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I like to look at the evidence for the
resurrection in four categories.

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The first one is, did Jesus die on the
cross?

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Was he dead?

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Virtually every scholar on planet Earth
can see that Jesus was dead after

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crucifixion.

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We have no record of anyone anywhere ever
surviving a full Roman crucifixion.

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Even the Journal of the American Medical
Association published a peer-reviewed

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scientific medical study of the evidence
for the death of Jesus and said,

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clearly, the weight of the evidence
indicates that Jesus was dead even before

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the wound to his side was inflicted.

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Even the atheist New Testament scholar,
Gerd Ludeman, says historically it's

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indisputable that Jesus was dead.

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So Jesus was dead.

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The second category of evidence is the
early accounts we have for the

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resurrection.

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In other words, I used to think as an
atheist that the resurrection was a legend

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and that took a long time to develop in
the ancient world.

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But what I learned is that we have
preserved for us a creed of the earliest

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Christian church.

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A creed that is an eyewitness-based report
of the resurrection of Jesus.

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Now this creed has been dated back by
scholars to within months of the death of

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Jesus.

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Within months.

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That is historical gold.

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So we've got a newsflash from ancient
history on the resurrection.

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Third category of evidence is the empty
tomb.

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And the best evidence for that is even the
opponents of Jesus implicitly admitted the

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tomb was empty.

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Because when the disciples began
proclaiming that Jesus had risen,

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what the opponents said was, oh,
well, the disciples stole the body.

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Now they're conceding the tomb's empty,
they're just trying to explain how it got

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empty.

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So everybody's conceding the tomb was
empty.

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How did it get empty is really the issue.

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And that goes to the fourth category of
evidence, which is eyewitnesses.

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You know, for most of what we know about
ancient history, it comes from one or

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maybe two sources of information.

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And yet for the conviction of the
disciples that they encountered the

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resurrected Jesus, we have no fewer than
nine ancient sources inside and outside

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the New Testament confirming and
corroborating the conviction of the

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disciples that they encountered the risen
Christ.

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That is an avalanche of historical data.

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So you put all that together and you have
a really good case for Easter.