In The Master's Service

The Defense of the Resurrection of Jesus

Brother John G. Gassaway

Do we REALLY know what is possible and what is not through our personal experiences? Sherlock’s Tryal of the Witnesses (more about Sherlock in later arti­cles) took an interesting approach to the incredible nature of the unknown. The case of an aborig­inal of Africa being told of a river that becomes "solid", so that one might walk over it as dry land, was considered. The man living in the tropics of Africa would not accept that as even possible. Yet the one reporting it comes from the frozen tundra of the Arctic. Now WE know that rivers freeze there, but this African native has never even experienced a cold day, and in the days of Sherlock (18th century), African aboriginals were not in possession of such experience as rivers freezing and would reject such an idea. We in this day and time ac­cept things that we, nor anyone else, understand and yet are com­fortable to order or reorder our lives upon these unknown things.

We cannot explain gravity, yet we have no misconceptions about obeying its effects. The "laws" that have been drawn up to satisfy the "understanding" are totally dependent on other things that we do not understand such as time. Time depends upon var­iables of space and matter that physicists state can "bend" time and change its constancy. Yes! That is what the great Einstein concluded about the nature of space-time. It can be bent! This is a matter of actual observation in deep space study of distant galax­ies. Time is dependent on a con­stant speed of light. Yet, we are told by some scientists that the speed of light may NOT be con­stant. If that is the case, then all our laws of motion and the uni­verse itself are suspect. We accept from scientists that "black holes" in space exist, face value, and that the possibility is that time stands "still" in one of these places. The laws of gravitation would actually support the state­ment. They say that time STANDS STILL and we as students just accept the statement! Scientists propose a "big bang" for the be­ginning of our cosmos and it is accepted face value. Yet these scientists will admit that they cannot explain the conditions that existed on the "other side" of the big bang. Even we, who accept a creator God for the worlds and the first man Adam, have to accept many, many things that are difficult if not impossible to understand.[www.ldolphin.org/setterfield].

In these areas God is unknow­able, yet He has given us certain conditions within our sphere that we can understand well enough to predict the movements of plan­ets, stars, and galaxies. We sim­ply do not know what lies outside this sphere or dimension. Deute­ronomy 33:26—27 describes God as the "God of Jeshurun", "the eter­nal God." [#6924 which is trans­lated "forefront" and literally has a meaning of "leading from out­side time"]. He can deal with us within the limits of physical time while existing outside this frame. An eternal creator God lives outside our dimension and Jesus’ only description of Him was that He is a Spirit. [John 4:24]. We have no idea what a "spirit" is. We may have some imaginations, but caught inside the framework of time and space, we can never be sure. The Spirit of God materialized in the body of Jesus Christ in the incarnation. Is it not possi­ble that Jesus, resurrected immor­tal in the Spirit, can just as easily dematerialize? We have evidence from scripture that He appeared and disappeared at will after the resurrection. Yet, was He not raised not simply a spirit, but an eternal man-God in the flesh, by the same power that God made the first man Adam? Is it not Luke the physician who makes note of the flesh and bones nature of the risen Christ, who partakes of natural food? [Luke 24:30, 31; Luke 24:39; Luke 24:42].

This is the crux of the story. Just because we do not under­stand how a dead body can be raised in the flesh, immortal does not mean it cannot happen. Neith­er do we understand how these other "natural" things happen in our cosmos. That does not mean the cosmos does not exist although there are some fools who actually state that everything we think of as real, including our own existence, is just imagined and is in fact some kind of fic­tional existence. Here we have a record of a "man" who died and was raised in the flesh from the dead. The only question is whether or not this record is true. If it is true, then we have evidence that a dead body can be made alive again. Miracle or not, this is reported to have happened and the person who raised from the dead claimed to be Divine, to have created the cosmos and would raise our mortal bodies from the grave. It is incumbent upon us to look into this matter.

The naysayers have used "cir­cular" logic for centuries to deny the possibility. They say that "a resurrection can not occur, therefore it did not occur, there­fore anyone who reports a resur­rection cannot be trusted, because a resurrection cannot occur", and so on. They are little different from the African aboriginal who denied the possibility of a river turning to a solid (ice). In not too far past days, they would have said "impossible!" about an event as otherwise "commonplace" as going to the moon in a spaceship. Anyone who would have predic­ted it would have been thought to be insane.

