Whether or not the resurrection of Jesus happened is one of history’s greatest questions, but it’s also personal to me, because I changed my mind on the resurrection. I was brought up in quite a relaxed, agnostic family. I assumed Jesus was in the same camp as the tooth fairy and Santa Claus. But I was also brought up to ask questions and think critically.
And so the ideas of Christianity really intrigued me. One in particular – did Jesus really rise from the dead? Our culture seems to take that lightly, but that struck me as having world-changing significance.
Actually, one of the writers of the New Testament in the Bible says that if the resurrection didn’t happen, then Christianity is pointless.
And conversely if it did, well then it would demand that all of us sit up and listen. So I want to set out what made me change my mind about the resurrection.
The first question we have to ask is how we know anything about what happened two thousand years ago in Palestine.
I grew up assuming that we couldn’t really know. But that’s not exactly true.
The writings about Jesus that are in the Bible stack up as historical accounts – they bear all the hallmarks of reliability.
And those writings seem to establish a few questions – the answer to which lead us to think the resurrection really did happen.
First – did Jesus really die?
Some people will refute the resurrection by saying that Jesus just fainted, rather than actually dying.
That flies in the face of all of the evidence. Crucifixion was a gruesome, brutal way to die. Victims would experience lashings of leather with metal balls in them – their backs would be ripped to shreds – I won’t quote what historians say about it because it’s too disgusting. It was carried out by expert executioners, whose literal job it was to kill people. The New Testament records a spear being put into Jesus’ side and water and blood coming out – which is consistent with modern medicine’s understanding that fluid can build up around the heart and lungs during heart failure.
Second – was the tomb empty?
Another excellent way to refute the resurrection would be to find a dead body. But at the centre of the accounts of Jesus’ death is an empty grave.
His body was never found.
One of the very interesting things about the new testament accounts of the empty tomb is that it was discovered by women. To our ears that doesn’t stand out – but what is interesting is that in Jewish culture at this time, the testimony of a woman wouldn’t be considered reliable in court.
And so, if people were making up the story of the empty tomb, they would absolutely almost definitely NOT make up that women found the empty tomb. Which is another reason why these accounts bear the hallmarks of reliability.
Third – did people witness Jesus alive – after his death?
One of the earliest writings about Jesus is Paul’s letter to the Corinthians. In it, he writes to the church that Jesus was seen alive after his death.
If you were making this up, you would probably say something like ‘once upon a time, in a land far away’, and yet his words are the opposite of that. He lists names of people who saw him, almost as if he’s inviting the readers to go and ask them about their experience.
Fourth – why did the Church start?
The early church was not a powerful group of people, with political, financial, or other power. In fact they were largely from the poorer, less powerful parts of society – many of whom were women – who were utterly convinced that they had seen Jesus alive after his death.
They didn’t gain from making that claim. Instead most of them lost livelihoods and were persecuted – or even killed – for giving allegiance to Jesus and believing that he was the one who deserved their love and worship.
I can understand people dying for something they believed was true, but for something that they knew wasn’t true? Inconceivable.
So what else accounts for these pieces of evidence? A dead man, an empty tomb, sightings of him alive, and the growth of a movement that continues to give people hope two thousand years later?
Philip Pullmans’ allegorical book ‘The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ’ re-imagines the New Testament story, where Mary has twins. Jesus died, and Christ lives – and masquerades as Jesus.
He does it to show how fables can develop. He thinks the church developed these stories of Christ’s literal resurrection to serve their own ends, to propagate their own interests and power.
(You might have spotted from his other – better known – works, Philip Pullman is NOT a fan of the church).
It shows the crazy lengths you have to go to, to fit together the evidence that stacks up around the resurrection: a dead man, an empty tomb, witness of him alive after his death, and the growth of the church.
I get that many people will think all of this is too good to be true, because after all, death always seems to get the final word. And it never stops hurting.
We all long for death to be over, for hope to hold onto in the face of it.
Eddie Izzard said: ‘Religious people might think it goes on after death. My feeling is that if that is the case it would be nice if just one person came back and let us know it was all fine, all confirmed. Of all the billions of people who have died, if just one of them could come through the clouds and say, you know, ‘It’s me, Jeanine, it’s brilliant, there’s a really good spa’, that would be great.’
It would be great. It would be the best, life-changing, glorious news that there ever was. Confirmation that death is not the end; more than that – confirmation that the death of Jesus was truly what he said it was: the ransom for our sins. So that we can have eternal life knowing God.
So that’s a whistle-stop tour of why I changed my mind about the resurrection. Rather than being too good to be true, it’s so good because it’s true.
