The Veracity of the Resurrection

Sermon Introduction

I hope that in the little over a year that I have served as your pastor, I have been able to convey how much I love the Bible.

Although that statement in itself requires two qualifications...

Academic Disciplines

First of all, I do not mean to imply that I love the Bible more than any others… Of course, we who believe in Jesus as our Lord and Saviour all love the Bible because it reveals God, and declares to us the Gospel, the way of salvation.

However, there is a multitude of topics within Christianity that diffrerent people would naturally be interested in.

There are, for example, those who are interested in studying the history of the church, and how God has moved in time to bring people to himself.

There are those who might be interested in a kind of philosophical study of God, more popularly known as Theology. These people would be interested in how we think about God’s revelation about himself, sin, church, salvation, and so on.

And then there are those who might be interested in the Bible itself… Studying how to interpret and apply it, the history of how the Bible was written, compiled, and passed down to generation of Christians across the world.

These three disciplines, Church History, Systematic Theology and Biblical Studies, generally make up the core of the academic study of Christianity.

And so when I say I love the Bible, in addition to loving it as the Words of Life which reveals Christ, I am also firmly in the Biblical Studies camp…

For example, one of the Facebook Groups that I am a part of is called “Nerdy Biblical Language Majors”.

This leads me to the second qualification I need to explain.

View of the Bible

You see, I love the Bible because it is the Words of Life… as I said, it reveals God, and declares to us the Gospel.

As such, it is the Holy Bible… and yet, the fact of the matter is, the physical book, is itself not intrinsically holy.

What I mean is this… we do not revere the bible itself… unlike how other religions view their holy books...

Now I’m not say out loud which religions these are.. There’s no point in it… though I’m sure you can Google it.

But there are several religions that will not allow their scriptures to be desecrated in any way…

They require special physical handling, or at least they will absolutely lose their minds if something happens like their scriptures touch the ground or is burned in protest...

There’s another religion which believes that their scriptures were literally handed down to their prophet as golden tablets, written in text that only that prophet alone can interpret it...

These religions revere their scriptures so much, which in some ways can be seen as good… but honesty in my opinion, it borders on idolatry...

By comparison, how many of you, especially those who have been Christians for a long time, have old, worn out Bibles sitting in your homes right now?

I’ve probably got half a dozen Bibles sitting in boxes right now in my garage… And yes, I’ve dropped a Bible or two on the ground before, and I certainly don’t get upset when protesters burn Bibles… in fact:

I used to work at Chapters when I was in Seminary…And do you know what bookstores do with some unsold books - particularly cheap paperbacks?

They tear off the book cover to send back to the publishers for a refund… While the rest of the book, they just threw in the recycling… It just wasn’t worth the cost of shipping the whole book back.

Now, I never did this myself, because that was handled by our inventory people… But I knew this happened, obviously because I saw it… but also I did same thing for news papers…

One of my responsibilities anytime I helped open the store was to cut the masthead off unsold issues of news papers - especially American papers that we carried like the NYT, Wallstreet Journal etc…

Think about that for a moment… They did this for unsold Bibles… like the ones we have at the usher’s table...

And like I said, I was a little sad at the waste of paper.. but of courseI didn’t get all upset about it…

And that’s generally a reflection of what Christians believe about physical Bibles..

Now, as for the words of the Bible, we Christians do believe that, as 2 Timothy 3:16 says, “16 All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness,”

But we also accept that the Bible is a historical artifact… in the sense that the books of the Bible were written like any other ancient books.

God used ordinary people in the ordinary language of the time, to reveal Himself...

These human authors were of course inspired by the Holy Spirit… as:

2 Peter 1:21 puts it… “21 For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.”

Denials of the Resurrection

But there’s no secret language, no special hidden interpretive insight, no magic… Just plain language telling the incredible story of God’s grace and mercy towards all of humanity.

Now, the trouble with this though… and I’m not sure if you’ve noticed thisw… The trouble is, that there are people out there who hate Christiantiy and want to disprove what we believe in.

Especially at Easter.

It’s the time when the History Channel, the Discovery Channel, and National Geographic… begin to air their documentaries about why the Resurrection of Jesus Christ cannot possibly be true...

They’re going to bring out their so-called experts to try to explain it away...

That Jesus, or Jesus didn’t really die, or his disciples were all just hallucinating… or that his disciples basically faked the whole thing...

Which is especially interesting because that’s what the Romans and the Jewish leaders tried to do!

