Full Transcript

Welcome back to Share the Word, and for our new listeners, thank you for joining us. We truly believe that the best way to learn about the New Testament is chapter by chapter. And on today’s podcast, Paul will be unpacking the big idea from the last chapter of the Gospel of Luke. So let’s listen in. Luke chapter 24. Resurrection: fact or fiction?

We’ve arrived today at the final chapter of Luke’s account of Jesus, Luke’s resolution of the whole story. The chapter contains the all-important claim that Jesus was resurrected and describes several reported post-resurrection appearances. Honest Christians will admit this: the resurrection of Jesus is the essential foundational claim of the Christian faith. If it did not happen, if it is only a legend, there is nothing particularly unique or powerful about Christianity. In fact, if it didn’t happen, the Christian faith is based on a lie. The apostle Paul admitted exactly that in a letter he wrote to early Christians in Greece around 55 A.D.

As a key leader of the early Christian movement, he said to them, If Christ was not raised, then our preaching is in vain and our faith is useless. Descriptions of Jesus’ physical resurrection and subsequent appearances are in all four Gospels. Matthew, realized, was one of the twelve original disciples, so he was there, as was John, whose personal experiences related to the resurrection of Jesus we discussed a while back in episode 20. Mark, who was a younger associate of the apostles, whose parents owned the home with him in the upper room in Jerusalem. He became a protégé of the apostle Peter, and what he tells us in his gospel comes from that primary source. Our Luke here is a little different.

He tells us up front that what he gleaned was from information from interviews with eyewitnesses of the events he writes about, although he himself was not there. So Luke is like an investigative journalist. We have these four different versions of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection we call the Gospels, based on a lot of both personally experienced as well as gathered testimony. Unlike, say, the foundational story of Mormonism, which is about a guy who supposedly found some engraved golden tablets on a mountainside in New York in the 19th century. Joseph Smith was his name. He claimed that when magically deciphered, they contained a new account of Jesus appearing in North America.

These tablets mysteriously disappeared, of course, and so, as far as I know, his story about Jesus appearing to Native Americans when that was supposed to have happened, the Native Americans never talked about it and never wrote about it. The comparison between the amount of evidence and the number of witnesses for the foundational claims of Christianity versus, for example, the same for Mormonism couldn’t be more different. The reality of Jesus’ resurrection is based on a ton of extremely compelling evidence and from a variety of firsthand sources. The four different accounts in the Gospels each describe the resurrection and subsequent appearances of Jesus through different lenses. Think of it as any other major historical event, if described from different angles or perspectives, with each writer’s sources recalling different details and filling in different pieces of the puzzle.

What I’m going to do today is put all four of the gospel accounts together and consider their key pieces of evidence for the reality of the resurrection. Not just what Luke tells us in this chapter, but also include details that Matthew, Mark, John, and later Paul also tell us. I’m not an attorney. I’ve never even played one on TV. But I’m going to lay out the case for the historicity of the resurrection based on what eyewitnesses say they saw and experienced. Then you can decide for yourself if the unique foundational claim of Christianity, that is, that Jesus of Nazareth, who was condemned to die by the Roman procurator Pontius Pilate around 33 A.D., in fact rose from the dead as early Christians claimed, or whether that’s just a groundless legend.

Are you ready? Key piece of evidence number one: his predictions. During Jesus’ public ministry in Israel, which lasted three years, he on several occasions predicted that he would die at the hands of his enemies, Israel’s religious leaders, and that he would subsequently be resurrected. Now you must admit that is a very unusual claim, and so we should take it into account as part of the evidence. Jesus told friends and enemies alike that the great sign proving his identity, confirming the truth of his message, would be his resurrection from the dead. No one at the time could conceive of that.

