Did Jesus Really Rise from the Dead?

If you were watching TV in 1955, chances are that you remember the most popular show of the year. It was called the $64,000 Question. It was a quiz show, hosted by Hal March. It offered contestants the opportunity to win incredible sums of money by answering complex questions on whatever subject they professed to be experts in.

The questions would get harder and harder, and the cash prizes would get larger and larger until finally, they reached the $64,000 question level.

When it comes to Christianity, the $64,000 question is this: Did Jesus really rise from the dead? If he did, then Christianity has something that no other religion can claim: a founder who is alive today, a leader who actually conquered death. But if Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, then Christianity is nothing more than a myth; the wishful thinking of people who call themselves Christians.

If Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, then the Christian faith is meaningless. The Apostle Paul recognized this when he wrote in 1 Corinthians 15:14 “And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith.” Christianity stands or falls on whether or not the tomb of Jesus Christ is really empty.

Christians, from the year 30 A.D. right up to the present, have claimed that that tomb is empty. The New Testament documents, on which Christianity is founded, claim that the tomb is empty. If someone wanted to demolish those claims, if someone wanted to disprove Christianity, all he would have to do is prove that Jesus’ tomb is not empty.

And that, in fact, is what many people have tried to do. In answer to the Christian claim that Jesus Christ rose from the dead, they have put forward other, supposedly more reasonable explanations for the empty tomb. This morning I want to examine with you the four most common explanations they have proposed.

What are the answers that the skeptics of Christianity have given to the $64,000 question: Did Jesus really rise from the dead?

Answer 1:

Jesus did not rise from the dead. The disciples who claimed to have seen him were simply seeing things. They were having hallucinations. They wanted so badly for the Resurrection to be true that they simply imagined that they saw Jesus alive after his burial.

Incidentally, a book was written a couple of years ago suggesting that Christianity originated from the teaching of early Christians, who used to eat psychedelic mushrooms and have strange visions and hallucinations.

If only we could have taken those early Christians to a good psychiatrist, he would have helped them to get over their extreme disappointment over the loss of their leader. Then we wouldn’t have had all this silly nonsense about Jesus having risen from the dead.

Well, that’s an interesting theory. However, there are some problems with it.

The first problem is that people simply do not share hallucinations. There is no such thing as a mass hallucination. Psychologist Heinrich Kleurer, in a book entitled The Psychology of Perception states that hallucinatory phenomena are unique to the individual.

The only constant about hallucinations is their variability from person to person. It simply isn’t possible for even two individuals to have the same hallucination, let alone more than 500, which is how many people the NT tells us saw Jesus after his death.

Secondly, hallucinations tend to occur in people who have a strong desire to see something, or someone. Their subconscious is elevated to a high degree of expectancy and hope. This is why a man who is starving to death begins to hallucinate and dream about food. The wish becomes the father of the thought.

But when you read the NT, you realize that the disciples of Jesus were not expecting Jesus to rise from the dead. Far from it. Their hopes of ever seeing him again had been dashed. As far as they were concerned, it was all over.

On Easter Sunday morning, Mary Magdalene and the other women came to the tomb with spices to anoint a dead body, not with incense to worship a risen Lord. The last thing they were expecting was to see Jesus alive.

And when they found the tomb empty and ran back to Jerusalem to tell the other disciples, those disciples didn’t believe them. And then when those disciples told Thomas about it, he didn’t believe them.

All the way through the Resurrection story, there is this undercurrent of skepticism and doubt on the part of the disciples. They were not the easily persuaded converts of wishful thinking. Quite the contrary - their persuasion had to struggle over barricades of doubt and disbelief until finally, the facts were so overwhelming that they had no alternative but to believe.

So the hallucination explanation simply doesn’t work. Because these were not the kind of people who were in a hallucinatory state of mind. They were down-to-earth realists, like the people from the State of Missouri who say “Show me.”

Answer 2:

Jesus did not rise from the dead. What really happened on Easter Sunday morning was that the women, and then everyone else after them, went to the wrong tomb. Had they gone to the right tomb, where Jesus was in fact buried, they would have found his body still there.

But, knowing how women often get their directions mixed up, they went to the wrong tomb - an empty tomb - and started this wild rumor about Jesus having risen from the dead.

I feel as though I need to apologize to the ladies for this explanation, because I smell more than a whiff of male chauvinism in it! It is patronizing and condescending, to say the least.

