We are still in the Easter season. For the Easter sermon, I didn’t have time to explore the above question as I wanted to focus on the hope that Easter brings. I assume that Easter did happen – Christ did rise from the dead! But did he?
Down the ages, those who don’t believe in the resurrection have come up with all sorts of theories to disprove it. It is good for us to know what some of these contentions are so that we can dialogue with our friends should they bring them up. Surely, the Christian faith, including the resurrection, can stand up to scrutiny.
The angel told 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.” (Matthew 28:5-6) Some skeptics said that he had not risen because he did not die in the first place! He only fainted. After several hours, he was revived by the cool air of the tomb. This was not possible given the amount of suffering he had to endure prior to his crucifixion and during his crucifixion.
Roman floggings were terribly brutal. They usually consisted of thirty-nine lashes but were frequently a lot more depending on the mood of the soldier dealing the blow. The soldier would use a whip of braided leather thongs with metal balls woven into them. When the whip struck the flesh, these balls would cause deep bruises which would break open with further blows.
And the whip had pieces of sharp bone as well, which would cut the flesh severely. The back would be so shredded that part of the spine was sometimes exposed by the deep cuts. A third-century historian by the name of Eusebius described a flogging by saying, “The sufferer’s veins were laid bare, and the very muscles, sinews, and bowels of the victim were open to exposure.”
Many would die from this kind of beating, from the great loss of blood, even before they could be crucified.
At the crucifixion site, the Romans used spikes that were five to seven inches long to do the nailing. The nails were driven into the largest nerve going out into the hand. Then the person would be hoisted up and nails would then be driven through his feet with his knees bent at around 45 degrees.
The pain would be absolutely unbearable. There was nothing in the language that could describe the intense anguish. They had to invent a new word: ‘excruciating’ which means ‘out of the cross’.
Once the person was hanging in a vertical position, crucifixion was essentially an agonisingly slow death as he found it harder and harder to breathe. He had to flex up on his knees to lower his diaphragm and inhale, and then flex down on his knees to exhale. When he inhaled, he would be hanging on spiked hands, and when he exhaled, he would be pushing down on spiked feet, so he alternated from excruciating pain to excruciating pain.
This would go on and on until complete exhaustion took over and the person wouldn’t be able to push up and breathe anymore. The Roman soldiers were trained killers. They would not have released Jesus’ body for burial unless they were certain that he was dead!
Another explanation to refute Jesus’ resurrection is to claim that some people came to take his body away. Grave robbers were common in those days but if they had indeed stolen the body and hid it somewhere else, they could have presented it to the public to refute the disciples’ declaration that Jesus had risen from the dead – “It is fake news! Look, here is his body.”
Some others claim that the disciples came by night and took Jesus’ body away while the soldiers were asleep. (Matthew 28:13) That was what the religious leaders were afraid of. That was why they went to Pilate and requested for the tomb to be made secure. (Matthew 27.62-66) And when the body could not be found, they conveniently used the very same reason – the disciples had stolen it while the soldiers were sleeping.
Would you think the disciples had such courage when earlier they fled in all directions upon Jesus’ arrest? If they did not protect Jesus while he was alive, surely they would not have risked their lives to rob his tomb after his death.
The soldiers themselves must have been heavily drugged because rolling away the massive stone (weighing 1.5 to 2-ton) would have definitely created a lot of noise. Wouldn’t they be severely punished for sleeping on the job? Well, the religious leaders seemed to have confidence in appeasing Pilate with such a lame reason. Maybe Pilate couldn’t care less since in the first place it was not his idea to post a guard outside the tomb.
If the disciples did indeed steal the body, the resurrection would have been a hoax. Then why would they preach about the resurrection so boldly and be willing to die for it! Tradition holds that eleven of the twelve apostles were martyred for their faith. Why would they die for a lie?
Another creative suggestion by those who refuse to believe is that the women were hallucinating when they said they saw Jesus: “And behold, Jesus met them and said, ‘Greetings!’ And they came up and took hold of his feet and worshipped him.” (Matthew 28:9) They must have missed Jesus so dearly and thought of him day and night that they imagined seeing him.
But the women weren’t expecting to see Jesus.
The disciples weren’t anticipating the resurrection either. The appearances came as a surprise while the disciples’ minds were on other things. They were more afraid for their lives, huddling together in the upper room with locked doors.
The apostle Paul wrote in 1 Corinthian 15:6, “Then he [Jesus] appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive.” This meant that if anyone doubted the resurrection of Christ, they could go and find out from those who were still alive what they had seen. And we don’t suppose each of those five hundred was hallucinating at the same time when they saw Jesus! That is simply not how hallucinations work.
One last proposition that has been put forward is that the whole resurrection account is being made up. The Gospel writers were fanatics who had fabricated the story. However, if people of that time were to spin a story about someone having resurrected, they would have drawn from what they were already familiar with regarding people returning from the dead.
This person would either be a dazzling heavenly figure, e.g. Daniel 12:2-3 describes the resurrected at the end of age as ‘shining like the brightness of heaven’, or an ethereal figure like that of the ghost of the dead prophet Samuel in 1 Samuel 28:13.
The risen Jesus wasn’t described in any of these ways. He appeared to be completely ordinary yet there was some strangeness about him. His disciples couldn’t recognise him straight away. There was continuity with his former body in that he still had the nail marks on him (John 20:27), but it was a transformed body in that twice he could enter through locked doors (John 20: 19, 26).
There was simply nothing like this in the Jewish and Greco-Roman traditions for the Gospel writers to draw on. No one could thought this up unless it really happened in the way it was described because the disciples were there to witness for themselves.
Resurrection is said to be the linchpin of the Christian faith. What’s a linchpin? It refers to something that holds the different parts of a machine together. If that thing is missing, the whole machine will not be able to work or the whole complicated structure will just collapse. That is how important the resurrection of Jesus is. Christianity stands or falls with the truth of the resurrection.
I pray that in this Easter season, as you consider once again the evidence surrounding Christ’s resurrection, you will be convinced that he did rise from the dead, and it will be good for you to tune into the Easter sermon now so as to reflect on the implications of that reality.