No other religion in history revolves around a single event the way Christianity revolves around the resurrection. It is a provable, testable event and is subject to all the power of archaeological, scientific and historical investigation. It either happened or it didn't.

In a previous article, we've established the authorship of the Gospels and shown that these men were first or second hand eyewitnesses to everything the accounts record. We've also established that the Gospels we have today have survived remarkably well so that we can be certain we know what was originally written. Finally, we established that the Gospels writers were not writing fiction, myth or legend. They intended their stories to be believed.

With all of the preliminaries out of the way, we can move onto the final piece of the puzzle. Were the Gospel writers telling the truth - did Jesus Christ rise from the dead? This is the key question in all of Christianity, for everything rests upon the fact of Christ's resurrection. If it happened, then all of Christianity is true and has profound meaning for all of us. If Jesus did not rise from the dead, then Christianity has no meaning at all.

Certainly, Jesus' disciples understood the importance of the resurrection. During the two days after Jesus' death, his disciples were distraught, disillusioned and ready to go their separate ways. They knew from ancient Jewish prophecy that the Messiah would not be taken by death, so Jesus' fate on the cross left them questioning everything they had previously believed. It was not until Jesus appeared to them in the flesh that the apostles got organized, motivated and began to preach the good news of the Gospel. They would all continue to do so until their deaths.

Jesus' Death On The Cross

The fact of Jesus' crucifixion is well recorded not only in the Bible but in ancient Jewish and Roman texts. It is not in doubt by virtually any modern scholar. But did He die? One explanation for the resurrection is that Jesus simply never died - that he survived the crucifixion and spent three days recovering in the tomb. There are several problems with this theory. First, we know that Jesus was flogged before he was crucified and we know from studying Roman history that this brutal process would have left Jesus extremely weakened and dehydrated. The amount of blood lost from this horrible torture would have caused Jesus to go into shock. Some people did not survive long after a flogging and it's possible that without intervention, Jesus would have died as a result of these wounds alone. Anyone who has seen the Passion of the Christ can understand how brutal this torture was. Then, if Jesus survived the crucifixion and faked His death on the cross, we know that a Roman soldier pierced his side with a spear before he was taken down. Then, without any medical intervention, he was placed inside a tomb where he fully recovered. The implausibility of this idea starts to become clear once we realize that during His many appearances, he walked with His disciples despite having had spikes driven through His feet days earlier. The final and most important reason we must reject this theory is that if Jesus did survive, He would have been weak, gaunt, bed-ridden and near-death. In this condition, Jesus could not have inspired his followers the way He did. Clearly from the accounts, we see that Jesus is alive, healthy, vibrant and active. Only in this condition could He have inspired his apostles to believe that he truly was the Son of God. If we are to believe all the historical account that Jesus was crucified, then we must accept that He was killed on the cross. Roman executioners performed thousands of crucifixions and were exceedingly good at their job, for they knew that a mistake could cost them their own lives. They would not have allowed someone to come down from the cross alive.

The Empty Tomb

With Jesus' death established, we turn to the empty tomb three days later. It is not in dispute that on the Sunday following His death, the tomb where He was laid was empty. Following the discovery of the empty tomb by Jesus' disciples, the Jewish leaders did not argue that the body was still there, rather, they accused His disciples of stealing the body. There were Roman soldiers guarding the tomb and the Jewish leaders accused the guards of falling asleep, permitting Jesus' followers to sneak off with the evidence. Never once is it recorded that anyone disputed the claim that the tomb was empty. Such a simple fact would have been easy to verify, yet all of the disagreement surrounds who took the body, not whether or not it remained in the tomb. Jesus Christ's body was nowhere to be found.

Did the Disciples Take the Body?

It was the consensus of the Jewish authorities at the time that the disciples took the body and non-Christians have been arguing this ever since. This theory becomes unsupportable once we look at evidence of the disciple's lives in the years following Jesus' death. Each and every one of them spent the rest of their lives preaching about Jesus amidst terrible persecution. Eventually, they were imprisoned, tortured and killed for their beliefs. How could it be that they would perpetrate a hoax and then face terrible persecution for their lie? The apostles had nothing to gain and everything to lose by telling this lie. If we want to believe that the disciples took the body, we have to believe that they all were willing to die for something they knew to be false.

You can point to other religious people who are willing to die for their beliefs, but the comparison does not stand up. For most of us, we accept what we believe by faith. We cannot know the truth for certain, yet our faith sustains us, even to the point of dying for what we believe. Conversely, early Christians watched Jesus die and then saw him in the flesh three days later. They knew it was true; it was not a matter of faith. If you want to believe the apostles lied, then to make a true comparison, you would need to find someone who knows their religion is false but is willing to sacrifice their lives anyway. The idea makes no sense. You can expect someone to die for something they believe is true, but you can't expect them to die for something they know is false.

Were the Gospel writers telling the truth? It's clear that the early Christians knew for a fact whether or not Jesus rose from the dead. They saw Him with their own eyes and they touched with their hands. Unlike any other religious claim in history, there is nothing about their belief which involved faith at any level. From their perspective, it's either a fact or it's a lie.

Based on what they saw, each and every one of them dedicated their lives and were willing to die to get the word out. Like no other story in history, the Gospel writers demonstrated by their sacrifice that what they saw and what they wrote was so important that they were willing to give everything, including their lives, so that the story would still be told two thousand years later.