Dan Olinger

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We’ve looked at the eyewitness evidence for the resurrection of Christ, noting that the eyewitnesses pass all 3 standard tests for legal witnesses. Now we turn to the second main type of evidence, the forensic.

Forensic evidence is tangible, something you can touch. Is there any evidence like that for the resurrection? I’d suggest that the Scripture offers two, one you’ve probably already thought of, and another one that perhaps you haven’t.

The one you’ve thought of, because everybody mentions it, is the tomb itself.

[Sidebar: today there are two sites alleged to be the tomb of Jesus. We’ll never be entirely sure which of them is the correct one—or even whether either of them is. For what it’s worth, I’m inclined to think that the “Garden Tomb” is not likely to be it, mostly because nobody identified that site as the Real One for centuries, and it’s unlikely that the early church would have completely forgotten it immediately. More here if you’re interested.]

The key characteristic of the tomb is simple and obvious.

It’s empty.

And even more important, it was empty at the time; nobody can say that a century or two later, some Christians came along and removed the skeleton when nobody was looking.

How do we know that?

Well, a number of Jesus’ close followers arrived on Sunday and confirmed that the body was not there: first Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Salome, and Mary the mother of James, early Sunday morning (Mt 28.1; Mk 16.1; Lk 24.10; Jn 20.1); then Peter and John (Lk 24.12; Jn 20.2ff), as soon as the women told them what they had seen. And to raise the ante, the Roman guards reported to the Jewish leadership that the body was gone (Mt 28.11).

It was empty,

There have been a couple of attempts to account for this. One we’ve already mentioned. It was the very first cover story (Mt 28.11-15)—that the disciples stole the body. We’ve noted that the disciples’ credibility argues against the theory. But the story was incredible on its face, since the tomb would typically have been guarded by 16 soldiers in 4 squads of four (cf Ac 12.4), who worked in shifts. How likely was it that all 16 soldiers would have fallen asleep simultaneously? Four of them on watch? When the penalty for doing so was death? And even if they had, how likely was it that the disciples could have rolled the stone away and retrieved the body without waking anybody up?

I’m supposed to believe that? And I’m the fideist?

There’s another attempt to explain the problem, indirectly. The “wrong tomb” theory says that when the women first came to the tomb Sunday morning, they came to the wrong tomb, one not yet used. In their grief, they misinterpreted what the tomb attendant told them. In the following paragraph from Matthew 28, the struck-through text indicates what was not actually said:

⁵ The angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid; for I know that you are looking for Jesus who has been crucified. ⁶ He is not here, for He has risen, just as He said. Come, see the place where He was lying. ⁷ Go quickly and tell His disciples that He has risen from the dead; and behold, He is going ahead of you into Galilee, there you will see Him; behold, I have told you.”

Hmm. How shall I say this? If a conservative had posited this, he would immediately be accused of sexism. Women are so emotional, you know. And not good at directions. And they never listen when men talk to them.

Nope. I don’t buy that one, either. None of it. The women had earlier observed where the body was buried (Mt 27.61; Mk 15.47), and they had every reason to remember it well. They had no reason to fail to hear more than half of what the “attendant” told them—and the fact the he had “an appearance like lightning” (Mt 28.3; cf Lk 24.4) should have been a clue that something was up. And then the emptiness of the tomb was confirmed by men, who, as we all know, are more reliable witnesses. (Sarcasm alert.)

Another evidence against the story is that the religious leaders at Pentecost, less than two months later, produced no body when Peter announced the resurrection publicly. They certainly would have if a body had been available. But I’ve said that already.

The tomb was empty. On Sunday morning. Inexplicably.

Next time, we’ll look at the other key piece of forensic evidence. You’re gonna like this one.

Part 6

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One more requirement of those peskily unreliable witnesses:

• Eyewitnesses must be credible.

By that we mean that they must back up their story with evidence of believability. Attorneys will go to great lengths to discredit opposing witnesses by looking for inconsistencies in their stories or by pointing out actions by the witnesses that put the lie to what they’re claiming. It can be as simple as a financial motive (the grieving widow recently took out a million-dollar life insurance policy on her late husband) or behaviors that contradict official testimony (the “disabled” witness gets out of his wheelchair and walks when he thinks no one is watching). Television shows about private eyes have given us thousands of plot lines that illustrate this concept.

