The most preposterous thing about Christianity is that orthodox Christians believe that Jesus bodily resurrected from the dead after suffering a grizzly death by crucifixion. Yet, Jesus’s followers were convinced they had encountered the resurrected Jesus. They would accept persecution and even death rather than say it didn’t happen. Those early disciples organized the rapid expansion of Christianity in the first century in spite of intense opposition.
Jesus told his disciples that he would rise from the dead after His execution (e.g., Matthew 16:21, Luke 9:22). They couldn’t grasp what He was saying. After the crucifixion His disciples were forlorn and in hiding (John 20:19). Nobody went to the tomb on Sunday morning to greet Jesus. Only the women went to the tomb to complete customary burial preparations.
In Hebrew law, a body was buried the day of death except on the sabbath (Deuteronomy 21:23). Joseph of Arimathea requested Jesus’s body for burial.
This was uncommon but permissible under Roman law.1 Funeral customs in Jesus’s time are well known. The body was washed, anointed with oils and perfumes then wrapped in a shroud. Spices were then sprinkled over the deceased and in the tomb. It was the women’s task to prepare the body for burial.2 Jesus was nailed to the cross at 9 AM. His time of death was 3 PM. 3 Jesus’s body was placed in the tomb after an incomplete preparation since Sabbath was rapidly approaching. 4 The women had to go to the tomb Sunday morning to finish preparing Jesus’s body for interment. They brought aromatic spices they had compounded according to their funerary traditions (John 19:40, Luke 23:56, 24:1).
Jewish leaders feared that Jesus’s followers would be viewed as a political insurgent group and invite Roman martial law (John 11:48). They wanted Jesus killed, His movement stopped and His followers disbanded. Jewish leaders didn’t want Jesus’s disciples to think He had resurrected from the dead. It would foil their plan to disperse them. So they asked Pilate to place soldiers at the tomb but Pilate refused and told the Pharisees to post soldiers from the Sanhedrin Temple Guard at the tomb (Matthew 27:62-66).
The soldiers watching Jesus’s tomb fainted when they saw an Angel (Matthew 28:4). When they told Jewish leaders what they saw, the Chief Priests bribed the soldiers to say that Jesus’s body was stolen.
When they had assembled with the elders and consulted together, they gave a large sum of money to the soldiers, saying, “Tell them, ‘His disciples came at night and stole Him away while we slept.’ (Matthew 28:11-13, NKJV)
Accounting for the empty tomb by saying the body had been stolen seemed credible. Nobody expects a corpse to return to life. Even Mary Magdalen, when she found the empty tomb thought Jesus’s body had been removed. When she first saw Jesus she didn’t recognize Him. She thought He was the cemetery gardener (John 20:1-2).
Rather than perpetrate a lie about the disciples removing the body, a far more compelling option to squash the Jesus Movement would have been to exhume the body. Had the Pharisees removed Jesus’s corpse from the tomb and put it on public display Christianity would not exist
Romans liberally used crucifixion as a deterrent for political insurgency. It should not be overlooked that bodies were left on the cross to be eaten by scavenging animals. Imagine the chilling effect this had on the local population! Burial was very rare after crucifixion. That is why there have only been a handful of archeological finds of crucifixion victims. Leaving the corpse of a political insurgent on the cross until there was nothing left of the remains was usual practice. Jewish leaders could have requested this from Roman authorities. It is noteworthy that they did not.
Is there a cogent explanation for the disciples’ behavior and the rise of Christianity in the first century apart from the biblical narrative of Jesus’s resurrection? Alternative naturalistic explanations are unconvincing.
The “swoon theory” is the idea that Jesus didn’t actually die. He somehow survived and was nursed back to health. The historical record contradicts this proposition, however. Roman military discipline was austere. A soldier caught sleeping while on watch would be beaten to death, for example. 5 Allowing a capital criminal to survive crucifixion would mean death for the soldiers on the execution team. 6
The reason a spear was thrust into Jesus’s side was to make certain He was dead before the body was released for burial (John 19:33-34). Soldiers on the execution team would not release the body if there were any chance He was still alive.
There is only one case of a crucifixion victim that survived. The historian Flavius Josephus saw three friends being crucified during the siege of Jerusalem in AD 70 and was able to obtain a stay of execution for them. All three were let down from the cross and provided medical care but only one survived. 7 There is no other literary reference of anyone surviving crucifixion.
