Easter is upon us again! part 2

By Stephen Mitchell

In the first post I listed five statements, four of which are accepted by all reputable scholars, and the fifth by most. Then I listed the evidence for the first, that Jesus died by crucifixion. In this post I will look at the evidence for statement 2.

The second statement, “Jesus’ disciples believed that He rose and appeared to them,” is supported by the Disciples’ subsequent behavior. This is demonstrated in two ways, by their teaching and by their acceptance of suffering and death as a result of their teaching and evangelizing.

How do we know the Disciples actually taught this? Habermas and Licona list three ways to demonstrate this. They are 1) the Apostle Paul’s testimony, 2) the oral tradition of the early church, and 3) the written works of the early church. Paul noted, in his first letter to the church at Corinth, chapter 15, that he had had passed on to him the teaching that Jesus had died and risen again on the third day. Then he wrote, in verses 9-11, that both he and the apostles taught this. Since the widely accepted date of this letter is around A.D. 55, this constitutes an early testimony to the teaching of the disciples on the resurrection. But this passage also demonstrates an early oral tradition of the church. Verses 3-5 have been generally recognized as a creed of the early church. As such, Paul wrote that he had “received” it; i.e. it had been passed down to him. This would have been much earlier than the A.D. 55 date of the letter. Most likely it would have been within five years of the resurrection itself or, at most, within 20 years. The early sermons of the church recorded in Acts also show that the resurrection was a regular part of the teaching / preaching ministry of the Disciples. Also, the Gospels themselves, written within living memory of the life of Jesus, record His resurrection. As Paul noted in the letter quoted above, there were many still living who could corroborate or deny the truthfulness of the record. One only had to go ask them.

Then there are the written records of the early students of the original Disciples. Clement of Alexandria wrote a letter about A.D. 95 to the same church at Corinth as had Paul. He wrote that both Peter and Paul belonged to his generation. Irenaeus wrote in the second century A.D. that Clement had known the apostles and had heard them speak. Clement wrote of the Disciples, in section 42, “Having therefore received a charge, and having been fully assured through the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ and confirmed in the word of God with full assurance of the Holy Ghost, they went forth with the glad tidings that the kingdom of God should come.” Polycarp, who died a martyr at the age of 86 in about A.D. 160, was a student of the Apostle John according to Irenaeus. In Polycarp’s letter to the church in Philippi, written about A.D. 110, he wrote of the Disciples, “For they loved not the present world, but Him that died for our sakes and was raised by God for us.” So the early students of the Disciples taught the same thing the Disciples taught: that Jesus had risen from the dead.

How do we know the Disciples actually believed what they taught? Though many people throughout history have suffered and died for a lie, people do not suffer or die for what they know is a lie. J. Warner Wallace, in his book Cold Case Christianity, on page 110, noted, “In my experience as a detective, I have investigated many conspiracies and multiple-suspect crimes. While successful conspiracies are the popular subject of many movies and novels, I’ve come to learn that they are (in reality) very difficult to pull off.” (p. 110) After listing several reasons why they are difficult and why it would have been extremely difficult for the Disciples to have conspired to lie about Jesus’ resurrection, he continued,

“Successful conspiracies are unpressured conspiracies. The apostles, on the other hand, were aggressively persecuted as they were scattered from Italy to India. According to the records and accounts of the local communities, each of them suffered unimaginable physical duress and died a martyr’s death. Ancient writers recorded that Peter was crucified upside down in Rome, James was killed with the sword in Jerusalem, and Thomas was murdered by a mob in Mylapore. Each story of martyrdom is more gruesome than the prior as we examine the list of apostolic deaths. This pressure was far greater than the fear of state prison faced by Charlie and Vic, yet none of the Twelve recanted their claims related to the resurrection. Not one. I can’t imagine a less favorable set of circumstances for a successful conspiracy than those that the twelve apostles faced. Multiply the problem by ten to account for the 120 disciples in the upper room (Acts 1: 15), or by forty to account for the five hundred eyewitnesses described by Paul (1 Cor. 15: 6), and the odds seem even more prohibitive. None of these eyewitnesses ever recanted, none was ever trotted out by the enemies of Christianity in an effort to expose the Christian ‘lie.’” (pp. 113-114)

That the Disciples taught that Jesus was raised from the dead and appeared to them and then subsequently accepted suffering and death without recanting that teaching shows that “Jesus’ disciples believed that He rose and appeared to them.”

Gary R. Habermas and Michael R. Licona, The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus (Grand Rapids: Kregel Publications, 2004)

J. Warner Wallace, Cold-Case Christianity: A Homicide Detective Investigates the Claims of the Gospels (Colorado Springs, CO: David C. Cook, 2013)