Introduction:

If God exists, it will make sense to at least consider the idea that Jesus is more than just a man. It is at least a possibility, but why should anyone think it is true? To begin to make this case, we need to remember a couple of things we have seen about the Bible.

It appears to be generally reliable. At this point all we need to say is that the Bible is a generally reliable source of information about what Jesus said and did, and how those around Him reacted to all that.

We have also seen that we have a very close approximation of that the documents of the Bible - especially those of the N.T. - record. We don’t have the originals, but what we have is very close, and the differences are not crucial.

So how do we proceed?

Jesus staked His claims on supernatural events.

Before we get into all that, remember our session on assumptions.

One big assumption that always comes up here is that supernatural events are simply impossible. The influential 18^th century philosopher David Hume claimed that miracles are a violation of natural law, natural law is inviolable (Hume says the "uniform experience" of humanity is against natural law violations), so miracles are impossible.

But you see that this argument makes two assumptions that are very disputable, especially the idea that natural law cannot be violated. Modern-day skeptics about the supernatural aspects of the Christian faith still appeal to variations of Hume’s argument.

Here is the outline a of response to Hume. First of all, Hume nor anyone else can know what the "uniform experience" regarding miracles is. This is one of those unjustified assumptions. The historic Christian faith doesn’t claim that most, or even many, people have experienced violations of natural law. The claim is that there is historic evidence that a very few people experienced this.

This is an area where many Christians have not helped matters because of loose talk about miracles.

The Bible uses very specific words for what we call "miracles." One place you can find all three of these together is Romans 15:19. There we find:

"Signs" - this points to the function of a miracle as a evidence for a claim

"Wonders" - miracles are signs because the amazing, out-of-the-ordinary events

In the Bible, miracles are "few and far between." Not everything is "a miracle" even though we use the English word very loosely sometimes. Miracles come in clusters, and they surround situations in which God is making new revelation of Himself. So, for example, God healing someone in response to prayer is not necessarily a miracle. It would be supernatural, but unless it is an event that serves as a sign, it is not a miracle in the Biblical sense. The tendency of some Christians to call everything positive that happens to them a "miracle" is very misleading and confusing.

This suggests something else about miracles that we won’t go into in detail just now, but apart from God giving new revelation, miracles are pointless. Thus, it is reasonable to think that miracles ceased when revelation ceased - and keep in mind that scripture indicates that "the faith" was once for all delivered - past tense.

A Miracle case study

There are "miracles" and then there is the chief miracle, the resurrection. Let’s start with a very typical and illustrative one of the "miracles" to see how Jesus based His claims about Himself on these.

Mark 2:1-12

The setting - four friends of a paralyzed man bring him to Jesus hoping for healing.

Jesus - unexpectedly - begins by saying to the paralyzed man, "Your sins are forgiven."

Some onlookers reason - not incorrectly - that only God can forgive sins. They have assumed Jesus cannot be God, and so they think He is speaking blasphemy.

Jesus says, "Here is how you can know that I can forgive sins" and, by implication, that He is God.

Jesus heals the paralyzed man - instantaneously and completely, just by "speaking it so."

The people witnessing this are "amazed."

Notice some important things in this typical case of Jesus working a miracle:

The situation and the context give this event its "sign value." When Jesus does something like this, at other times in the gospels, it is done before witnesses and in a context that someone learns something about Jesus because of what happened. Miracles are signs.

The event is unambiguous in a way that is causes amazement in those who witness it. Miracles are events that couldn’t "just happen." They are unmistakably astounding. They are wonders.

A miracle event clearly points to a cause beyond the physical universe. They are not things that could very likely be "tricks." They are not things that could happen naturally. One very incorrect way some people try to defend the idea of miracles is to claim that we could understand how they happened if only we understood the universe better. But Jesus is not claiming to be some "super physicist" or "super chemist." He is claiming to be God the Son. Miracles are events of supernatural power. They are the intervention of a power outside the physical universe that causes and effect within the physical universe. An improved understanding of the physical universe will not help explain that.

The Chief Miracle - the Resurrection of Jesus

The Resurrection in Context - Jesus was not suddenly raised from the dead without warning, or without connection to anything else. On the contrary, Jesus repeatedly predicted His resurrection and connected it to His claims about Himself.

