Its by Steve Turner, I Knew it would get a reaction.

This comes from a debate btw. William Land Craig and Bart Erhman. Craig argues for the affirmative position. Take the time to read. This is why I treat the ressurection as highly probable.







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

Historians have established this fact on the basis of evidence such as the following:

1. Jesus’ burial is multiply attested in early, independent sources.

We have four biographies of Jesus, by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, which have been
collected into the New Testament, along with various letters of the apostle Paul. Now the burial
account is part of Mark’s source material for the story of Jesus’ suffering and death. This is a
very early source which is probably based on eyewitness testimony and which the commentator
Rudolf Pesch dates to within seven years of the crucifixion. Moreover, Paul also cites an
extremely early source for Jesus’ burial which most scholars date to within five years of Jesus’
crucifixion. Independent testimony to Jesus’ burial by Joseph is also found in the sources behind
Matthew and Luke and the Gospel of John, not to mention the extra-biblical Gospel of Peter.
Thus, we have the remarkable number of at least five independent sources for Jesus’ burial, some
of which are extraordinarily early.

2. As a member of the Jewish Sanhedrin that condemned Jesus, Joseph of Arimathea is unlikely
to be a Christian invention.

There was an understandable hostility in the early church toward the Jewish leaders. In Christian
eyes, they had engineered a judicial murder of Jesus. Thus, according to the late New Testament
scholar Raymond Brown, Jesus’ burial by Joseph is “very probable,” since it is “almost
inexplicable” why Christians would make up a story about a Jewish Sanhedrist who does what is
right by Jesus.

For these and other reasons, most New Testament critics concur that Jesus was buried by Joseph
of Arimathea in a tomb. 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 after the crucifixion, Jesus’ tomb was found empty by a group of
his women followers.

Among the reasons which have led most scholars to this conclusion are the following:

1. The empty tomb is also multiply attested by independent, early sources.

Mark’s source didn’t end with the burial, but with the story of the empty tomb, which is tied to
the burial story verbally and grammatically. Moreover, Matthew and John have independent
sources about the empty tomb; it’s also mentioned in the sermons in the Acts of the Apostles
(2.29; 13.36); and it’s implied by Paul in his first letter to the Corinthian church (I Cor. 15.4).
Thus, we have again multiple, early, independent attestation of the fact of the empty tomb.

2. The tomb was discovered empty by women.

In patriarchal Jewish society the testimony of women was not highly regarded. In fact, the
Jewish historian Josephus says that women weren’t even permitted to serve as witnesses in a
Jewish court of law. Now in light of this fact, how remarkable it is that it is women who are the
discoverers of Jesus’ empty tomb. Any later legendary account would certainly have made male
disciples like Peter and John discover the empty tomb. The fact that it is women, rather than
men, who are the discoverers of the empty tomb is best explained by the fact that they were the
chief witnesses to the fact of the empty tomb, and the Gospel writers faithfully record what, for
them, was an awkward and embarrassing fact.
I could go on, but I think enough has been said to indicate why, in the words of Jacob Kremer, an
Austrian specialist on the resurrection, “By far most exegetes hold firmly to the reliability of the
biblical statements concerning the empty tomb.”


Fact #3: On different 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 virtually universally acknowledged by scholars, for the following reasons:

1. Paul’s list of eyewitnesses to Jesus’ resurrection appearances guarantees that such
appearances occurred. Paul tells us that Jesus appeared to his chief disciple Peter, then to the inner circle of disciples
known as the Twelve; then he appeared to a group of 500 disciples at once, then to his younger
brother James, who up to that time was apparently not a believer, then to all the apostles.
Finally, Paul adds, “he appeared also to me,” at the time when Paul was still a persecutor of the
early Jesus movement (I Cor. 15.5-8). Given the early date of Paul’s information as well as his
personal acquaintance with the people involved, these appearances cannot be dismissed as mere
legends.

2. The appearance narratives in the Gospels provide multiple, independent attestation of the
appearances.

For example, the appearance to Peter is attested by Luke and Paul; the appearance to the Twelve
is attested by Luke, John, and Paul; and the appearance to the women is attested by Matthew and
John. The appearance narratives span such a breadth of independent sources that it cannot be
reasonably denied that the earliest disciples did have such experiences. Thus, even the skeptical
German New Testament critic Gerd Lüdemann concludes, “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 suddenly and sincerely came to believe that Jesus was risen
from the dead despite their having every predisposition to the contrary.

Think of the situation the disciples faced following Jesus’ crucifixion:

1. Their leader was dead.

And Jewish Messianic expectations had no idea of a Messiah who, instead of triumphing over
Israel’s enemies, would be shamefully executed by them as a criminal.

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

Nevertheless, the original disciples suddenly came to believe so strongly that God had raised
Jesus from the dead that they were willing to die for the truth of that belief. But then the obvious
question arises: What in the world caused them to believe such an un-Jewish and outlandish
thing? Luke Johnson, a New Testament scholar at Emory University, muses, “Some sort of
powerful, transformative experience is required to generate the sort of movement earliest
Christianity was.”5 And N. T. Wright, an eminent British scholar, concludes, “That is why, as an historian, I cannot explain the rise of early Christianity unless Jesus rose again, leaving an empty
tomb behind him."

I am skeptical.

If you asked me Yes or NO, I would say no

I dont know but, but I cant prove they dont.