians 15:14 ESV). I heard countless sermons about the resurrection. I’d read every page of the Bible numerous times. It was all old hat I’d heard since I was a small child. Jesus’ resurrection was as factual to me as anything could have been.

This carries important weight though. If Jesus did rise from the dead, then according to the New Testament, God has given this as evidence for the message of the gospel. And the gospel, or “good news,” is not ALL good news. Because Jesus died in our place as the ultimate payment for all sin we
can be saved. But the catch is that we have to believe in Jesus and that belief is somehow authenticated by a life lived in obedience to God. If you don’t do these two things, you’re very likely going to suffer eternally in a burning Hell, whatever you think Hell is like. So because of this, I never in my life could understand how so many people would profess that they believe in Jesus and God and yet live a life as though this God isn’t really isn’t real. They lived with absolutely no anticipation of the Day of Judgment. This was the weakest and most dangerous kind of “faith” anyone can conceive of. I wasn’t going to be duped- or so I thought.

A few years into my life as a committed Christian I read some of the most highly esteemed books on apologetics I could find. Apologetics means “speaking a defense.” It’s not an apology for Christianity. It’s the study of the “evidences” for the Christian faith. I read Evidence That Demands A Verdict and More Evidence That Demands A Verdict by Josh McDowell. I read Lee Strobel’s The Case for Faith and The Case for Christ. I bought the Complete Works of Josephus. On the radio I’d hear Ravi Zacharius and other Christian teachers repeatedly rave about how there is so much historical evidence for the historical Jesus. To be fair, if we reject his resurrection as a fact than to be consistent we’d also have to reject the existence of most historical figures. Jesus and his resurrection have more evidence than most people or events in history that are commonly accepted without doubt do. Fair enough. The field’s foremost experts have done the hard work and they’ve unanimously concluded that the evidence is incredibly strong. It is an historical fact. Jesus rose from the dead. you would have to be in rebellion against the obvious conclusions of leading reputable scholars to deny this. Only demonic deception could obscure this most important fact.

The so-called evidence for the resurrection is usually presented as being derived from the Gospel of Mark, Paul’s writings and sometimes Flavius Josephus and/or other ancient writers of latter times. Mark is the earliest written gospel which much of Matthew, Luke and  a little of John were based off of. Mark says Jesus resurrected. Or does he? The earliest manuscripts of Mark we have found all curiously end at 16:8.

“And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun
had risen, they went to the tomb. And they were saying to one another, “Who
will roll away the stone for us from the entrance of the tomb?” And looking up,
they saw that the stone had been rolled back—it was very large. And entering
the tomb, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, dressed in a white
robe, and they were alarmed. And he said to them, “Do not be alarmed. You seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified.

He has risen; he is not here.

See thep lace where they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is
going before you to Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.” And
they went out and fled from the tomb, for trembling and astonishment had seized
them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” (Mark 16:2-8 ESV)

So Mark does not have anyone ever encountering Jesus alive again after his death and claimed resurrection. Mark has a mysterious unnamed young man secretly telling the women at the tomb to instruct the rest of the disciples to go wait for Jesus to meet them in Galilee. To make it worse, the women didn’t even bother to tell anyone what happened because they were afraid, leaving Jesus to be wandering around Galilee waiting for his disciples who would never come.

One of the most popular views of the ending is that Mark was a written in a genre called “closet drama” in which the story ended without the anticipated closure and often with a sudden shocking twist of events preventing a closure. In other words, Mark was a fictional tale that may or may not have been inspired by actual history. Curiously, when you compare the ending of Mark with the endings of the latter gospels of Matthew and Luke (who borrowed heavily from Mark for content), the resurrection stories grow, develop and contradict each other in irreconcilable and important ways. I’m not going to cover all the problems here because countless others have already done a fine job of laying it out. You can just compare the gospels for yourself and the problems quickly emerge. When did Jesus resurrect exactly? Who first came to the tomb? What happened at the tomb? How many angels, if any, were at the tomb? Was Jesus there? Did any of the male disciples go to the tomb? What role did the Romans play in this event? Did Jesus or angels give any instructions at the tomb? Who was this mysterious young man in Jesus' tomb that knew where Jesus was? If so, do these messages contradict each other in the gospels? The list of discrepancies and contradictions grows with every piece of information that each gospel gives. About the only thing they have in common that Jesus was once in the tomb, dead. The reasonable conclusion would be that since the gospels give definite contradictions about what happened at Jesus’ tomb after he dies, then either only Mark is a reliable account of history, Matthew, Luke or John are reliable or none are reliable. ONLY one could be accurate since they each contradict each other in major points, making the three other gospels unreliable sources of information about the historical Jesus.