Matthew 28:11–15 “11 While they were going, behold, some of the guard went into the city and told the chief priests all that had taken place. 12 And when they had assembled with the elders and taken counsel, they gave a sufficient sum of money to the soldiers 13 and said,

“Tell people, ‘His disciples came by night and stole him away while we were asleep.’ 14 And if this comes to the governor’s ears, we will satisfy him and keep you out of trouble.” 15 So they took the money and did as they were directed. And this story has been spread among the Jews to this day.”

So this attempt to undermine the resurrection has literally been happening since the day Jesus rose from the grave…

And in the modern version of this, if you pay attention, one of the main ways that they’re going to do that is by casting doubt on what the Bible says...

And so this morning, what I’d like to do is talk about some of the reasons why what the Bible says about the resurrection of Jesus Christ is reliable...

And the first thing I’d like to remind you of is how reliable the Bible really is...

The Bible Is A Reliable Document

Now, I would like to be able to just give you all some irrefutable archaeological evidence to prove that Jesus’s tomb was empty.

But, there really are none… however there is one really interesting artifact that I discovered while researching for this sermon.

It’s called the...

Nazareth inscription: “It is my pleasure that graves and tombs remain perpetually undisturbed for those who have made them for the cult of their ancestors or children or members of their house.

If, however, anyone charges that another has either demolished them, or has in any other way extracted the buried, or has maliciously transferred them to other places in order to wrong them, or has displaced the sealing on other stones, against such a one I order that a trial be instituted… In case of violation I desire that the offender be sentenced to capital punishment.”

It’s really interesting because it seems like an imperial edict directly in response to Matthew 28:11-15 - against the lie told by the Jewish leaders that the Apostles stole Jesus’s body from His tomb and are faking His resurrection...

There’s really no way to know for sure… But it is an incredible artifact nonetheless...

What’s more important to remember though is that the Bible is, historically, a very reliable document… Much more than any other ancient documents out there.

There are many reasons why we believe this. But there are two particular reasons, related especially to the New Testaments and the Gospels, that I want to bring up today...

Time Elapsed

First of all, the New Testament was written so soon after the events that it describes.

I’m sure you can appreciate why this is so important… The sooner after something happened you record it, the more reliable that record is...

This is why when the Counil of Elders and Deacons meet, we have what? Meeting Minutes! Otherwise, we’d forget what we talked about.

So then, looking at the Gospels… how soon after the events of Jesus’s life were they written?

Well, less than 20 years passed between the Resurrection of Jesus and when the Gospels of Matthew and Mark were written...

There’s a little debate about which of the two were written, but regardless of that, they were both written around 50 A.D.

Meanwhile, Luke was written later… around 60 A.D., but remember Luke was also a more systematic historian than Matthew and Mark, and so he spent time gathering up all of the eyewitness testimonies of Jesus’s life.

Finally, John was the last to write his Gospel, around 80-90 A.D.

And so, between 20 and 50 years after Jesus rose from the dead, there were already definite accounts written about it…

Now, I know that might seem like a long time by our modern standards… After all, the famous biographer Walter Isaacson has already published a major biography of Elon Musk...

But compared to other ancient biographies, 20-50 years is hort! Consider, for example, another famous death - the Assassination of Julius Caesar… most of us are probably familiar with this right?

How he was stabbed inside Senate House of Pompey by Brutus and a group of about Roman Politicians...

That happened on March 15th, 44 B.C.

And the first written account we have is a book called Life of Caesar by a Greek Philosopher named Plutarch which was written in 110 A.D.

That’s 154 years after the event! More than 3 times as long as John’s Gospel, and almost 6 times as long as Matthew and Mark...

And yet no one questions how Julius Casear died… There are no documentaries questioning it in the History Channel.

Number of Copies

The second reason why we generally believe that the Bible is a reliable document is the sheer number of ancient copies we have of the New Testament.

On the screen right now is an artifact called P1 short of Papyrus 1, which is a copy of the Gospel of Matthew dated to about 150 A.D.

Now remember, Matthew was written around 50 A.D., and so this is a copy from about 100 years later.

And we do have to concede one important thing about the Gospels… that is, that we don’t have any of the originals anymore.

So the original piece of paper that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John… and for that matter all the other writers of the New Testament, Paul, Peter, Jude, James… We don’t have any of those original documents anymore.

What we have are copies, sometimes copies of copies, of copies...

That may seem like a problem, by modern standards… But we’re dealing with ancient documents here. And by far, the Bible is the absolute most reliable out of all of them...

That’s because the Greek New Testament has over 5,600 copies in existence.

And this doesn’t account for ancient translations of the New Testament into other languages, and all of the quotations of the New Testament from ancient Christian writers...