It was a very bizarre thing to say. It’s evident from his followers’ behavior after Jesus’ death, as well as their later testimony, that none of them really expected it would happen. Key piece of evidence number two: the empty tomb. If you disbelieve in the resurrection of Jesus, you must account for the empty tomb. No one disputes the fact that the tomb where Jesus was buried was empty on Sunday morning and the corpse unaccounted for. Realize that Jesus’ disciples, Peter, John, the others, were boldly preaching in Jerusalem just weeks after this that he had in fact risen from the dead, and not in India or some faraway place, but right there in Jerusalem.

If they were wrong, their claim could have easily been disproven by simply taking a ten-minute walk out from the city and retrieving Jesus’ body from the tomb. The enemies of Christianity could not do that because the tomb was empty. Although the priests desperately wanted to silence the claim that Jesus arose, and they threatened and beat the apostles for saying he had, they could not do the one thing that would shut them up. They could not produce the corpse of Jesus and had no credible explanation for the empty tomb. Realize that put them in a serious bind. They were really left with only one possible response, one way to try to explain it.

What was that? They spread the rumor that the friends of Jesus must somehow have stolen and moved his body. We’ll consider how plausible that explanation is as we proceed. Key piece of evidence number three: the guard detail. The Roman governor Pilate was concerned to put to rest all the controversy surrounding Jesus. His only interest now was to keep order in Judea, and the last thing he wanted was any hanky-panky involving this controversial dead prophet.

Although Pilate did not favor executing him, once he was pressured into it by the Jewish authorities, he wanted to make sure that was the end of the matter, especially after he was informed of Jesus’ bizarre prediction that he would rise from the dead. He ordered, therefore, the tomb to be officially sealed and gave the high priest permission to have it guarded round the clock. Sealed means the Roman governor’s imprimatur was placed on it with a warning: anyone who tampers with this place will answer to Roman authority. At a minimum, four soldiers would have been on this duty, watching the tomb, more likely eight. Their duty would rotate if the detail was, say, six. Two of them would stand guard in the morning, two in the afternoon, two in the evening, like that, and they would switch off.

The penalty for leaving a post in the face of danger in the Roman legions was death. For failure to protect what was being guarded due to neglect under Roman statutes was death. Nevertheless, something happened that caused those very disciplined soldiers to panic and leave their post. What was it? What did they encounter? The story they ended up telling, because they were bribed to tell it, was that they had fallen asleep and that Jesus’ disciples must have come and somehow stolen his body.

But if that’s really what happened, they would have been signing their own death warrants. If the body was actually stolen because of their negligence, they would have faced very severe consequences, and they didn’t. Also, would Jesus’ frightened, disheartened followers have hatched a plot to try and get his body from a guarded tomb, thereby challenging Rome’s authority? Could they have overcome these seasoned Roman soldiers to do so? And what possible motive would they have had? Should they succeed for taking his corpse and then hiding it someplace it was never found?

None of that makes any sense at all. Key piece of evidence number four: the stone. The way tombs around Jerusalem at the time were built holds a major clue in interpreting the evidence. The wealthy, like Joseph of Arimathea, had tombs built by digging out rooms from a rocky hillside. The doorway to the tomb would be four, maybe four and a half feet high and would be covered by a stone, if you can picture this, a stone in the shape of a disc that could be rolled down in place to cover the opening. The covering stone was held in place by a wedge up a trough until ready to close up the tomb and seal it, and then it would be rolled into place in front of the entrance when the burial work was complete.

Those who have worked on these archaeological sites say that these covering stones, like the one rolled in front of Jesus’ tomb, weigh between one and a half and two tons. The odd thing is, the witnesses who first saw this place on Sunday morning said that the covering stone’s position when they arrived at the site wasn’t toppled over, but was carried away or thrown away from the tomb’s opening. So tell me, who carries or tosses away two-ton stone discs? This might clue you in to what those very disciplined guards saw that caused them to lose composure and run from that scene. Key piece of evidence number five: the grave clothes. Jesus was not buried by his disciples.