John 2:18-22 Then the Jews demanded of him, "What miraculous sign can you show us to prove your authority to do all this?" [Control the temple, which He called "My Father’s house.] Jesus answered them, "Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days." The Jews replied, "It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and you are going to raise it in three days?" But the temple he had spoken of was his body. After he was raised from the dead, his disciples recalled what he had said. Then they believed the Scripture and the words that Jesus had spoken. (NIV)

Notice how Peter sums this up after the fact in Acts 2:22-24

Men of Israel, listen to this: Jesus of Nazareth was a man accredited by God to you by miracles, wonders and signs, which God did among you through him, as you yourselves know. This man was handed over to you by God's set purpose and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross. But God raised him from the dead, freeing him from the agony of death, because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him. NIV

The Evidence for Jesus’ Resurrection

Jesus death was by execution at the hands of the Roman state. It was thus official, and His death was certified by competent public officials. See Mark 15:44,45.

Several individuals, not all of whom were disciples (see Matt 28:4,11), reported empirically experiencing Jesus alive again after His execution - they saw Him, spoke with Him, touched Him.

These reports involved many individuals, over a period of forty days, and in a variety of settings and locations. (See Acts 1:3-4)

There are many of these reports, but the incident with Thomas in John 20:24-28 is especially helpful. While we sometimes preface the name "Thomas" with "doubting," he is was really no more doubting than the other disciples. They all knew Jesus very well, the knew He had died (some watched him die), none of them expected or even hoped to see Him alive again, and yet they were convinced by their experiences that this same Jesus was alive once again.

Notice how powerful this account is. In order to avoid the force of this, about all you can do is say, "That just can’t have happened." But the testimony, carefully preserved and transmitted to us, says it did.

One very simple, though supernatural, explanation of these reports would be the fact of the resurrection of Jesus, just as He had predicted. When I say "simple" I don’t mean, "Not a big deal." I mean that it is a less complex explanation than the schemes cooked up to deny it.

Is There a Better Explanation of all this? There is a long history in the 19^th and 20^th centuries of trying to accept the basic N.T. data and still deny that the resurrection occurred.

There have been rival explanations offered for the events reported in the N.T.

The first one is recorded in Matt 28:12-15 - the explanation that the disciples took Jesus' body.

In the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries some who had begun to doubt the Bible could be what it claims to be (remember of discussion of that point in a earlier session) tried to cope with most of the data from the N.T. by claiming that Jesus was crucified, appeared to die but in fact just "swooned" and was revived after He was left in the tomb. It was a completely incredible theory that didn’t last long because the proponents gave up on coping with the data in the N.T. and went on to "bigger and better" denials.

About this same time "mass hallucination" theories became popular. The idea was that the disciples so wanted Jesus to be alive that they all just hallucinated the resurrection appearances - all completely consistent with one another!

In the later 20^th century "Passover Plot" of Schonfield who claimed Jesus intended to fake His own death but eventually died in the attempt. Schonfield had to be a bit selective when he approached the data from the gospels, but he was trying to account for at least most of it.

Another popular 20^th century approach that Jesus "rose from the dead" only in the hearts and faith of the disciples, while, in fact, His body remained in the tomb.

These rival explanations arise - not surprisingly - from times when anti-supernatural assumptions began to control the thinking about this. The problem with all these rivals is that they ignore the evidence. They do not account for that collection of reports from the witnesses that we have in the N.T.

There are also other events best explained by the fact of the resurrection, such as the existence of the church (even under persecution), the conversion of Saul of Tarsus, the change in the attitude of the eleven, and the replacement of the seventh day of the week (the Sabbath) with the first day of the week as "the Lord’s Day" - among other things.

There were other resurrections recorded in the N.T. Notable among these is Jesus’ friend Lazarus, recorded in John chapter 11. (Review that episode sometime and notice how careful Jesus is to put it into a context in which it can serve as a sign of Who Jesus really is.) But these, while perhaps more spectacular than a "mere" healing like Mark 2, were not like the resurrection of Jesus. While Jesus gave Lazarus a "new lease on life" it was still just a lease - Lazarus would die once again.

So unless you have ruled out as even a possibility, the testimony found in the Bible, especially the N.T., makes a very strong case for the resurrection of Jesus, and the resurrection is a good reason for accepting everything that Jesus says about Himself.

The Resurrection of Jesus as an Historical Event

Some have tried to understand the resurrection of Jesus in this way: during Jesus’ life on earth He was "in history" just as we all are. But when He was raised from the dead He exited human history and moved into some other realm that is outside history.

This approach is taken by those sympathetic to the Christian faith.

