Single: If Jesus really did rise from the dead, then it would confirm everything
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An Undeceptions Podcast.

Hey, John Dixon here. Many of you know that in June 2021, my best mate of 40 plus years, Ben Shaw, died in our home in Sydney, surrounded by his loved ones. But not before he finished his wonderful book, Seven Reasons to Reconsider Christianity. It's a unique blend of humour and thoughtfulness designed to explain the heart of the Christian faith for those who aren't sure what to make of it.

His publisher invited me to do the voice record for the audiobook, which was a lot of fun. And they've given us permission to offer Undeceptions listeners a taste of the book in the lead up to season 10. So here's a bit of Ben Shaw's seven reasons to reconsider Christianity. Let's just for a moment entertain a thought together.

If Jesus really did die on that Roman cross, if he really was completely and utterly dead, kaput, finished, gone, deceased, but then he really did come back to life and gave overwhelming proof that he was truly resurrected from the dead, you would have to admit that would have some pretty major implications.

If Jesus truly rose from the dead, then this was not only arguably the most significant event in history, it would also go a long way towards validating who he was, what he said, and what he claimed he had done. For three years before his death, Jesus had been showing and subtly telling the disciples that he was God incarnate, God in human form.

But it wasn't until the resurrection that the penny fully dropped for his followers. His resurrection totally confirmed for them that Jesus was who he said he was, and from the moment they saw him alive again, they confidently affirmed his divinity. In fact, as soon as the disciple Thomas saw Jesus alive again, he said to him, My Lord and my God. John chapter 20 verse 28.

No disciple had ever said that previously. The resurrection was arguably the turning point for the first followers of Jesus. If Jesus did rise from the dead, then it would go a long way to defending the case that he is the Son of God. Likewise, if Jesus really did rise from the dead, it would also seem to confirm what he said about God, life, death, and life beyond the grave.

If you were listening to a person giving a talk on mountaineering, it would make a big difference if you knew they had just returned from climbing Mount Everest. Or if someone was offering to be your swimming coach, I'm sure you'd be much more willing to take their advice if you knew they had previously won a gold medal at the Olympic Games.

Likewise, if Jesus rose from the dead, it gives a lot more weight to his claim that he came to bring us life and life to the full. John chapter 10 verse 10. So the question we must all consider then is this. Did Jesus really rise from the dead? Was it real news or fake news? Is there any evidence? Can you believe in the resurrection with intellectual integrity?

Well, as I begin to attempt to answer these questions, there's a couple of things I would first like you to be aware of. First of all, there is a truckload of detailed, serious scholarship on the subject.

Much of it, I'm sure, would put most people to sleep. But it's worth knowing that Jesus' resurrection and the subsequent rise of early Christianity has generated a lot of high-quality research in the scholarly world. Perhaps none is more impressive than N.T. Wright's book on the resurrection, The Resurrection of the Son of God. My copy is around 800 pages long and has caused one of the bookshelves in my study to sag.

That's because it's a very thorough historical and theological assessment of the resurrection, and by no means the only one in its field. Second, the accounts of Jesus' death and resurrection in the New Testament are considered by historians as valid historical documents, equal to any other such sources from the ancient world. Scholars don't disregard the New Testament just because it's a collection of religious documents and therefore biased.

All historians acknowledge that any document we have, whether ancient or modern, is written with at least some kind of agenda or bias to it. For example, one of the best historical sources we have on Alexander the Great comes from the ancient biographer Plutarch, who penned his biography on the famous Greek Macedonian general around 400 years later.

Plutarch was clearly a fan of Alexander and either ignores or glosses over many of Alexander's moral failures. However, no historian of Alexander disregards the writings of Plutarch simply because he wrote with a favourable bias. They just take that into account when assessing his work, as they do when assessing any historical document.

Those historians might not come to the same conclusion that the New Testament authors come to about Jesus and the resurrection, although some do. But they still regard these ancient Christian sources as historical evidence and the resurrection as a subject of great importance. Now, back to answering our question, did it really happen?

Well, of course, I can't give you conclusive, watertight proof that Jesus rose from the dead. I wish I could. But here are several things that help me to believe in the resurrection and to stay devoted to the Christian faith. And I'd love you too to consider these. Almost all our sources on Jesus' death, both Christian and non-Christian, tell us that he was executed on a cross.

This is significant, most obviously because if Jesus didn't really die, then he couldn't have risen from the dead. However, we can have great confidence that Jesus really did die precisely because he was crucified.

We might have a lot more reason to doubt Jesus' death and therefore his resurrection if indeed Jesus was lost at sea or fell over a cliff or was murdered in secret. However, a very public execution by a professional execution squad makes Jesus' death a certainty. One of the world's most eminent ancient historians is Robin Lane Fox, a prolific writer and a giant in his field.

In his highly readable book on ancient Greece and Rome, he categorically states, whatever the truth of the first Easter, the crucifixion at least is a historical fact. Crucifixion was almost always done publicly and by a team of professionals whose job it was to ensure the death of the victims.

I don't want to get into the gory details, but it was virtually physically impossible to crucify someone on your own. You needed a team of people to do it. And there was usually a head executioner overseeing it all. This is what we're told happened in Jesus' case. John 19, verse 23. Luke 23, verse 47.

Also, we are told by the Gospel writer John, who witnessed the crucifixion for himself, that Jesus was stabbed in the side with a spear by one of the Roman soldiers to confirm that he had indeed died. John 19:34-35

Furthermore, before releasing Jesus to be buried, the soldiers would have had to have handled the body, and the centurion would have needed to confirm firsthand that Jesus had indeed died. That was their job. Presumably then, they would have checked the body for any signs of life.