So how do the eyewitnesses to the resurrection stack up against this criterion? Well, since we don’t know who the 500 disciples were that saw Jesus at once (1Co 15.6), we can’t evaluate them. But we do know quite a bit about the 11 disciples. We know that at Jesus’ arrest, “all the disciples left him and fled” (Mt 26.56). We know that at Jesus’ first post-resurrection appearance to them, they were huddled in a locked room “for fear of the Jews” (Jn 20.19). And yet less than 2 months later, Peter stood before a skeptical crowd in Jerusalem (Ac 2.12-13) and said, “Let all the house of Israel therefore know for certain that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified!” (Ac 2.36 ESV). And shortly later, he stood in the Temple complex (Ac 3.11) and cried, “You denied the Holy and Righteous One, and asked for a murderer to be granted to you,and you killed the Author of life, whom God raised from the dead. To this we are witnesses!” (Ac 3.14-15). And the next day (Ac 4.3), after a night in the slammer, Peter looked the rulers of Israel in the face and said, “Whether it is right in the sight of God to listen to you rather than to God, you must judge, for we cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard!” (Ac 4.19-20).

Does this fellow sound like he thinks he’s making stuff up?

Early church tradition tells us that 10 of the 11 went to their deaths for the story they were telling—for any of them, a simple retraction would have saved their lives and in most cases stopped a gruesomely painful execution. The one exception is John, who died a natural death—after a stint at slave labor in the Patmos salt mines in his 90s.

How reliable is the early church tradition? Well, it’s not Scripture and thus not inerrant and authoritative, and some of the traditions are not well attested. But we do have excellent evidence for Peter, Thomas, and Andrew (and of course biblical evidence for James in Acts 12), and the other stories are credible as to the major facts, especially in light of the extensive persecution under Rome in the late 1^st century. “They were not liars. They truly believed Jesus rose from the grave and they were willing to give their lives for it” (Sean McDowell).

This evidence completely undercuts the earliest “explanation” for the resurrection—that the disciples stole the body of Jesus while the Roman guard slept (Mt 28.11-15). Any investigator will tell you than when you’re interrogating a gang, you split them up, interview them separately, and then figure out who’s the weakest link. Then you come down on him like Nebuchadnezzar on Jerusalem. You tell him his friends are saying that he did it—that they’re going to be released, and you, my poor friend, are going to prison for life. And the weak link will snap, and he’ll tell you everything you want to know, so that he doesn’t have to pay the price for everybody.

Nobody did that. Nobody broke.

They all stuck with the story through the bitter end, paying the price, painfully, with their lives.

Now that’s credibility. These people did not steal the body.

So what do we have?

We have multiple eyewitnesses, whose claims are consistent with one another, who are describing events that they simply couldn’t have imagined in good faith, and who demonstrated their credibility by dying for the story.

That’s really good evidence.

Next time, we’ll turn to the forensic evidence.

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We’re looking at the eyewitness evidence for the resurrection of Christ—a claim that we recognize to be extraordinary. Last time we noted that in court, witnesses are required to be competent—that is, they have to have seen something. In this post we’ll look at the next requirement:

• Eyewitnesses must be consistent.

Not only must an eyewitness not contradict himself, but ideally there should be multiple eyewitnesses, and they must agree with one another on the key facts.

The reasons for this are obvious. Sometimes people lie, and sometimes people are mistaken about what they think they saw. Any investigator knows that if you separate the witnesses and grill them on the details, the liars can usually be exposed. There’s a great example of this in the apocryphal book Susanna, one of the so-called “Additions to Daniel.” Susanna is a pious Jewish woman accused by two lecherous priests of being caught in flagrante
delecto with a man in her husband’s garden. The priests say the two were engaged in sexual relations under a tree. As she is about to be executed, Daniel speaks up on her behalf, directing that the accusers be separated and asked a simple question—under what tree in the garden did they see the two? The accusers identify different trees, and Susanna is vindicated.

Fun with the Apocrypha.