Now as for Flavius Josephus, his writings contain a small section called Testimonium Flavianum. Flavius was a Jewish historian commissioned by the Roman authorities to write a record of history. Josephus' work was written around c. 93-94 CE and contains one very important passage which reads:

“About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him
a man. For he was one who performed surprising deeds and was a teacher of such
people as accept the truth gladly. He won over many Jews and many of the Greeks.
He was the Christ. And when, upon the accusation of the principal men among us,
Pilate had condemned him to a cross, those who had first come to love him did
not cease. He appeared to them spending a third day restored to life, for the
prophets of God had foretold these things and a thousand other marvels about
him. And the tribe of the Christians, so called after him, has still to this
day not disappeared.”  Flavius Josephus: Antiquities of the Jews, Book 18, Chapter 3, 3.

However, the evidence strongly suggests that this was both completely or mostly made up and added in by a latter Christian editor, possibly Eusebius himself, author of the first written account of the passage. Again, I won’t go into more specifics about it. A simple Google search can lead you to explanations of why this passage is in such dispute by the majority of scholars, including most conservative Evangelical scholars.

So there you have it. Mark is the one piece of “evidence” we have for Jesus’ resurrection. Scholars purport that Mark was originally written c.66–70 CE, a full 33 to 39 years after Jesus’ death. The author is unknown. The author was not an eyewitness nor did he or she claim to be. Furthermore, Mark gives us painfully little Christian theology. No one could read Mark on its ownand walk away with the modern Christian gospel message about the  divinity of Jesus, the cross’ atonement for sins, the Holy Spirit, the church, being born again, the virgin birth of Jesus, incarnation of God the Son and the ascension of Jesus into heaven. These were all latter inventions by other Christian authors struggling to explain Jesus in the face of opponents and in absence of any credible information about Jesus (unless you count Mark and/or the hypothetic Q document). There is not one single sentence that has ever been found that was written about Jesus by a credible admitted eyewitness. That’s very telling. The best we can come up with is a short book originating from probably another country, written decades after the purported events with no other corroborating sources of information: the Gospel of Mark.

Paul is the only author on record who claimed to have been an eyewitness of the resurrected Jesus. But this witness consisted of a “revelation” Gal. 1:11 and an “appearing” to him somehow at some point long after his supposed resurrection, 1 Cor. 15:3-8. These hardly count as eyewitness testimonies any more than my own private childhood encounter with (what I believed was) the resurrected Jesus would be (see my note, Doubting Thomas for the scoop on that). The book of Acts was written by an unknown follower of Paul’s teachings (possibly second-hand, third-hand or even further distanced from Paul himself) and contains two contradictory accounts of Paul’s encounter with the resurrected Jesus as being a light in the sky and a disembodied voice that only he understood. Few people today would take anyone seriously if they claimed that they experienced lights and disembodied voices claiming to be a resurrected dead person with absolutely authoritative personal instructions about the purpose of life and the universe from an invisible god in an invisible heaven. There are medications, therapists and hospitals for people with those types of delusions because we now understand that these are neurological phenomena that can be treated. Paul might have shared a room in a facility with another man who claimed that an invisible god that only he could hear told him to kill his son as a test of his faith, Abraham. Today these people would be assessed for possibly having schizophrenia. But instead we venerate them as lofty giants of the true faith.

So there you have it. The foundation of the Christian faith rests on the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus. The grounds for establishing the factuality of the resurrection are extremely shaky and dubious. Mark highlights how little we know about the historical Jesus. There is even doubt as to whether or not the historical Jesus even existed. This doubt is called Mythicism. Jesus may have been a conglomeration of stories of more than one individual that snowballed and evolved into Mark’s Jesus. He may have been an entirely fictional character that drew inspiration from first century Jewish Apocalypticism and pagan myths in general.

Jesus was one of many self-proclaimed Christs of first century Judea. He was one of a handful of mythological god-men. He wasn’t the first mythological figure to rise from the dead, perform miracles, be born of a virgin or sired by a god, ascend into heaven, control the elements, heal the
sick, offer some sort of salvation or to give divinely inspired teachings and commandments. Jesus fits right in with the Egyptian Horus, the Persian Mithras and Zoroaster, the Greek Hercules, Zeus and even the Scandinavian Thor and Wodin. Most of the miraculous features of Jesus have striking parallels in numerous pagan myths of gods. And when we carefully compare the Jesus’ of Mark with Matthew, Luke, Paul’s seven authenticated writings, John and the rest of the books in the New Testament we can trace the specific steps of the evolution and diversity of the Christ myth. The Jesus Christians have been indoctrinated into believing in is based on a myth, whether or not there is a kernel of historicity behind Mark’s tale of Jesus.