And if Christ was dead, they would have seen palamortis, the skin becoming pale, and felt algamortis, the body growing cold. They wouldn't have surrendered the body to be buried if they had thought the victim was still alive. The evidence then in no way supports the theory that Jesus swooned, fainted, passed out on the cross, was removed while still alive, and revived in the tomb shortly thereafter.

That not only runs against all the written testimony, but also contrary to what we know about Roman crucifixion and the imperial execution protocol. From all our available sources, it seems that everyone agreed that the tomb that Jesus had been placed in on the Friday was empty by the Sunday.

No one suggested that the women who went first and the apostles who arrived afterward went to the wrong tomb. The initial question among both Jesus' disciples and his enemies was, how did the tomb become empty? No one, it seems, questioned the fact of the empty tomb. They just debated how it got that way.

If there was any possibility that the followers of Jesus had got their GPS coordinates wrong, it is curious that not one of our sources reveals that someone then suggested going to the right tomb. If the disciples had gone to the wrong grave, any one of Jesus' enemies could have gone to the correct one and have simply produced the corpse. However, no one did.

Another thing worth pointing out is that our earliest sources on the resurrection tell us that there were many witnesses who saw Jesus alive at different locations.

Jesus didn't appear to just a few people on one particular foggy evening after they'd had a couple of pints or an overindulgence of strong cheese. We're told that Jesus physically appeared to many perfectly sober people in Jerusalem and in Galilee, and that he appeared at these locations on a number of occasions at different times of the day.

The Apostle Paul not only happily names a number of these witnesses, but also, almost casually, mentions that on at least one of those occasions, Jesus appeared to around 500 people at the same time. 1 Corinthians chapter 15 verse 6. While he concedes that some folk within that large group had since died, he also says that many of them were still alive. Just think about that for a moment.

If indeed 500 people really saw Jesus alive all at the same time, that almost totally rules out the theory that the disciples simply imagined it or that they were hallucinating the whole thing. It's also worth noting that if many of that group of 500 were still alive, then anyone reading Paul's words could go and find at least some of them and hear their accounts firsthand.

Another undeniable fact that virtually all scholars of history seem to agree on is the radical change that occurred in the disciples.

Within a matter of months, the remaining followers of Jesus, a mere 120 of them, went from being a bunch of confused, frightened no-hopers to a confident and courageous group of over 3,000 believers who boldly and unashamedly proclaimed that Jesus was indeed the Christ who had died and risen again.

It is an undeniable fact that Christianity began to spread like wildfire in and around Jerusalem, and within 30 years it had spread across the Mediterranean to reach the capital of the empire, Rome.

What can explain that? Could mere hearsay or legend generate such conviction and radical change in the disciples? It seems that what sparked the transformation and subsequent preaching of the first Christians was a genuine belief that Jesus was who he really claimed to be, that his death truly did pay for the sins of the world, and that he really did rise from the dead. My point is this.

When, like good detectives, we look at all the evidence and assess all the sources on the resurrection of Jesus, it seems to point in the direction of a bodily resurrection. Other theories, that the disciples made it up, or that they originally meant that Jesus simply rose spiritually, or that the women went to the wrong tomb, have no major evidence supporting them, and actually end up contradicting the evidence we do have.

As one lawyer has put it, the silence of history is deafening when it comes to the testimony against the resurrection.

Many years ago, I was a leader on a teen church camp in Australia. We had taken about 30 teenagers to a low-budget activity centre about two hours southwest of Sydney for a weekend of games and sport and a series of talks. On the first night, immediately after lights out, I retired to the room I was sharing with another leader when all of a sudden we heard an almighty bang that clearly came from the adjacent boys' dorm.

We both looked at each other in shock and simultaneously said, what the heck was that? We ran into the dorm and turned on all the lights. In the middle of the room were two dishevelled boys, both standing with guilty faces. The room was a mess and their pyjamas were ripped. They had clearly been wrestling and we'd caught them in the act. It wasn't too much of a surprise though, as these rather likeable lads were the most mischievous of the group.

What was that noise? I asked. What noise? They replied with cheeky grins. What was that loud bang? What bang? The conversation went to and fro like that for a few minutes before we noticed that directly behind the boys was a huge dent in the plaster wall. It was virtually the shape of one of them. Did you do that? We asked. Nope, came the quick reply. We asked them again, but they kept denying that they had anything to do with it.

We sent them to bed and went away to work out what we'd tell the camp owners. It was clear to us that these lads were responsible. We just couldn't prove it. All the evidence was there. The sound of the bang, the two of them standing there with their clothes ripped, the character of the suspects, the size and shape of the dent in the wall and so on. We couldn't ultimately prove that these lads had done it, but all the data certainly pointed that way.

In a similar way, I can't conclusively prove that Jesus rose from the dead. No one can. But what I can say is this. Just about all historians seem to agree that around 2,000 years ago, there was a massive bang. And the sound of it has reverberated and echoed down through two millennia.

When we go and investigate what the noise might have been and look at all the evidence, there is a large historical dent in the first century, and it's the outline of a resurrected man. MUSIC

I hope you liked this taste of Ben Shaw's Seven Reasons to Reconsider Christianity, published by The Good Book Company, available everywhere. And before you know it, we'll be back with Undeceptions Season 10. See ya! An Undeceptions Podcast.