The Scripture recognizes this problem and addresses it. The Mosaic Law required 2 or 3 witnesses to any capital charge (Num 35.30; Dt. 17.6). When giving instruction on church discipline, Jesus commanded that an accuser take with him 2 or 3 witnesses, “so that every word may be established” (Mt 18.16, quoting Dt 19.15). Paul issued the same requirement for charges against a church leader (1Ti 5.19).

The other problem with eyewitnesses is that eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable. People really think they saw things that they didn’t.

So for a claim like resurrection, we’re going to need a lot of eyes on the target.

What do we have?

As I’ve noted before, multiple people saw Jesus alive after his time in the tomb, and many of those people are the ones closest to him—Mary Magdalene, the 11 disciples remaining after the death of Judas Iscariot, even Jesus’ brother James. Paul makes the claim that Jesus was seen by more than 500 followers at once (1Co 15.6)—and though we have no other record of that event in Scripture or elsewhere, Paul notes that as he’s writing, about 20 years after the event, most of those eyewitnesses are still available to give testimony, though some have since died. Don’t you think that if the claim were false, the Jewish leaders would have found a way to demonstrate that? After all, they all knew the story of Susanna.

The presence of multiple eyewitnesses renders unlikely another modern attempt to explain away the resurrection: the hallucination theory—that people close to Jesus, who loved him deeply and had a desperate psychological need to deny his ignominious end, simply fell victim to their own fancies and imagined that they had seen him—and believed it, many to the extent that they would be martyrs for their misguided belief.

Why does this not make any sense? Two reasons. There are just too many simultaneous witnesses, and the nature of the appearances and the accompanying interaction with Jesus rules out any psychological explanation. Sure, sometimes people think they see the face of the Virgin Mary in a tortilla, and sometimes large groups of people think they see a brief and insubstantial phenomenon. But 11 disciples at once? In an extended conversation with the man they’d lived with for 3 years? Who is eating with them as he talks?

Sorry, but I just don’t have that kind of faith.

Next time, one more requirement of witnesses—which these witnesses unanimously meet.

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Part 1

In my last post I observed that because the claim that Christ rose from the dead is extraordinary, it calls for an extraordinary level of evidence. I noted that the Bible contains both eyewitness and forensic evidence. In this post we begin to work with the eyewitness evidence.

People don’t always tell the truth. Sometimes they lie, and sometimes they’re just mistaken. (Just think of all your Facebook friends who regularly post things you know to be flatly untrue—and they really believe the nonsense. And think of how many of them are professing Christians.) Because the legal system knows of this problem, it has instituted requirements for witnesses, to weed out the crooks and the well-intentioned bozos:

• Witnesses must be competent.

That is, they must have actually seen something. “My brother told me that he saw … “ will get a witness thrown out on the basis of a sustained objection to hearsay. We have no time for people just passing along stories they’ve heard. What have you seen?

The biblical record includes witnesses like that—people who saw and heard the resurrected Christ. Eyewitnesses like Mary, who initially thought that Jesus was the gardener but realized during the ensuing conversation that he was the one she had known so well (Jn 20.11-18). And his eleven disciples, who had lived with him for three years and knew him intimately, and who actually sat and ate with him at least twice after the resurrection (Lk 24.33-43; Jn 21.1-14), and likely a lot more than that (Ac 1.1-3). And James (1Co 15.7), his next-younger brother (Mt 13.55), who had not believed in him during his earthly ministry (Jn 7.5).

These are competent eyewitnesses. They’ve seen, and they know what they’ve seen.

Are there other explanations for what they’ve seen? Anything other than a resurrection?

Well, it couldn’t be a case of mistaken identity; these witness knew Jesus well and interacted with him extensively during the 40 days after the resurrection.

And despite lots of frantic theories, there’s no evidence that Jesus had a twin brother—especially since his birth is described in great detail (Mt 1-2; Lk 1-2) without any mention of a twin. Now you’re just getting desperate.

Further, these eyewitnesses rule out the most obvious counter-explanation—that the resurrection is just a myth, a natural consequence of stories accreting unlikely details over time, like the fish that gets bigger every time the fisherman describes him.

How do these witnesses rule out the myth theory?

