It may be surprising to learn that the majority of New Testament critics investigating the gospels accept the central facts undergirding the resurrection of Jesus. These are not evangelical or conservative scholars only, but a broad spectrum of New Testament critics who teach at secular universities and non-evangelical seminaries. Amazing as it may seem, most of them have come to regard as historical the basic facts which support the resurrection of Jesus. These facts are as follows:

Fact #1: After his crucifixion, Jesus was buried in a tomb by Joseph of Arimathea.

• According to the late John A. T. Robinson of Cambridge University, the burial of Jesus in the tomb is “one of the earliest and best-attested facts about Jesus.”

Fact #2: On the Sunday following the crucifixion, Jesus’ tomb was found empty by a group of his women followers.

• Jacob Kremer, an Austrian specialist in the resurrection: “By far most exegetes hold firmly to the reliability of the biblical statements concerning the empty tomb."

Fact #3: On multiple occasions and under various circumstances, different individuals and groups of people experienced appearances of Jesus alive from the dead.

• This is a fact which is almost universally acknowledged among New Testament scholars.

• Even Gert L¸demann, the leading German critic of the resurrection, himself admits, “It may be taken as historically certain that Peter and the disciples had experiences after Jesus’ death in which Jesus appeared to them as the risen Christ.”

Fact #4: The original disciples believed that Jesus was risen from the dead despite their having every predisposition to the contrary.

• Their leader was dead. And Jews had no belief in a dying, much less rising, Messiah.

• The catastrophe of the crucifixion for the disciples was not simply that their Master was gone, but that the crucifixion showed, in effect, that the Pharisees had been right all along, that for three years they had been following a heretic, a man accursed by God!

• Jewish beliefs about the afterlife precluded anyone’s rising from the dead to glory and immortality before the general resurrection at the end of the world.

• Despite all this, the original disciples believed in and were willing to go to their deaths for the fact of Jesus’ resurrection.

William Lane Craig once participated in a debate on the resurrection of Jesus with a professor at the University of California. This professor had written his doctoral dissertation on the resurrection, and was thoroughly familiar with the evidence. He could not deny the facts of Jesus’ honourable burial, empty tomb, post-mortem appearances, and the origin of the disciples’ belief in the resurrection.

So his only recourse was to come up with some alternate explanation of those facts. And so he argued that Jesus of Nazareth had an unknown, identical twin brother, who was separated from him as an infant and grew up independently, but who came back to Jerusalem at the time of the crucifixion, stole Jesus’ body out of the tomb, and presented himself to the disciples, who mistakenly inferred that Jesus was risen from the dead!

This example is illustrative of the desperate lengths to which scepticism must go in order to refute the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. Indeed, the evidence is so powerful that one of the world’s leading Jewish theologians, the late Pinchas Lapide, who taught at Hebrew University in Israel, declared himself convinced on the basis of the evidence that the God of Israel raised Jesus of Nazareth from the dead!

Source: https://www.reasonablefaith.org/

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