The problems with this view are pretty obvious, beginning with the fact that the Bible tells us that the women knew very well where the right tomb was.

Matthew 27:59 Joseph took the body, wrapped it in a clean linen cloth, and placed it in his own new tomb that he had cut out of the rock. He rolled a big stone in front of the entrance to the tomb and went away. Mary Magdalene and the other Mary were sitting there opposite the tomb.

The women watched as his body was hastily prepared for burial; they watched as it was placed in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, and they took careful note of the location, because they intended to return on Sunday morning to complete the embalming of Jesus’ body. (Joseph and Nicodemus had only done a hasty job, since sundown was approaching, and the Sabbath was about to begin.)

These women knew precisely where Jesus’ body lay. To say otherwise is an insult to them, and to all women everywhere.

But suppose, just suppose, that the women did go to the wrong tomb and then start this incredible rumor. Would not Joseph of Arimathea have put a stop to it? Would not he have known where his own tomb was located?

And furthermore, would not the enemies of Jesus, the very men who had put him to death, have known where his body lay? After all, they had stationed a guard there to watch over the tomb.

If the disciples had started spreading a false rumor around Jerusalem about Jesus rising from the dead, what would Jesus’ enemies have done? They would have gone to the right tomb, hauled out Jesus’ corpse, put it on a cart and paraded it through the center of Jerusalem. And that would have been the end of that.

Which raises a good question: Why didn’t they do that? Well, the answer is that they apparently didn’t have the body. But why not? Because…

Answer 3:

The disciples had stolen Jesus’ body. They somehow managed to sneak past the guards, roll the rock away, enter the tomb, drag Jesus’ body out, and hide it somewhere else. Then they started preaching that Jesus Christ was alive.

If the last explanation was insulting to women, this one is insulting to all Christians everywhere, because it makes the root of Christianity out to be a deliberate deception - the biggest hoax in history. In other words, the disciples knew that Jesus was dead, but they lied through their teeth that he was alive.

This is actually the oldest explanation of all, because it got started on Easter Sunday morning. In fact, you might say that it got started the day before that. The chief priests and Pharisees suspected that this very thing might happen. That’s why they went to Pilate and requested that a guard be placed over the tomb.

Matthew 27:63-64 “Sir,” they said, “we remember that while he was still alive that deceiver said, ‘After three days I will rise again.’ So give the order for the tomb to be made secure until the third day. Otherwise, his disciples may come and steal the body and tell the people that he has been raised from the dead. This last deception will be worse than the first.”

So Pilate gave them their guard, and that should have been the end of the story. But the whole thing came unraveled anyway. On Sunday morning, to the utter frustration of the chief priests and Pharisees, the tomb turned up empty. How to explain it?

Well, the only way they knew how to explain it was to fall back on their original hypothesis that the disciples had stolen the body. But what about the guards?

Ah, what about the guards! It seems that the guards had come to the Pharisees early on Sunday morning babbling an unbelievable story about an earthquake at the tomb, and angels rolling the stone away.

Rather than take this report at face value, here is what the chief priests did:

Matthew 28:12 When the chief priests had met with the elders and devised a plan, they gave the soldiers a large sum of money, telling them, “You are to say, ‘His disciples came during the night and stole him away while we were asleep.’ If this report gets to the governor, we will satisfy him and keep you out of trouble.” So the soldiers took the money and did as they were instructed. And this story has been widely circulated among the Jews to this very day.

Are there any problems with this explanation? There most certainly are. To begin with: How can a person who is asleep tell you what happened while he was sleeping?

Secondly: No Roman soldier in his right mind is going to tell people that he was asleep while on guard duty, because sleeping on watch was a crime punishable by death. Maybe that’s why they had to give these soldiers a large sum of money. They had to swallow their professional pride and put their necks on the line for it.

Thirdly: If the guards were not, in fact, asleep, then there are only two alternatives: either the disciples had to have come and attacked, and overpowered them, or else something supernatural happened to get Jesus body out of the tomb. Because you have to account for the fact that the tomb was empty. Even the chief priests were ready to concede that.

Now the idea of the disciples launching a sneak attack on the guards is a pretty flimsy scenario. For one thing, the disciples were in no frame of mind to mix it up with the authorities. They were running scared. They were scattered and disorganized. They were trembling in fear that they were going to be arrested next.

Furthermore, these fishermen would have been up against professional soldiers. What were they going to do: throw fishnets over them? Hit them with boat oars, maybe? No, the whole idea is ludicrous.

