The whole of Christianity and it’s validity rests on one simple historical event that we celebrate this Easter weekend, that Jesus of Nazareth was killed and came back to life.
As I immersed myself back into apologetics over that last eight or so years, I’ve learned that the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ is the most well attested historical fact of the ancient world. There is more solid evidence for this having actually happened than that Cesar existed and was murdered by the Roman Senate, or that Alexander the Great conquered the known world of the time, or that Plato and Aristotle were real ancient Greek philosophers. Unless a person is a complete historical skeptic, the honest seeker will take this evidence seriously.
To me the most powerful testimony about this fact comes from the Apostle Paul in the 15th chapter of his first letter to the Corinthians. He says that this gospel he preaches rests on a set of historical events that actually happened, and were witnessed by a large number of people:
3 For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, 4 that he was buried,that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, 5 and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. 6 After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. 7 Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, 8 and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.
If this didn’t in fact happen, then he further says that our faith is futile, and “we are of all people most to be pitied.” Don’t give me any post-modern nonsense that historical events can be true for you, and not for me. Either they happened or they didn’t. If they did, then nothing in all existence is as important; if they didn’t, then whatever, eat, drink, and be merry . . .
What is significant about Paul’s words, are not just what he is asserting, but where they likely come from and when. All New Testament scholars, believers or not, agree that I Corinthians was written in the mid-50s AD. The events of Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection happened about 20 years previously. If you’re old enough, can you remember what happened 20 years ago, in 1998? Seems like yesterday, doesn’t it. There are a lot of people alive today who remember 1998 very well. But more important than when he wrote them, is where he likely got them.
In a time when most people were illiterate, and books were expensive and scarce, important ideas and events were passed along orally. So putting words in a way that made them easily memorized was important. That’s why many ancient stories, like Homer’s Greek epics, were put in poetic form, so people could tell and pass them on. Three or so years after his conversion, Paul tells us in Galatians that he went to Jerusalem, which would have been maybe four or five years after the resurrection. Many scholars believe that what Paul received and passed on in the passage above is the saying of Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection he received from the Apostles in Jerusalem. It is phrased exactly the way an oral tradition would be so it could be easily memorized:
- That Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures
- That he was buried
- That he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures
All scholars agree that the first two items are historically irrefutable; they happened. Everything turns, of course, on the third. What we can say without doubt is that the earliest followers of Jesus claimed they they were eyewitnesses of the resurrected Jesus of Nazareth, and they taught it from the very beginning. They even suffered for it. It’s one thing to die for what you believe to be true even though it’s a lie, it’s quite another to die for what you know to be a lie but claim to be true. Many skeptics ignorantly assert that all this is a fairy tale that developed over decades and even hundreds of years. Wrong. It was a well established story the flowed out of real historical events at the time they happened.
If it were not a dead guy coming back to life after being horribly crucified, who claimed to be God and the only way to eternal life, every historian on earth would say these are irrefutable historical facts. That is how well attested the events that make up our truth claims about Christianity are, and it is not a difficult case to make to our children. We first, of course, have to make the case to ourselves.
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