Chapter 4. The Resurrection of Christ
We have considered the extravagant claims which Jesus made and the selfless character which he displayed. We are now to examine the evidence for his historical resurrection from the dead.
Clearly, if it is true, the resurrection has great significance. If Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead, then he was beyond dispute a unique figure. It is not a question of his spiritual survival, nor of his physical resuscitation, but of his conquest of death and his resurrection to a new plane of existence altogether. We do not know of anyone else who has had this experience. Modern man is therefore as scornful as the Athenian philosophers who heard Paul preach on the Areopagus: "When they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some mocked."
The argument is not that his resurrection establishes his deity, but that it is consistent with it. It is only to be expected that a supernatural person should come to and leave the earth in a supernatural way. This is in fact what the New Testament teaches and what, in consequence, the church has always believed. His birth was natural, but his conception was supernatural. His death was natural, but his resurrection was supernatural. His miraculous conception and resurrection do not prove his deity, but they are congruous with it.[1] We are not concerned here with the virgin birth of Jesus, for it is not used in the New Testament to demonstrate his Messiahship or deity, as is the resurrection. The case for the virgin birth is well argued in The Virgin Birth of Christ by James Orr, Hodder and Stoughton, 1907, and The Virgin Birth by J. Gresham Machen, Marshall, Morgan and Scott, 1936. Jesus himself never predicted his death without adding that he would rise, and described his coming resurrection as a "sign." Paul, at the beginning of his letter to the Romans, wrote that Jesus was "designated Son of God in power... by his resurrection from the dead," and the earliest sermons of the apostles recorded in the Acts repeatedly assert that by the resurrection God has reversed man's sentence and vindicated his Son.
Of this resurrection Luke, who is known to have been a painstaking and accurate historian, says there are "many proofs." We may not feel able to go as far as Thomas Arnold who called the resurrection "the best attested fact in history," but certainly many impartial students have judged the evidence to be extremely good. For instance, Sir Edward Clarke K.C. wrote to the Rev. E. L. Macassey: As a lawyer I have made a prolonged study of the evidences for the events of the first Easter Day. To me the evidence is conclusive, and over and over again in the High Court I have secured the verdict on evidence not nearly so compelling. Inference follows on evidence, and a truthful witness is always artless and disdains effect. The Gospel evidence for the resurrection is of this class, and as a lawyer I accept it unreservedly as the testimony of truthful men to facts they were able to substantiate.
What is this evidence? An attempt may be made to summarize it by four statements.
The Body Had Gone
The resurrection narratives in the four Gospels begin with the visit of certain women early on Easter Sunday morning to the tomb. On arrival they were dumbfounded to discover that the body of the Lord had disappeared. Not many days later the apostles began to preach that Jesus had risen. It was the main thrust of their message. But they could hardly have expected men to believe them if a few minutes' walk could have taken them to Joseph's tomb where the body of Jesus still lay! No. The tomb was empty. The body had gone. There can be no doubt about this fact. The question is how to explain it.
First, there is the theory that the women went to the wrong tomb. It was still dark, and they were dazed with sorrow. They could easily, it is claimed, have made a mistake.
This sounds plausible on the surface, but it hardly bears examination. To begin with, it cannot have been completely dark. It is true that John says the women came "while it was still dark." But in Matthew 28:1 it is "toward the dawn," while Luke says it was "at early dawn," and Mark distinctly states that "the sun had risen." Further, these women were no fools. At least two of them had seen for themselves where Joseph and Nicodemus had laid the body. They had even watched the whole process of burial, "sitting opposite the sepulcher." The same two (Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Jesus) returned at dawn, bringing with them Salome, Joanna and "the other women," so that if one mistook the path or the tomb, she is likely to have been corrected by the others. And if Mary Magdalene went to the wrong place the first time, she can hardly have repeated her error when she returned in the full light of morning and lingered in the garden till Jesus met her. Besides, no mere sentiment brought them so early to the tomb. They had come on a practical mission. They had bought spices and were going to complete the anointing of their Lord's body, since the approach of the sabbath had made the work so hasty two days previously. These devoted and businesslike women were not the kind to be easily deceived or to give up the task they had come to do. Again, even if they mistook the tomb, would Peter and John, who ran to verify their story, make the same mistake, and others who doubtless came later, including Joseph and Nicodemus themselves?