They were all hiding in fear. It’s possible John and a couple of the women followers of Jesus were there as observers, but he was buried by two rich Jewish benefactors who admired him. The respected teacher Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea, who owned the tomb. And Jesus was buried according to the customs of the Jews at that time, which means his body was washed, straightened, clothed in a clean linen cloth, then wrapped with strips of cloth coated with spices. The spices used in Jesus’ burial were aloes and myrrh, according to the Gospel of John. Aloes is a powdered aromatic wood, and it was mixed with myrrh, which is a thick, gummy substance.

Imagine that mixture smeared over the linen covering the corpse, and then more strips of cloth wrapped around the body up to the armpits. Then the arms were laid close to the body, and it was all smeared again, and they were wrapped again up to the neck, with the head being left uncovered. There were usually at least three layers of these wrappings, with the gummy compound smeared between each one. Nicodemus and Joseph, according to the Gospel of John, had 75 pounds, or weight, of this sticky mixture to use to wrap the body of Jesus. But when Peter and John, two of the first eyewitnesses who arrived at the tomb on Sunday morning, when they entered the tomb, John says it was the grave clothes that he found so convincing.

As they ducked into that tomb, can hardly imagine how creepy that was, what John saw was those grave wrappings still lying on the burial slab, only they were empty, like the shell of a cocoon. And the cloth that had been wrapped around his face was neatly rolled up beside the empty grave wrappings. When John saw that, when that registered in his brain, he said, That’s when I believed. Do you understand why? He realized that if someone wanted to move a dead body buried in this way, they would have never taken the time to get it out of those sticky, gummy grave wrappings. Who in the world would have taken the time to do that?

No, they were stealing a body. They would have grabbed it and run. That’s what struck John. When he saw this empty cocoon of wrappings lying undisturbed on the slab and that head covering neatly rolled up beside it, the incredible truth struck him. There was no other plausible explanation for this except that Jesus had in fact risen as he’d promised. Key piece of evidence number six: eyewitnesses.

Circumstantial evidence can be powerful, but nothing is as valuable as eyewitness testimony. Realize the testimony of seeing and interacting with Jesus after his resurrection didn’t come from a few flaky people who were disposed to believe it. As the historian Luke points out, he appeared with many convincing proofs over a period of forty days. Because of the number of witnesses, who those witnesses were, the variety of settings where they interacted with the resurrected Christ, and the amount of time they were exposed to him, I don’t think their testimony can be reasonably impeached. Let’s break this down for a moment. First of all, the New Testament claims more than 500 people over a period of forty days saw Christ alive after he had been publicly executed.

Twenty years after the fact, the apostle Paul made this claim in 1 Corinthians chapter 15. He said most of those people were still alive at that time, so they would have been available for questioning. Think about that. If we were in a courtroom trying to decide the validity of the resurrection, and each of those witnesses was called in and asked what they saw, what they had firsthand knowledge of, and each was given just ten minutes to give their story and be cross-examined, do you realize you would be exposed to over 80 hours of continuous eyewitness testimony? That’s an enormous amount of eyewitness testimony. As you listen to these witnesses after witnesses, you would realize that literally none of these people were predisposed to believe the resurrection would happen.

Not even his closest associates like John and Peter. They did not expect it. They did not believe it until faced with overwhelming proof they could not deny. Besides the circumstantial evidence at the gravesite, Peter and John could testify that they were with Jesus after the resurrection physically numerous times in various settings. He met them back in that upper room the night of the resurrection, but he also met them 60 miles away from there on the shore of the Sea of Galilee weeks later. They touched him.

They ate with him. This was no illusion. Another of Jesus’ disciples who was not in the upper room at the first appearance doubted it even when his ten associates said that it happened and they had seen Jesus. Thomas was his name. He didn’t believe it until Jesus appeared again when he was present, when Jesus offered to him to personally examine the wounds still fresh in his body. Thomas fell down before him and said, My Lord and my God.