By comparison, here are other ancient texts and the number of copies we have...

The writings of Plato, 7 copies; The writings of Julius Caesar, 10 copies; HERAH-DA-TUS, 8 copies; TWO-SI-DI-TEES, 8; Aristotle, 49; Josephus, 120; And the next best after the Greek New Testament, the writings of Homer, 643 copies...

None of these even compare in terms of sheer numbers of copies to the New Testament...

And that’s not all, notice the middle column here.. This is how much time passed between the original writing of the work - we call these Autographs, by the way… and the oldest copy we have of that work...

As you can see from the chart, more than 1000 years separate the autopgraphs and the oldest copies of the first 6 works, and only about 500 years for Homer...

Meanwhile, as I already mentioned before, only about 100 years separate the autographs of the New Testament books from their copies...

Similar to the time between the event and when it was recorded, the time between the original and the earliest copy of an ancient text is crucial for the reliability of that document...

And as you can see here the New Testament is orders of magnitude more reliable than other ancient texts...

Matthew, Mark, Luke and John wrote reliable accounts of Jesus’s life, death, burial and resurrection… And their accounts were reliably transmitted through generation after generation of Christians seeking to pass on the Good News of Jesus Christ!

The Living Word

But there’s just one more point I’d like to make about the reliability of the Bible…

Because some people might wonder why we don’t have any of the original documents of the New Testament, why the first Christians weren’t more careful to preserve them?

Well, to make this point, let me tell you this story, which I might have already mentioned before, but...

The summer before I started Seminary, I was on staff at a Bible Camp in British Columbia, and I since I was teaching little kids, I decided to bring a little NIrV Bible…

For those of you who don’t know that version, it’s basically a simplified version of the NIV, which made it easier to read for Children.

That little Bible took a beating… I brought it with me when I took kids on hikes, to the beach, when we went to the gym to play games…

Sometimes I would get the kids to read out of it. And, I may have dropped it on the grass, or the sand, or the gym floor quite a few times...

And as you can imagine it would have been pretty beat up by the end of that summer. The cover was coming off, pages were all torn up...

Now, some people might say, I don’t revere the Bible based on how I treated it… But I would disagree...

That Bible got all beat up because it was used a lot… It didn’t sit in my shelf all pretty and polished… careful never to touch the floor or “disrespected” in any way...

It moved with me, I used it, I taught out it, I read it, I gave it to others to read...

And I think that’s why we don’t have any of the original writings… Because those original Gospels and letters moved from person to person, used, taught out of, read, copied… until eventually they just disintegrated from wear and tear.

The Bible isn’t meant to be admired from afar, or handled gently and carefully...

As Hebrews 4:12 says, “12 For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.”

We can talk about how reliable the Bible is as a historical document all day long… It’s called Textual Criticism, it’s a branch of Biblical Studies, and it’s one of my favourite areas of study...

But ultimately this is the reason why the Bible is so important… It is the living, breathing word of God… And it has the power to change people’s lives with the Gospel, the good news that it contains.

Amen right? Praise the Lord! But we do have two more reasons why what the Bible says about the resurrection of Jesus Christ is reliable…

And the second one is that...

The First Witnesses Were Women and Others Saw Him Too

So, the end of the Resurrection acount that we read earlier tells us who exactly discovered the empty tomb...

Luke 24:10–11 “10 Now it was Mary Magdalene and Joanna and Mary the mother of James and the other women with them who told these things to the apostles, 11 but these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them.”

This is a really important detail.. And it is repeated in each of the Gospel accounts of the Resurrection, in Matthew 27:1, Mark 16:1, and John 20:1...

Jesus’s resurrection was first discovered by several women… Why is this so important?

Because it’s exactly what happened!

And we know that’s exactly what happened, because no ancient historian in their right mind would have women that primary witness to such an important event.

If Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were making this story up, and they wanted to make it as believable as possible to people in the 1st Century, they would have made a man the first witness, and the more prominent the better...

Why? Because unfortunately, the testimony of women just did not carry any weight at all in ancient times…

It’s right there in Luke 24:11 “11 but these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them.”

Now this isn’t a bias that the Bible has against women… This is a bias in 1st Century Roman society…

Here’s how couple of historians explain the place of women in Roman law and public life: “Women are excluded from all civil and public functions and therefore can neither be judges nor carry any civil authority, they cannot bring a court case, nor intercede for someone else nor act as mediators… Women were reckoned with minors, slaves, the dumb and criminals to be incapable of being witnesses.”

Now, don’t get angry at me about this alright… I’m just explaing how people in the Roman Empire viewed women.