Bible-hating "scholars" meet regularly in what is dubbed, "Jesus Seminars", where they reg­ularly go through the Bible and remove any areas that speak of miracles because they take an apriori position that "miracles can not occur, therefore they do not, and should not be accepted in the Bible story." Therefore prophecy cannot occur for that would be a miracle of sorts. With this starting point, they strip vast amounts of Bible verses and stories from our Bible by a "vote", using a white ball to indicate ac­ceptance and a black ball to re­ject. These "wise men" cast this vote and then emerge to report to us on our "new and corrected Bible."

The witnesses have already been defended to the extent that their writings were true and re­liable. At this point in the discus­sion, it does not matter whether what they say is true. They BE­LIEVED it was true and they died horrible deaths to carry the mes­sage to the world. I am confident of this — multiple men do not die this way, alone, for a lie, the same lie told over and over by all. Peer or group pressure just might cause them to stick to a lie if they were all together in one place. But they were TOTALLY alone and isolated from their fellow evangelists. There was no news media with a TV camera held on them broadcasting back to their fellow evangelists, as they responded to the demands to re­cant. No one would know they had recanted. That is all it would take for them to be free and return home. Secular historical records indicate that. [Pliny the Younger]. The early church fathers witnessed to that. [Fox’s Book of Martyrs]. They could go home and tell their fellows that they withstood the torture and held out on the story and no one would know the difference. That is true if they were honest OR if they were liars.

All one has to do is read the details of these men’s deaths from later sources to realize that they died for the story and died alone in far away places. It is incredible that at least ONE OF THE APOS­TLES would not have broken down and recanted. It is even more incredible that they would not have recanted IF THEY WERE LIARS. You can search history and you will not find any record that they recanted. All you find are sites where they are reported to have been executed. Logic forces the conclusion that they were NOT LIARS.

Let us then proceed with the facts regarding Jesus and the re­surrection as we have them. Eve­ryone has been bombarded with television and movie presentations of the "historic" Jesus of Nazareth. They mostly all follow the lead of the 19th century "high­er critics" of Western Europe who did not believe in a historic Jesus or the possibility of miracles or a resurrection. Therefore these presentations always leave you with more doubts than any true information. The only exception is the last movie, "The Passion." It truly attempted to follow the Gospel narrative with only some "editorial" license that movie di­rectors usually take and in this case did not detract from the known facts. All the rest, that I have seen, try to present Jesus in some "human" fashion or over-glamorize some of the traditions that are not even in the Gospels. So the question is, "can we trust the Gospels?" Can we believe in miracles?

What are we to believe? If we were on a jury and given all of this information, so says Sherlock and Pamela Binnings Ewen, we would be hard put to condemn these men and their story. Their story is plausible on the basis of things we know and DONT know of the nature of things eternal. Their story is plausible on the basis of the true record of the event, told by four writers, who were not in collab­oration to tell a lie.

Much of what I have stated here has been said by more learned men than I. The ap­proach below is "borrowed" from many writers who have used an analytical approach to the discus­sion. I first became aware of this approach about eighteen years ago when I was attracted to this approach by the late Dr. Gene Scott. It had a profound effect upon the skeptical "scientist" that I was. I believed the Gospel story because I trusted the people who taught it to me. Yet, I did not know how to defend a resurrec­tion against skeptics much more sinister than I. I had the Gospel record of it, but I did not know how to interpret it. I did not have outside historic and secular sources that were being quoted. I felt I should check out the sources and I used the sources below, particularly,to direct my research, of the subject, and compared the facts and conclusions to the New Testament scriptures. Probably one of the most profitable discus­sions was that of the aboriginal of Africa who could not believe in a frozen river. I suddenly con­fronted the obvious; we accept things just as impossible in our own lives and dimension daily.

The list of sources:

1. THE TRYAL OF THE WIT­NESSES OF THE RESURRECTION OF JESUS CHRIST by Thomas Sherlock, 1729, a reprint from Capstone Books

2. FAITH ON TRIAL by Pam­ela Binnings Ewen

3. WHO MOVED THE STONE? by Frank Morrison

4. EYEWITNESS TO JESUS by Carston Thiede and Matthew D’Ancona

5. MERE CHRISTIANITY by C. S. Lewis

6. Various Histories, Ancient writings and Web site sources on the historic record of Jesus, including He Walked Among Us, McDowell and Wilson, Jesus in the Mishnah and Talmud, Robert A. Morey and others that will be listed at the end of this writing. As I cannot possibly include all or even most of the material from these sources, I encourage you to get these and read them through thoroughly.