Could the disciples have made a mistake? Did they go to the wrong tomb and mistakenly believe Jesus had resurrected? Not likely. They knew the location of the tomb. Mary Magdalene and others saw Jesus’ body put in the tomb (Mark 15:47, Matthew 27:59-61, and Luke 23:55). It was the new family tomb of a wealthy member of the Sanhedrin, the supreme Jewish legislative council. Furthermore, there were temple soldiers guarding the tomb. It would be hard to miss a company of soldiers standing next to a grave.
Did the disciples perpetrate a hoax? What would be the motivation to fake Jesus’s resurrection? There was no allure of potential reward. Such a hoax would abruptly end as soon as Christians were persecuted and killed for preaching Jesus was the resurrected Messiah.
The Church was formed on the Day of Pentecost, fifty days after Jesus’s crucifixion (Acts 2:41-42). Christian persecution started shortly after that. Peter and John were arrested for preaching about Jesus’s resurrection (Acts 4:1-3). Stephen, the first Christian martyr, may have been killed as early as a year after Jesus’s crucifixion (Acts 7:58). 8 Nobody risks their life or sacrifices there personal safety without a hope of reward or self-preservation. The notion that the disciples perpetrated a hoax is absurd.
Logical problems with the “swoon theory” or notions of bungling disciples have caused skeptical scholars to gravitate to the Hallucination Hypothesis, that is the proposition that the disciples’ meetings with the resurrected Jesus were not veridical but were instead psychological phenomena.
What are hallucinations? Hallucinations are experiences in one or more of the five senses without external stimuli. What skeptical scholars miss is that hallucinations are symptoms of underlying illness. Causes can include metabolic derangement, drug induced hallucinations, certain kinds of brain tumors, or psychiatric disease
How likely is it that all the disciples simultaneously experienced severe psychiatric illness with hallucinations? For the sake of argument consider that the twelve disciples were all schizophrenic, a type of psychiatric illness where symptoms might include hallucinations. The prevalence of schizophrenia in the general population is about one per 222 persons. 9 If we consider the number of faithful disciples was about 120 people, the number gathered in the upper room on the Day of Pentecost, the probability that 12 within that group simultaneously suffered the same severe mental illness is about 1.88 x 10^-12, or 1.88 in a trillion. Practically speaking, it is impossible that the twelve disciples simultaneously suffered severe mental illness with hallucinations.
It is noteworthy that people suffering with hallucinations are often disconnected from reality and have impaired social interaction. Twelve severely ill disciples could not have organized and implemented the rapid expansion of Christianity in the first century.
It should be noted that hallucinations occur only in the milieu of an individual’s brain. Psychological phenomena, therefore, offer no explanation for the many post-resurrection group encounters of Jesus with His disciples (e.g., Matthew 28:16-17, Luke 24:36-43, John 20:19-29, I Corinthians 15:5-8). Psychiatric explanations for the disciples belief in Jesus’s resurrection are simply untenable.
The Mystery The disciples didn’t see it coming! Before they met the resurrected Jesus, the disciples were in fear and hiding. When some of the women told them they had seen the resurrected Jesus the disciples thought it was pure nonsense (Luke 24:10-12, NET)
The rulers of this age didn’t see it coming! If they had, they wouldn’t have crucified Jesus, the Lord of Glory (I Corinthians 2:8). While this Bible verse could be referring to Jewish leaders and Roman governmental authorities, many commentators believe this is referring to the dark powers of the devil and his cohort. 10 This is a plausible interpretation since through His death Jesus destroyed the devil (Hebrews 2:14)
What God prepared for those that love Him is beyond human imagination, but the Holy Spirit has revealed God’s mystery (I Corinthians 2:9-10). Nobody could foresee that when God raised Jesus from the dead every believer was also raised from the dead with Him.
My old self has been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. So I live in this earthly body by trusting in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. (Galatians 2:20, NLT)
… even though we were dead because of our sins, he gave us life when he raised Christ from the dead. (It is only by God’s grace that you have been saved!) For he raised us from the dead along with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms because we are united with Christ Jesus. (Ephesians 2:5-6, NLT)