Thomas’ doubts were completely satisfied. He also appeared to another class of witnesses, people who were not even followers of his before the crucifixion, like his brother James, who the Bible says didn’t accept Jesus’ claims previously, or Saul of Tarsus, who not only rejected Jesus’ claims but who had been a leading persecutor of the early Christians before he came face to face with the risen Lord. One of the more noteworthy things about the eyewitness testimony is that many of the eyewitnesses were women. In fact, the very first person to see Jesus alive after the resurrection was a woman by the name of Mary Magdalene. No first-century Jew concocting this story would have ever written that script, because the testimony of women at that time was not even legal in a court of law. But Mary is recorded in the Bible as being the first to interact with, touch, and talk to Jesus.

Why? Because she was. That’s why. Key piece of evidence number seven: transformed lives. The final piece of evidence is absolutely conclusive for me. People do not willingly suffer for a lie.

What advantage or reason would there have been for any of them to do that? Yet, not for a day, not for a few weeks, not for months, not for a couple years, but for the next sixty-some years, the eyewitnesses of the resurrection, the apostles, and many others who were there suffered for refusing to recant their story of having seen Jesus alive. That goes against everything we know about human nature. Take Peter as one example. Here was a man who, we just saw, before the crucifixion, was so intimidated he denied he even knew Jesus was. Then, just weeks later, after the resurrection, this same fellow was standing in Jerusalem, publicly challenging the leaders of Israel, saying things like, You delivered up Jesus.

You disowned him in the presence of Pontius Pilate when he had decided to release him. You disowned the Holy and Righteous One. You put to death the Prince of Life, but God has raised him from the dead, a fact to which we are all witnesses. Wow. You tell me, what changed that man? Suddenly, this same man could not be intimidated.

They threatened him. They imprisoned him. They beat him. Eventually, they crucified him too, because he simply would not quit telling people that Jesus, the Messiah, died for our sins and was raised to life. And so it went for all of them. They were beaten and hounded and persecuted, and eventually, all but one of the twelve original apostles were put to death by opponents of Christianity because they refused to change their testimony.

Are you seriously telling me that these men would submit themselves to all sorts of persecution, even martyrdom, for something they all knew in their hearts was a lie, a fiction they had concocted? With all due respect, that’s preposterous. If they were not 100% certain that the resurrection occurred, if they had not seen Jesus with their own eyes and handled him with their own hands, if there was any doubt whatsoever in their minds. They would certainly have cracked under the intense pressure that came down on them, and none of them ever did. None of them ever changed his story under the most intense pressure imaginable. To their dying whispers, they maintained, Jesus Christ is alive.

And it’s on that foundation of their unwavering and unimpeachable testimony that Christianity was established and grew like wildfire in the Roman Empire. So the bottom line is this. There are only two possible alternatives when you come right down to it. Some would have you believe that Jesus’ friends stole his body and spread the false rumor that he had been resurrected, and that somehow from that legend arose a movement that changed the world.

But to believe that, you must also believe that intimidated men plotted a grave robbery, a cover-up, overcame a watch of heavily armed guards, broke the seal of the Roman governor, which was a capital offense, in an unnecessary Herculean effort, carried away rather than toppled over a two-ton disc of stone that covered the entrance, then took the time, against all reason, to carefully extricate the corpse from all those gummy grave wrappings, and hid the body somewhere it has never been found. Finally, they convinced about 500 other people to join them in this false claim that they too were eyewitnesses of Jesus alive after his crucifixion, even though that could only lead those people to being persecuted, imprisoned, and in many cases actually killed for insisting this was all true. Are you able to believe all that? I find it beyond incredible, completely implausible.

Believing that would take way more faith than I have. Or you can believe what the evidence actually points to. And what the evidence points to is what the eyewitnesses said they saw, even though it requires a miracle of God. That is that Jesus Christ, in fact, rose from the dead as he predicted repeatedly he would. Believe that not just because you want to believe it, not just because you hope death is defeatable. Believe that because that is where the evidence overwhelmingly points.

Believe that based on the facts. This has been Paul for Share the Word. Thanks, Paul. You know, I can’t believe that we’ve come to the end of the Gospel of Luke. And if you’re enjoying these commentaries, please help us share the word by letting others know. Share it on your Facebook and across all the social media platforms.

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