Sermon: 06.04.14

We are quickly coming up to Easter and the most important festival in the Christian Church. The four days that make up Easter are the most pivotal in history. And in case you think I can’t count I’ve included Maundy Thursday in that as without the events before Good Friday, Easter wouldn’t exist. And it is because Easter is so important it often is called into question. The last 200 years have seen a huge assault on the authenticity of the Easter accounts with all sorts of alternatives being put forward because the Easter story is about a man who died and then rose from the dead.

I have been asked if Easter really happened the way the Bible tells us it did. Was it not a legend spun out by the followers of Jesus? And so today I want to look at sharing some of the information I have learnt reading up about this very special time in the life of the Church.

Before I start I am indebted to Lee Strobel and his book “The Case for Easter” in providing the starting point for my journey into the authenticity of the Easter Account.

Secular arguments regarding the Easter accounts fall into three main categories:

1) Christ never died
2) There isn’t enough evidence to prove the tomb was actually empty
3) The crucified Christ was never seen by anyone after he was supposedly resurrected.

Before I briefly deal with each one of these objections I must quickly explain by the Easter story is so crucial to the life of the Church. And the answer is this: Without Easter there would be no Church and so if someone could discredit the Easter Story then the very basis of Christianity is discredited. Do away with Easter and suddenly Jesus is no longer the Son of God crucified, buried and resurrected but a pious Rabbi who died for no apparent reason other a misguided belief in …

We have two readings (John 19: 12-19, 28-30, 33-37; 1 Corinthians 15: 3-8). One of the very earliest and one of the last books written in the Bible. 1 Corinthians has been dated as being written between 53 and 57 AD. Most biblical scholars will be more accurate and date it to 56 AD. The earliest fragment of 1 Corinthians has been carbon dated to before 70 AD and so for all sorts of reasons we can day fairly accurately that the copy of 1 Cor. we have today is accurate.

The gospel of John is dated to after 70 AD with some scholars suggesting it could have been written earlier. The earliest fragment we have of John is dated to before 200 AD so again we can assume the account to be accurate.

If both the readings are accurate then it stands to reason that using them to prove the accuracy of the Easter account shouldn’t be too difficult.

So let’s start with the first objection:

1) Jesus never died
As early as the beginning of Islam, theories have abounded about Jesus being crucified but not actually dying. It’s often referred to as the “Swoon Theory”. The idea behind it is that Jesus didn’t actually die on the cross but that he fainted or was drugged and so when he was taken down from the cross he was revived and so was able to appear as if he had risen from the dead.
A scholar by the name of Alexander Metherill is classed as an expert in the fields of Medicine and bio-engineering and has written a lot about the Crucifixion.
Metherill says there are three reasons why he believes that the Gospel accounts for the death of Jesus are accurate:

1.1) The Gospel accounts are medically accurate. The physical symptoms described in the Gospel accounts would actually have happened to Jesus while he was being crucified. The blood and water, John describes for instance, is actually a condition called Cardiac and Pleural Effusion. This occurs when a person died from hypovolemic shock caused by extreme blood loss. There is no way John could have known this had he not been there. The descriptions of Jesus pain, suffering and physical weakness are all indications of someone who is dying.

1.2) The Roman soldiers were very good at their job.  They weren’t very good at compassion but they were very good at killing people and have had plenty of experience of seeing dead people. Besides it was their job to make sure that those on the cross were dead. That was why they broke the legs of those who were dying slowly. To make sure they were going to die. They had no reason to believe that Jesus wasn’t dead. They would have known and so when they saw Jesus was dead didn’t need to go the effort of breaking his legs

1.3) There were too many witnesses alive that could testify to the death of Jesus at the time the Gospels and 1 Corinthians were written for it to be wrong. Paul mentions a great list of people in his account in 1 Corinthians. The majority of people he mentions were alive at this time and no doubt the details would have gotten back to those mentioned. Should the accounts in the Gospels and the Corinthians reading been wrong then I’m sure someone would have mentioned it.

2) Was the tomb really empty?