First, the "Tryal" of the witnesses previously referred to above, was the written description of an actual mock trial (note old English spelling of "tryal") by several lawyers and judges in England in the 18th century. This "company" of men, who met so­cially together on a regular sched­ule, was discussing a current case of a certain Mr. Woolston who had written against the evi­dence of Jesus Christ and His miracles including particular ob­jections by Mr. Woolston in the case of Lazarus. It seems Mr. Woolston had been found guilty of his acts under laws that existed against such writings against Christianity and particularly the Church of England. The men of this "company" spent the greater part of a night discussing the merits of the case against Woolston and in the end decided they would debate the matter by going to the source, the claims of the resurrection in the Gospels.

After much discussion of the matter, these men decided they would hold a trial of the "witnesses", that is, the witness of the New Testament story as given in the Bible by the Apostles. They appointed a judge and even se­lected a jury of men who were not previously present and thus, unaware of the nature of the previous discussion concerning Mr. Woolston. Then the case was presented with all of the pros and cons of the story as it had been told by the disciples, from the Gospels, and the case then was turned over to this jury. The jury came to the conclusion that the witnesses had been truthful in their recollections and writings at least in what they thought to be the events of the resurrec­tion.

I would like to describe in de­tail the company’s most interest­ing story and the arguments used by the lawyer who denied the miracles and the resurrection as told by the disciples and the lawyer who defended them as true witnesses. A typical argument was given above as to the nature of a man in the Congo to disbelieve the impossible, that rivers become solid (with ice). There is not space here, and there are other sources. "Faith On Trial" is a very similar work to Sherlock’s Tryal, placed in a more modern context of US courts, rules of evidence, and ar­guments from evidence. It dwells upon the admissibility of a record like the Gospels as evidence in a US Federal Court and upon the veracity of the witnesses and the ways that courts and juries detect actions by a witness to indicate whether the witness is truthful or not. The conclusion is the same as Sherlock and will be in my summary of the facts and the necessary conclusions. The Gospels would be accepted as "evidence", whether believed or not, on the basis of their proven antiquity. I have previously given that argument of antiquity. The Gospels can be traced back to almost their first writing in the first century. No other accepted writings of antiquity have such a proven paper trail. Arguments as to their veracity might be made, but their status as true documents would not be arguable. If you have any doubts, even the slightest, about this, go to some of these sources such as EYE­WITNESS TO JESUS.

Frank Morrison was an attor­ney who disbelieved the resurrection, went to Jerusalem, and investigated the sites. He then investigated the literature available on the claims of Christianity, studied Jewish law as it applied to the day, and finally made a true logical attempt to explain the resurrection as a myth or legend. When he was finished, he was instead convinced of the historicity of the resurrection from details about the trial, the burial and the surrounding stories as recorded in the New Testament.

An extremely talented writer and scholar, Josh McDowell has written several books on this subject. In He Walked Among Us, he gave a long accounting of historical records from secular, and most importantly, Jewish writers of the Talmud. In these secular and rabbinic sources, there is no doubt that Jesus was well known to the Jews, even those who totally rejected Him as the Son of God or the Messiah. Yet, even in their derogatory references to Jesus, they have given historic certainty to the Jesus of Nazareth.

All of these sources use pretty much the same approach I will be using later. I am indebted to these and other sources for the clear approach to the argument. I will present the information in four parts.

1. Jesus lived. He was cruci­fied by the Romans at the request of the Jewish leaders. These are facts of history that can be proved quite easily and at least be accepted; otherwise why even discuss whether or not a resur­rection occurred?

2. The empty tomb has to be explained and the "theories" over what happened to the body dispensed with.

3. The veracity of the witnesses who told the story in the New Testament is the final evidence that the story is true or false. I have already gone over this evi­dence in previous sections. The overwhelming evidence is that these evangelists only acted as honest reporters of an event they had witnessed personally.

4. How can we explain the origin and endurance of the "Christian way"?

TO BE CONTINUED: PART 5-A; THE HISTORIC JESUS; WHAT DO WE KNOW?