The second explanation of the empty tomb is the swoon theory. Those who maintain this view would have us believe that Jesus did not die on the cross, but only fainted. He then revived in the tomb, left it and subsequently made himself known to the disciples. This theory simply bristles with problems. It is thoroughly perverse. The evidence entirely contradicts it. Pilate was indeed surprised that Jesus was already dead, but he was sufficiently convinced by the centurion's assurance to give Joseph permission to remove the body from the cross. The centurion was certain because he must have been present when "one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and at once there came out blood and water." So Joseph and Nicodemus took down his body, wound it in the graveclothes and laid it in Joseph's new tomb. Are we then seriously to believe that Jesus was all the time only in a swoon? That after the rigors and pains of trial, mockery, flogging and crucifixion he could survive thirty-six hours in a stone sepulcher with neither warmth nor food nor medical care? That he could then rally sufficiently to perform the superhuman feat of shifting the boulder which secured the mouth of the tomb, and this without disturbing the Roman guard? That then, weak and sickly and hungry, he could appear to the disciples in such a way as to give them the impression that he had vanquished death? That he could go on to claim that he had died and risen, could send them into all the world and promise to be with them unto the end of time? That he could live somewhere in hiding for forty days, making occasional surprise appearances, and then finally disappear without any explanation? Such credulity is more incredible than Thomas's unbelief.
Third, there is the idea that thieves stole the body. There is no shred of evidence for this conjecture. Nor is it explained how thieves could have hoodwinked the Roman guard. Nor can one imagine why thieves should have taken the body and left the graveclothes, nor what possible motive they could have had for their action.
Fourth, it has been argued that the disciples removed the body. This, Matthew tells us, is the rumor which the Jews spread from the earliest days. He describes how Pilate, having given permission to Joseph to remove Christ's body, received a deputation of chief priests and Pharisees, who said: Sir, we remember how that impostor said, while he was still alive, "After three days I will rise again." Therefore order the sepulcher to be made secure until the third day, lest his disciples go and steal him away, and tell the people, "He has risen from the dead," and the last fraud will be worse than the first. Pilate concurred. "Make it as secure as you can," he said, and the Jews "made the sepulcher secure by sealing the stone and setting a guard." Matthew goes on to describe how the stone, the
seal and the guard could not prevent the resurrection, and how the guard went into the city to report to the chief priests what had happened. After consultation they bribed the soldiers and said, Tell people, "His disciples came by night and stole him away while we were asleep." And if this comes to the governor's ears, we will satisfy him and keep you out of trouble. So they took the money and did as they were directed; and this story has been spread among the Jews to this day. But the story does not hold water. Is it likely that a picked guard, whether Roman or Jewish, would all sleep on duty when detailed to watch? And if they did remain awake, how did the women get past them and roll back the stone?
Even supposing the disciples could have succeeded in removing the Lord's body, there is a psychological consideration which is enough to discredit the whole theory. We learn from the first part of the Acts that in their early preaching the apostles concentrated on the resurrection. "You killed him, but God raised him, and we are witnesses," they kept saying. Are we then to believe that they were proclaiming what they knew to be a deliberate lie? If they had themselves taken the body of Jesus, to preach his resurrection was to spread a known, planned falsehood. They not only preached it; they suffered for it. They were prepared to go to prison, to the flogging post and to death for a fairy tale.
This simply does not ring true. It is so unlikely as to be virtually impossible. If anything is clear from the Gospels and the Acts, it is that the apostles were sincere. They may have been deceived, if you like, but they were not deceivers. Hypocrites and martyrs are not made of the same stuff.
The fifth and perhaps the least unreasonable (though still hypothetical) explanation of the disappearance of Christ's body is that the Roman or Jewish authorities took it into their own custody. They would certainly have had motive enough for doing so. They had heard that Jesus had talked of resurrection, and were afraid of hanky-panky. So (the argument runs), in order to forestall trickery, they took the precaution of confiscating the corpse.
But when it is examined, this conjectural reconstruction of what happened also falls to pieces. We have already seen that within a few weeks of Jesus' death the Christians were boldly proclaiming his resurrection. The news spread rapidly. The new Nazarene movement threatened to undermine the bulwarks of Judaism and to disturb the peace of Jerusalem. The Jews feared conversions; the Romans riots. The authorities had before them one obvious course of action. They could produce the remains of the body and publish a statement of what they had done.
Instead, they were silent and resorted to violence. They arrested the apostles, threatened them, flogged them, imprisoned them, vilified them, plotted against them and killed them. But all this was entirely unnecessary if they had in their own possession the dead body of Jesus. The church was founded on the resurrection. Disprove the resurrection, and the church would have collapsed. But they could not; the body was not in their possession. The authorities' silence is as eloquent a proof of the resurrection as the apostles' witness.
