I like to look at the evidence for the resurrection in four categories.
The first one is, did Jesus die on the cross?
Was he dead?
Virtually every scholar on planet Earth can see that Jesus was dead after
crucifixion.
We have no record of anyone anywhere ever surviving a full Roman crucifixion.
Even the Journal of the American Medical Association published a peer-reviewed
scientific medical study of the evidence for the death of Jesus and said,
clearly, the weight of the evidence indicates that Jesus was dead even before
the wound to his side was inflicted.
Even the atheist New Testament scholar, Gerd Ludeman, says historically it's
indisputable that Jesus was dead.
So Jesus was dead.
The second category of evidence is the early accounts we have for the
resurrection.
In other words, I used to think as an atheist that the resurrection was a legend
and that took a long time to develop in the ancient world.
But what I learned is that we have preserved for us a creed of the earliest
Christian church.
A creed that is an eyewitness-based report of the resurrection of Jesus.
Now this creed has been dated back by scholars to within months of the death of
Jesus.
Within months.
That is historical gold.
So we've got a newsflash from ancient history on the resurrection.
Third category of evidence is the empty tomb.
And the best evidence for that is even the opponents of Jesus implicitly admitted the
tomb was empty.
Because when the disciples began proclaiming that Jesus had risen,
what the opponents said was, oh, well, the disciples stole the body.
Now they're conceding the tomb's empty, they're just trying to explain how it got
empty.
So everybody's conceding the tomb was empty.
How did it get empty is really the issue.
And that goes to the fourth category of evidence, which is eyewitnesses.
You know, for most of what we know about ancient history, it comes from one or
maybe two sources of information.
And yet for the conviction of the disciples that they encountered the
resurrected Jesus, we have no fewer than nine ancient sources inside and outside
the New Testament confirming and corroborating the conviction of the
disciples that they encountered the risen Christ.
That is an avalanche of historical data.
So you put all that together and you have a really good case for Easter.