The Resurrection of Jesus Christ an Historical Fact

The Resurrection the Foundation of the Christian faith

LET the issue be quite plain from the start: all that we believe -- if we claim to be Christians -- is staked upon the truth of Christ's resurrection. Either it is true that the body which hung upon the cross was pierced by the soldier's spear and placed in a tomb, came out of that tomb with the marks of its suffering still upon it, and was seen and touched truly and physically before ascending to heaven -- or Christianity is a delusion. There may be protest against this today: some may urge that Jesus was no less a great teacher of mankind if he decayed in the tomb and was lost, and others will contend that there may have been a kind of "spiritual" resurrection of Jesus without the need for a bodily presence among his disciples which, for some reason, is distasteful.

If Jesus did not rise ...

As to the first of these protests, if Jesus did not rise from the dead he was deluded; there is no power in his gospel. His moral precepts may be high and noble, but there is no life in them. The world does not willingly accept noble principles of conduct because a murdered man has advocated them. If the cross was the end of Jesus, it is the end of hope too. For he taught moral precepts to men who believed that his gospel was "the power of God unto salvation" (Romans 1:16), and that salvation cannot be realized to completion unless he is alive. The Christian hope is that a risen Christ will come again to give them his gift of eternal life, and to establish on the earth God's reign.

The second protest is a mere invention. It is not resurrection at all in the sense in which Jesus understood it, and the early Christians believed. It is as much as to say: 'We do not believe that the resurrection of Jesus, as the Bible records it, ever took place; but we can invent an idea of Jesus' survival, for which there is certainly no evidence, which is the best concession we can make to faith.'

We ask for no such concession. The challenge is very simple, and its terms are those on which an honest believer and an honest unbeliever will agree: either Jesus rose, physically and demonstrably, and Christianity is true beyond all argument; or Jesus died, never to live again, and Christianity is a monstrous lie. "If Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins ... If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable" (1 Corinthians 15:17-19).

The winning of belief

Notice the painful process whereby their belief was won. The disciples did not expect that Jesus would die, in spite of plain warnings from him (Matthew 16:21). They believed that their leader was destined to be the King of the Jews, literally and at once; and as soon as he allowed himself to be taken their hopes were dashed. The men (with two exceptions) fled from him, and the women remained, bravely but forlorn, only to take care of his corpse. They were simply unprepared for the resurrection, and nothing short of the strongest proof would convince any of them.

Mary thought when the body was not in the grave that it had been stolen; the two who walked from Jerusalem were unbelieving in spite of their astonishment at the women's stories -- they could not persuade the remainder by their experience (Mark 16:13); the absent Thomas stood out when all the rest had been convinced, until he, too, saw Jesus.

Notice also the nature of the appeal which Jesus made to his disciples when he had risen. See how actual it was: the women held him by the feet (Matthew 28:9); he shared meals with the two, with the many in the upper room, and with the disciples by the lake-side (Luke 24:30,41; John 21:9-13); he invited Thomas to prove by the nail-marks and the spear-wound that he was the Jesus who had died (John 20:27).

But there is another appeal too. The disciples were "fools and slow of heart" (Luke 24:25) not to have believed before: they ought to have taken more notice of the evidence they had. For the Jews had a Bible (our Old Testament) which they revered as the trustworthy word of God, and, said Jesus, that Book contained evidence that their Christ must suffer first, and receive glory afterwards: "And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself" (Luke 24:27).