These are the theories which men have invented to try to explain the emptiness of the tomb and the disappearance of the body. None of them is satisfactory, and for none of them is there any historical evidence. For want therefore of any adequate alternative explanation, perhaps we may be forgiven if we prefer the simple and sober narrative of the Gospels, describing the events of the first Easter day. The body of Jesus was not removed by men; it was raised by God.
The Graveclothes Were Undisturbed
It is a remarkable fact that the narratives which say that the body of Jesus had gone also tell us that the graveclothes had not gone. It is John who lays particular emphasis on this fact, for he accompanied Peter on that dramatic early morning race to the tomb. The account he gives of this incident (20:1-10) bears the unmistakable marks of firsthand experience. He outran Peter, but on arrival at the tomb he did no more than look in, until Peter came and entered it. "Then the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed." The question is: What
did he see which made him believe? The story suggests that it was not just the absence of the body, but the presence of the graveclothes and, in particular, their undisturbed condition.
Let us try to reconstruct the story.[2] Following Henry Latham, The Risen Master, LeightonBell, 1904. John tells us (19:38-42) that while Joseph begged Pilate for the body of Jesus, Nicodemus "came bringing a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about a hundred pounds' weight." Then together "they took the body of Jesus, and bound it in linen cloths with the spices, as is the burial custom of the Jews." That is to say, as they wound the linen "bandages" around his body, they sprinkled the powdered spices into the folds. A separate cloth will have been used for his head.[3] This is clear from John's account of the burial clothes of Lazarus. For when Jesus resuscitated him, "The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with bandages, and his face wrapped with a cloth" (11:44). They thus enswathed his body and head, leaving his face and neck bare, according to oriental custom. They then laid the body on a stone slab which had been hewn out of the side of the cave-tomb.
Now supposing we had been present in the sepulcher when the resurrection of Jesus actually took place. What should we have seen? Should we have seen Jesus begin to move, and then yawn and stretch and get up? No. We do not believe that he returned to this life. He did not recover from a swoon. He had died, and he rose again. His was a resurrection, not a resuscitation. We believe that he passed miraculously from death into an altogether new sphere of existence. What then should we have seen, had we been there? We should suddenly have noticed that the body had disappeared. It would have "vaporized," being transmuted into something new and different and wonderful. It would have passed through the graveclothes, as it was later to pass through closed doors, leaving them untouched and almost undisturbed. Almost but not quite. For the body cloths, under the weight of 100 pounds of spices, once the support of the body had been removed, would have subsided or collapsed, and would now be lying flat. A gap would have appeared between the body cloths and the head napkin, where his face and neck had been. And the napkin itself, because of the complicated crisscross pattern of the bandages, might well have retained its concave shape, a crumpled turban, but with no head inside it.
A careful study of the text of John's narrative suggests that it is just these three characteristics of the discarded graveclothes which he saw. First, he saw the cloths "lying." The word is repeated twice, and the first time it is placed in an emphatic position in the Greek sentence. We might translate, "He saw, as they were lying (or 'collapsed'), the linen cloths." Next, the head napkin was "not... with the linen cloths but... in a place by itself." This is unlikely to mean that it had been bundled up and tossed into a corner. It lay still on the stone slab, but was separated from the body cloths by a noticeable space. Third, this same napkin was "not lying... but wrapped together." This last word has been translated "twirled." (The Authorized Version "wrapped together" and the Revised Standard Version "rolled up" are both unfortunate translations.) The word aptly describes the rounded shape which the empty napkin still preserved.
It is not hard to imagine the sight which greeted the eyes of the apostles when they reached the tomb: the stone slab, the collapsed graveclothes, the shell of the head-cloth and the gap between the two. No wonder they "saw and believed." A glance at these graveclothes proved the reality, and indicated the nature, of the resurrection. They had been neither touched nor folded nor manipulated by any human being. They were like a discarded chrysalis from which the butterfly has emerged.
That the state of the graveclothes was intended to be visible, corroborative evidence for the resurrection is further suggested by the fact that Mary Magdalene (who had returned to the tomb after bringing the news to Peter and John) "stooped to look into the tomb; and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had lain, one at the head and one at the feet." Presumably this means that they sat on the stone slab with the graveclothes between them. Both Matthew and Mark add that one of them said, "He is not here; for he has risen, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay."[4] John 20:11-12; Matthew 28:6; Mark 16:6. Whether or not the reader believes in angels, these allusions to the place where Jesus had lain, emphasized by both the position and the words of the angels, at least confirm what the understanding of the evangelists was: the position of the clothes and the absence of the body were concurrent witnesses to his resurrection.