But that makes it all the more puzzling why the Gospel writers would make women the first witnesses to the Resurrection of Jesus Christ...

And not just any women… Mary Magdalene was the most prominent witness, her name appears in all four of the Gospels… But remember who she was…

Luke 8:2-3 explain that she was once demon posessed…

And many people believe that she was the “sinful woman” who was wiping Jesus’s feet in Luke 7… “Sinful woman” of course being a euphamism for prostitute...

So why are they the first witnesses? Well as I said already, because it’s true… The Gospel writers wanted to faithfully record the account of Jesus’s Resurrection even if it was going to cause them to “lose credibility”

More importantly, though… This is pretty much in line with how God works in humanity… Here’s how John MacArthur explains the first witnesses:

God likes to choose the weak, those who are not the noble, those who are behind the scenes, those perhaps who are unexpected. God likes to surprise us and maybe even startle us with his sovereign choices.

And some have suggested that God rewards the faithful, and after all the disciples had forsaken Him and fled. Where were they at the foot of the cross? Where were they at the burial? The women were there and God rewards faithfulness.

So, the resurrection account is reliable because the first witnesses were women…

And that might not have been people’s expectations in the first century, but it is what we expect from God...

1 Corinthians 1:27 “27 But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong;”

Jesus Appeared to Many Others

Now, having said all of that… of course, Jesus did appear to many others…

Luke 24:12 closes the narrative for us… “12 But Peter rose and ran to the tomb; stooping and looking in, he saw the linen cloths by themselves; and he went home marveling at what had happened.”

And then, we get a pretty good summary of of who else Jesus appeared to in his letter to the Corinthians......

1 Corinthians 15:5–8 “5 (Jesus) appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. 6 Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. 7 Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. 8 Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.”

And so, even though they were not witnesses to the empty tomb, Jesus appeared to hundreds more people before he ascended to heaven.

This is why some the History Channel so-called experts have to theorize that the Disciples were hallucinating...

Because Jesus appeared to so many people after he was resurrected… There is simply no denying that fact.

Except of course that they were lying… But the final reason we have to believe in the resurrection is the answer… and that is because...

The Believers Died For Their Faith

Acts 7:58–60 is our very first record of a Christian dying for his faith… “58 Then they cast him out of the city and stoned him. And the witnesses laid down their garments at the feet of a young man named Saul. 59 And as they were stoning Stephen, he called out, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.”

60 And falling to his knees he cried out with a loud voice, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” And when he had said this, he fell asleep.”

And why did the Jews stone Stephen? Because he proclaimed the risen Christ to them.

And Stephen is far from the only Christian to die for their faith… There were so many, that we eventually had to come up with a word to describe them...

That word is Martyr… which actually comes from the Greek word for “Witness” or “Testimony”. Because these people bore witness to their faith even as they were being killed...

And the Bible tells us of 2 other Christian martyrs… First Acts 12:2 tells us that James, the brother of Christ was killed by Herod.

Then John tells us about a Christian named Antipas who was killed for his faith in Revelation 2:13.

But there are many more… In fact, according to reliable historical sources - some of which are not even religious in nature - all the apostles were martyred for their faith...

The only exception was John, who was exiled the the Island of Patmos, where he died of old age...

Now, I do understand that martyrdom is hardly unique to Christianity…

After all, there are “martyrs” for many other causes… I remember reading, for example, about a few Buddhist monks during the who self-imolated… That is, they committed suicide by lighting themselves on fire to protest the Vietnam War...

I think recently there was news of someone doing this to protest the Israel-Gaza war...

And so Christians are not the only people who die for their faith… And yet what’s striking about Christian martyrdom…

First of all is that none of them committed suicide like like self-immolation… They were killed for their faith, so it’s really not a fair comparison.

But more importantly there are just so many of them!

I remember I used to have a physical copy of this book… Voices of the Martyrs.

I would highly recommend picking up a copy of this, and reading some inspirational stories of how Christians remained steadfast in their faith despite persecution and even death...

Now, to be clear, I’m not saying that we should believe in the resurrection because people died for this belief...

But it is certainly a good indicator of the reliability of the witness of the Cross when those witnesses would rather die than recant.

These Christians believed what Paul wrote in:

1 Corinthians 15:54–55 “54 When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written: “Death is swallowed up in victory.” 55 “O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?””

And why is it that death has lost its victory...

Because Jesus rose from dead… and as a result of that, as Colossians 1:18–20 tells us… “18 And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. 19 For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, 20 and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.”

Closing

Brothers and Sisters… He is Risen!

We have many, many good reasons to believe it!