But I haven’t even mentioned the biggest problem with this whole idea of a stolen body. If the disciples did in fact steal Jesus body, then they knew, beyond the shadow of a doubt that he was dead. They had to form a conspiracy to keep that fact a secret.

Then, they had to go out and start preaching a lie: that Jesus Christ was alive. And, here’s the kicker: They had to be willing to die for what they knew was really a lie. Eleven out of the twelve apostles died martyr’s deaths because of the fact that they had taught and preached that Jesus was alive.

I ask you: is it consistent with human nature to suppose that these men would be willing to die for something they knew wasn’t true? Don’t you think that one of them, facing the executioner, feeling the flames at his feet, hearing the hungry lions roar in the Coliseum, would have cracked and confessed the truth? But none of them did. They went to their deaths with their heads held high, because they knew it wasn’t a lie.

Answer 4:

Jesus didn’t really die. Everybody thought he died, but he really just went into a coma. They took him down off the cross, wrapped him up in the burial clothes, and placed him in the tomb, where sometime over the next couple of days, he revived.

Let’s look at this idea more closely. In order to believe this explanation, we must accept that Jesus survive the acute physical trauma of a Roman scourging followed by a crucifixion.

Then we must accept that his executioners, men who were proficient in their business and who had seen countless victims crucified, made a mistake. They mistook him for dead when he really wasn’t. The centurion testified to the governor, Pontius Pilate, that Jesus was dead. But he was wrong; Jesus still had a pulse. He still was breathing.

He survived a spear thrust into his side, causing a substantial loss of blood. He survived being completely wrapped with tightly wound strips of linen cloth. He survived having 75 pounds of a gummy mixture of myrrh and aloes smeared over that cloth, creating a hardened coating like a mummy. (And, by the way, Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus didn’t happen to notice that he was alive while they were embalming him, either.)

He survived 36 hours, unattended, in a cold, dark, damp, rock-hewn tomb. (I have been in such tombs in the Holy Land, and I can personally vouch for the fact that they are cold and damp, especially at this time of year.)

We must accept that, after going through this kind of physical ordeal, Jesus somehow resuscitated there in the tomb. His strength came back to him to the point where he was able to extricate himself from those yards of grave clothes - a escapist feat that would do the great Houdini proud.

Then he somehow got up the strength to roll away the great stone covering the entrance to the tomb. (This, by the way, from a man who was too weak to carry his own cross to the site of the crucifixion.)

He must have done all this without attracting the attention of the soldiers guarding the tomb, otherwise he would have had to engage in hand to hand combat with them in order to escape.

Then, Jesus would have had to find his disciples in Jerusalem, and present himself to them in such obvious and vigorous good health that they would assume that he had risen from the dead a new man!

Frankly, this explanation is utterly absurd. It takes more faith to believe that than to believe that Jesus rose from the dead.

There is no doubt that Jesus really died on the cross. Crucifixion is invariably fatal. The Romans intended that it should be. The Journal of the American Medical Association confirmed that from a modern medical standpoint in an article in their March 21, 1986 issue, entitled On the Physical Death of Jesus Christ. Let me quote to you the concluding paragraph:

It remains unsettled whether Jesus died of cardiac rupture or of cardiorespiratory failure. However, the important feature may be not how he died but rather whether he died. Clearly, the weight of historical evidence indicates that Jesus was dead before the wound to his side was inflicted and supports the traditional view that the spear, thrust between his right ribs, probably perforated not only the right lung but also the pericardium and heart and thereby ensured his death. Accordingly, interpretations based on the assumption that Jesus did not die on the cross appear to be at odds with modern medical knowledge.

We have looked today at four major attempts to explain away the resurrection:

1. The disciples were hallucinating

2. The women went to the wrong tomb

3. The disciples stole the body

4. Jesus did not actually die on the cross

Each of these explanations has so many difficulties and inconsistencies that it actually takes more faith to believe any one of them than it does to accept the fifth explanation - the explanation that the Bible itself gives for the empty tomb.

“He is not here. He is risen just as He said.”

If this is so, and I believe that it is, then that means that Jesus really is who He said He was. That He did what He said He would do. That when He died on the cross, He was dying for you and me. And now He lives to be the Lord of our lives.

You can disregard Christianity if you want to. But to do so, you have to ignore the fact of the empty tomb and the risen Lord.

Do you know him? Have you accepted Him as your Savior? You’ve heard the facts today, now it’s up to you to believe them.