The Lord Was Seen
Every reader of the Gospels knows that they include some extraordinary stories of how Jesus appeared to his disciples after his resurrection. We are told of ten separate appearances of the risen Lord to what Peter calls "chosen witnesses." It is said that he appeared to Mary Magdalene, to the women returning from the sepulcher, to Peter, to two disciples on the road to Emmaus, to the ten gathered in the upper room, to the eleven including Thomas a week later, to "more than five hundred brethren at one time" probably on the mountainside in Galilee, to James, to some disciples including Peter, Thomas, Nathanael, James and John by the Galilee lakeside, and to many on the Mount of Olives near Bethany at the time of the ascension. Paul adds himself at the end of his catalog in 1 Corinthians 15 of those who saw the risen Jesus, referring to his experience on the Damascus Road. And since Luke tells us at the beginning of the Acts that Jesus "presented himself alive after his passion by many proofs, appearing to them (the apostles) during forty days," there may well have been other appearances, of which no record has survived.
We cannot lightly dismiss this body of living testimony to the resurrection. We must find some explanation of these narratives. Only three seem possible. One is that they were inventions; the second that they were hallucinations; the third that they were true. Were they inventions? There is no need to devote much space to the refutation of this suggestion. That the resurrection appearance stories are not deliberate inventions is as plain as could be. For one thing the narratives are sober and unadorned; for another they are graphic and enlivened by the detailed touches which sound like the work of an eyewitness. The stories of the race to the tomb and of the walk to Emmaus are too vivid and real to have been invented.
Besides, no one could call them good inventions. If we had wanted to invent the resurrection, we might have done much better ourselves. We should have been careful to avoid the complicated jigsaw puzzle of events which the four Gospels together produce. We should have eliminated, or at least watered down, the doubts and fears of the apostles. We should probably have included a dramatic account of the resurrection itself (as do the fantastic apocryphal Gospels), describing the power and glory of the Son of God as he broke the bonds of death and burst from the tomb in triumph. But no one saw it happen, and we have no description of it. Again, we should scarcely have chosen Mary Magdalene as the first witness, if only to avoid Renan's sneer that "la passion d'une hallucinee donne au monde un dieu res-suscite."
There is an objection to the theory of invention greater than the naivety of the narratives. It is the obvious fact, to which we have already had occasion to refer, that the apostles, and so the Evangelists and the early church, were sublimely convinced that Jesus had risen. The whole New Testament breathes an atmosphere of certainty and conquest. Its writers may have been, if you like, tragically misled; they were definitely not deliberately misleading.
If these accounts were not inventions, were the appearances themselves hallucinations? This opinion has been widely held and confidently expressed; and of course hallucinations are not an uncommon phenomenon. A hallucination is the "apparent perception of an external object when no such object is present," and is associated most frequently with someone who is at least neurotic, if not actually psychotic. Most of us have known people who see things and hear voices and live sometimes or always in an imaginary world of their own. It is not possible to say that the apostles were unbalanced people of this type. Mary Magdalene may have been, but hardly blustering Peter and doubting Thomas. Hallucinations have also been known to occur in quite ordinary and normal people, and in such cases two characteristics may usually be discerned. First, they happen as the climax to a period of exaggerated wishful thinking. Second, the circumstances of time, place and mood are favorable. There must be the strong inward desire and the predisposing outward setting.
When we turn to the Gospel narratives of the resurrection, however, both these factors are missing. Far from wishful thinking, it was just the opposite. When the women first found the tomb empty, they fled in "trembling and astonishment" and were "afraid." When Mary Magdalene and
the other women reported that Jesus was alive, the apostles "would not believe it," and their words "seemed to them an idle tale." When Jesus himself came and stood in their midst "they were startled and frightened, and supposed that they saw a spirit," so that Jesus "upbraided them for their unbelief and hardness of heart." Thomas was adamant in his refusal to believe unless he could actually see and feel the nail-wounds. When later Christ met the eleven and others by appointment on a mountain in Galilee, "they worshiped him; but some doubted." Here was no wishful thinking, no naive credulity, no blind acceptance. The disciples were not gullible, but rather cautious, skeptical and "slow of heart to believe." They were not susceptible to hallucinations. Nor would strange visions have satisfied them. Their faith was grounded upon the hard facts of verifiable experience.