There are all sorts of objections to the Empty tomb. Sceptics will raise all sorts of objections to the Gospel accounts of the empty tomb. These range from Jesus wasn’t buried in the tomb the gospels describe, to the disciples stealing the body, to the account of the first Easter morning being added to the Gospels as a legend.

If the Gospel accounts are accurate then the question of the Empty Tomb must be accurate as well. There are a number of reasons that all the objections raised above would be wrong.

2.1) Jesus wasn’t buried in the tomb the Gospels describe.
This is probably the easiest to deal with. If Jesus was buried in a different tomb, when the disciples proclaimed the tomb empty, the authorities would have just pointed them to the right tomb. But Luke tells us that the women who followed Jesus, followed Joseph of Arimethea to the tomb to prepare the body. They knew where he was buried and were unlikely to forget where he was buried in two days.

2.2) The Disciples stole the body
The irony of this objection is that this is the story the Jewish Leaders told the soldiers at the tomb to say when the report came back that the tomb was empty. However unlikely this was it still persists but the question has to be asked: “Why would a group of people who abandoned Jesus while he was alive, risk their lives to steal his body back?” It makes no sense but the suggestion still makes its way to the surface today nearly 2000 years after the lie was first reported to have been told.

I think it’s important to point out that the Jewish Leaders weren’t particularly surprised to hear the tomb was empty. In fact the way Matthew records the account it was something they fully expected. Again this is significant because if this wasn’t the case there would have been enough people around to have pointed out the obvious mistake.

2.3) The Empty tomb is simply a legend.

This is a more modern question and is based on the argument that the Gospels were written a long time after the event took place. An American Author William Lane Craig is a renowned expert on the resurrection and has put a lot into countering this argument.

Craig defends the empty tomb from the accusation of the Legend by comparing the Canonical Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) with gospels written later in the life of the Church (Gospels such as the Gospel of Peter, Judas and Thomas). He shows that the accounts in the Canonical Gospels are very simple with none of the hyperbole and drama found in the later Gospels. In fact many of the apocryphal accounts of the Resurrection of Jesus including Jesus bursting forth from the ground with light and power and angels and things. The Gospels are simple because there were simply too many people around who would be able to stand up for the truth. Legends can only occur when those who have witnessed the event are dead. Not possible when you consider the dates of the Gospels.

3) The third question that needs to be asked is while the tomb may have been empty did Jesus actually rise from the dead

Someone has pointed out that there is no written account of the resurrection. And in fact they are right. When Christ was resurrected there wasn’t anyone sitting there writing down everything that happened. However Science deals with cause and effect. No one was there at the Big Bang but by studying the effects of the Big Bang scientists can be reasonably certain it occurred. The same principles can be applied to the resurrection. There may not have been anyone there at the moment the stone rolled away but everything that has happened as a result is more than enough proof that the resurrection. The fact that Jesus was alive, was something the apostles truly believed because they were witnesses to this very fact. It is highly unlikely that they would have willingly suffered and died for a hallucination or a lie.

However the strongest proof comes from the Gospels and the 1 Corinthians passage. Here is some interesting information about the passage in Corinthians. Biblical scholars have put forward that Paul is actually quoting a common creed that the Church had adopted at the time. He added his bit at the end for emphasis. If that is the case then Paul is quoting a piece of teaching that had been around longer than Paul’s letter to the Corinthians. The fact that Paul quotes this earliest of creeds suggests that this particular creed had been around at least twenty or thirty years after the death and resurrection of Jesus. A liberal Biblical Scholar Joachim Jeremias refers to this particular passage as “the earliest tradition of all.”

There is the possibility that this particular creed could be dated to around the mid 30’s AD. Paul may have been taught this creed by the first apostles when he went to study under them. This is something he talks about in his letter to the Galatians Chapter 1. The word Paul uses if Historeo which translates as being taught.

I must admit that Lee Strobel gives over half of his book to this particular question while I have given less than a third of my time to this. However there is a lot out there should anyone be interested. A good start id Josh McDowells book: “Evidence that demands a verdict.” It may seem like a lot but Peter encourages us to always have a ready defence for the hope in us. Sometimes it is worth getting the answers for the questions we face because they are being asked and we need to answer them.
Amen.