Well, they stood together, made the claim, and identified themselves publically as eyewitnesses less than 2 months after the event (Ac 2.32), in the very city where it allegedly happened, and no one—including a lot of influential and empowered people who wanted desperately to put the kibosh on the whole thing (Ac 4.6-7, 15-18)—was able to refute their story. That’s not how myths develop; they don’t spring up immediately, when opposing eyewitnesses would be available to serve as first-century mythbusters. The silence is deafening.

Now, if you’re thinking objectively, you’ve probably thought of a weakness with what I’ve done here.

How do we know about these eyewitnesses? From the Bible. And how do we know the account is true? How do we really know there were any witnesses at all?

Good question. I’m glad you’re thinking in an engaged way. (Teachers love it when students do that.)

That’s a big-boy question, and it requires a big-boy answer, not one you can present in a blog post or two. In short, I find the Scripture to be reliable on the basis of a great number of evidences and in the absence of any credible exclusionary evidence. I’ve laid out my thinking in that regard in a previous series of posts, but even those posts barely scratch the surface. I can recommend all kinds of books—big, thick, sometimes but not always dry and dusty books. Let me know if you want a list.

Next time, we’ll look at the second qualification for an eyewitness. And maybe a third, depending on how verbose I get.

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Squarely at the center of Christianity is the resurrection of Christ (1Co 15.3-4). As a rule, Christians have gotten so used to the idea that they no longer realize how crazy that sounds.

So try a little thought experiment.

Suppose you hear that someone you know has died. And then, a few days or weeks later, you see him walking around.

What do you think?

Well, there are several possibilities that will come to mind.

• If you see him just briefly at a distance, you’ll say to yourself, “Boy, that guy sure looked like Joe!” And you might see if you can get a second look at him. But then you’ll move on, marveling that different people can look so similar.
• If you see him more thoroughly—say he walks up to you and says, “Hello, old friend!”—you’ll conclude that the report you got was mistaken. The guy who told me he died must have been joking, or honestly misinformed. Or maybe I dreamed it. Or whatever. At any rate, he didn’t die; he’s still alive.
• There’s a third, less likely, possibility. Once an acquaintance of mine died. Something that a lot of his friends didn’t know was that he happened to be an identical twin. Since I did know that, I didn’t have the reaction many of his friends did on seeing his brother at the funeral.

But I’ll tell you what you won’t think. You won’t think your friend rose from the dead, because that just doesn’t happen, and you know that perfectly well. There has to be another explanation.

Resurrections just don’t happen. Resurrection is impossible.

So then. About this alleged resurrection of Christ. Christians need to fully apprehend what an extraordinary—even preposterous—claim it is. We can’t expect people to just accept the allegation, and in fact we shouldn’t accept the allegation either without extraordinary evidences. Plural.

Resurrections just don’t happen.

After a lifetime of studying the claim and ruminating over the evidence, I’ve come to a conclusion:

The least likely possibility—the impossible one—is in fact the most likely possibility.

Now, that claim is just as preposterous as the first one, isn’t it?

What I’d like to do over the next several posts is examine the evidence and see whether there’s any basis at all for my conclusion.

I should note that in 1998 Lee Strobel edited an anthology called The Case for Christ, containing chapters by our generation’s leading apologists on Jesus’ claims to Messiahship, including the resurrection. I came to confident belief in the resurrection before Strobel’s book arrived on the scene and was delighted to see that his thinking on the evidence paralleled mine. What follows here is a concise summary of my thinking; if you want something quite a bit deeper and a lot more thorough, read Strobel’s excellent book.

We should begin with some observations about the nature of evidence. When detectives investigate a crime today, they generally gather two kinds of evidence: eyewitness testimony, and forensic evidence, such as materials left at the scene: shell casings, blood, fingerprints, and so forth.

The biblical record contains both types of evidence. The subsequent question is two-fold:

• Is the evidence reliable?
• Is the evidence exclusionary? That is, does it rule out other explanations?

These are important questions, and given the preposterous of the claim—he rose from the dead!—we ought to evaluate the evidence carefully and answer the questions with reasonable objectivity. That’s what I hope to do in the next few posts.

Something to think about for next time:

Eyewitness evidence is notoriously unreliable. Especially when it sees dead men walking around. Nobody in his right mind believes that Elvis bought a sandwich at a diner in Tulsa in 2006. So does the biblical evidence reach the level of authority needed to support a preposterous claim?

See you next time.

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