Not only so, but the outwardly favorable circumstances were missing too. If the appearances had all taken place in one or two particularly sacred places, which had been hallowed by memories of Jesus, and their mood had been expectant, our suspicions might well be aroused. If we had only the story of the appearances in the upper room, we should have cause to doubt and question. If the eleven had been gathered in that special place where Jesus had spent with them some of his last earthly hours, and they had kept his place vacant, and were sentimentalizing over the magic days of the past, and had remembered his promises to return, and had begun to wonder if he might return and to hope that he would, until the ardor of their expectation was consummated by his sudden appearance, we might indeed fear that they had been mocked by a cruel delusion.
But this was not the case. Indeed, an investigation of the ten appearances reveals an almost studied variety in the circumstances of person, place and mood in which they occurred. He was seen by individuals alone (Mary Magdalene, Peter and James), by small groups and by more than five hundred people together. He appeared in the garden of the tomb, near Jerusalem, in the upper room, on the road to Emmaus, by the lake of Galilee, on a Galilee mountain and on the Mount of Olives.
If there was variety in person and place, there was variety in mood also. Mary Magdalene was weeping; the women were afraid and astonished; Peter was full of remorse, and Thomas of incredulity. The Emmaus pair were distracted by the events of the week and the disciples in Galilee by their fishing. Yet through their doubts and fears, through their unbelief and preoccupation, the risen Lord made himself known to them.
It is impossible to dismiss these revelations of the divine Lord as the hallucinations of deranged minds. So, if they were neither inventions nor hallucinations, the only alternative left is that they actually happened. The risen Lord was seen.
The Disciples Were Changed
Perhaps the transformation of the disciples of Jesus is the greatest evidence of all for the resurrection, because it is entirely artless. They do not invite us to look at themselves, as they invite us to look at the empty tomb and the collapsed graveclothes and the Lord whom they had seen. We can see the change in them without being asked to look. The men who figure in the pages of the Gospels are new and different men in the Acts. The death of their Master left them despondent, disillusioned, and near to despair. But in the Acts they emerge as men who hazard their lives for the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and who turn the world upside down. What has made the change? What accounts for their new faith and power, joy and love? Partly, no doubt, Pentecost and the coming of the Holy Spirit; but then the Holy Spirit came only when Jesus had risen and ascended. It is as if the resurrection let loose mighty moral and spiritual forces. Two examples stand out. The first is Simon Peter. During the telling of the Passion story Peter has suffered a tragic eclipse. He has denied Christ three times. He has cursed and sworn as if he had never known the restraining influence of Jesus in his life. He has gone out into the night to weep bitterly. When Jesus is dead, he joins the others in the upper room, behind barred doors "for fear of the Jews," and is utterly dejected.
But when we turn over one or two pages in the Bible, we see him standing, perhaps on the steps outside the same upper room of the same house in Jerusalem, preaching so boldly and so powerfully to a vast crowd that three thousand people believe in Christ and are baptized. We turn on to the next chapters of the Acts and we watch him defying the very Sanhedrin who had condemned Jesus to death, rejoicing that he is counted worthy to suffer shame for his name, and later sleeping in his cell on the night before his expected execution.
Simon Peter is a new man. The shifting sands have been blown away; true to his nickname, he is a real rock now. What has made the difference?
Or take James, who later assumed a position of leadership in the Jerusalem church. He is one of "the brethren of the Lord," who throughout the Gospels are represented as not believing in Jesus: "Even his brothers did not believe in him." But when we reach the first chapter of the Acts, the list which Luke gives of the assembled disciples concludes with the words "and... his brothers." James is evidently a believer now. What has made the difference? What convinced him? Perhaps we have the clue we are seeking in 1 Corinthians 15:7 where Paul, cataloging those who had seen the risen Jesus, adds "he appeared to James." It was the resurrection which transformed Peter's fear into courage, and James's doubt into faith. It was the resurrection which changed the sabbath into Sunday and the Jewish remnant into the Christian church. It was the resurrection which changed Saul the Pharisee into Paul the apostle, the fanatical persecutor into a preacher of the very faith he previously tried to destroy. "Last of all," Paul wrote, "he appeared also to me." These are the evidences for the resurrection. The body had disappeared. The graveclothes remained undisturbed. The Lord was seen. And the disciples were changed. There is no adequate explanation of these phenomena other than the great Christian affirmation "the Lord is risen indeed."
***
We have been occupied for three chapters in a critical investigation of the most absorbing personality of history, a modest carpenter from Nazareth who became a peasant preacher and died a criminal's death.
His claims were stupendous.
He seems to have been morally perfect.
He rose from the dead.
The cumulative weight of this evidence is all but conclusive. It makes eminently reasonable that last step of faith which brings us to our knees before him and puts on our lips the mighty confession of a doubting Thomas: "My Lord and my God."