It is sometimes an attempt to "protect" the risen Jesus from the scrutiny of historians. A Jesus now outside history is immune from the criticism of historians.

For others it is simply a common, popular mis-reading of the N.T. data about Jesus.

Think back to our session about faith, evidence, and certainty. Those who think faith has no connection to evidence sometimes see removing the resurrection from the realm of historical evidence as a good thing. Sometimes this comes into play here also.

Whatever the motive, this approach makes the resurrection non-historical. The problem with thinking the resurrection is outside of history is that it makes it impossible to offer historical evidence for the resurrection - and that’s the only kind of evidence we have!

The Biblical Evidence Concerning Jesus’ Resurrection Body - When carefully considered, the evidence indicates that Jesus was raised into the same body that died on the cross and was placed in Joseph’s tomb. For forty days he appeared to the witnesses for the very purpose of demonstrating that He was alive. Then, at the ascension, Jesus moved into what we could call "a new mode of existence" when He received a glorified body.

General points

The risen Jesus was recognizable. Nothing about His appearance was astonishing, rather, it was the very fact of His appearance alive that shocked His disciples, as we would expect.

As we have seen concerning the appearances, Jesus demonstrated His post-resurrection corporeality by letting Himself be touched, by eating, etc.

Jesus' post-resurrection body bore the scars of the crucifixion (Luke 24:39-40; John 20:20,27). This would seem to indicate that this is NOT Jesus' glorified body.

In 1 John 3:2 John states that "what we will be has not yet been made known . . . when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is." John had seen the post-resurrection Jesus, but what he says here implies that this was not the glorified Jesus.

Reasons to think that Jesus received the glorified body after the forty-day appearance period:

The ascension is the most likely and logical time for the transformation.

The cloud which received Jesus at the ascension was most likely the cloud associated with the "glory of the Lord" (Exodus 40:34-38; Isaiah 6:4; and Matthew 17:5). 1 Timothy 3:16 states that Jesus was "taken up into glory."

There is a yet-to-come example of this kind of change at a similar occasion. I Corinthians 15:51-52 speaks of believers' alive at the second coming being changed to the glorified body. 1 Thessalonians 4:17 may suggest this change will occur in connection with the ascension into the "clouds." This may well refer not to meteorological phenomena, but the cloud that is often associated with "the glory of the Lord" in scripture.

Jesus seems to have appeared to Paul in a different body than anyone else had seen. See Acts 9:1-9; 1 Corinthians 9:1; 15:8. Also note that Paul's description of the glorious resurrection body (1 Corinthians 15:35ff) does not seem consistent with the post-resurrection body of Jesus before the ascension.

Objections and Answers: This view seems to go against the grain of what many assume about this matter. Here are some common objections.

What about the "marvelous abilities" of Jesus resurrection body?

Some very unusual occurrences are recorded of the post-resurrection Jesus. See Mark 16:14; Luke 24:31,36; John 20:19,26. Some point to the fact that Jesus' burial wrappings were intact and conclude that Jesus passed through the garments and escaped the tomb without even rolling away the stone.

Response

But why attribute these abilities to Jesus body? Did not Jesus Himself possess these abilities before His death. How great a difference is there between disappearing and walking on water? A "transportation" may have happened to Philip in Acts 8:39,40.

Jesus statement in Luke 24:39 seems to directly state that His body is a normal, human body. There is nothing unusual about the body, nothing to indicate that it is now glorified. "See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself. Touch me, and see. For a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have."

The claim that Jesus was not recognizable because of the glorified body

See Luke 24:13-35, Mark 16:12,13.

Response: Luke 24:31" makes it clear that the lack of recognition was due to the disciples perception, not Jesus actual form.

The claim that it was not proper to touch Jesus' post-resurrection body

John 20:17 is taken to mean "You shouldn't (or can't) touch a glorified body." A better translation is "Do not cling to me."

Response: It is clear from Jesus post-resurrection appearances that Jesus both invited and encouraged touching his body to show that he was really alive.

There is good reason to think that Jesus was raised in exactly the same body that died on the cross, and appeared in that body over a forty-day period to show that He was, indeed, alive. His body was changed to its glorified form (most probably) at the ascension.

Conclusion: If the information we find in the N.T. is just generally reliable, and if we don’t make any unwarranted assumptions, there is very strong evidence that Jesus was raised from the dead. People have been convicted of murder on far less evidence. Jesus offered some extraordinary claims, but remember, He also offered some extraordinary evidence!