2) Paul’s Damascus Road experience: Saul of Tarsus didn’t just have a hallucination. He was a hardened soldier of Yahweh, waging a Jihad against the Church. The point about seeing the resurrected Jesus was that he realised in an instant that all his theology had been wrong. For him, the crucifixion proved that Jesus could not be the Messiah. In the instant that he realised that God had raised Jesus from the dead, he understood that Judaism as he had known it had been superceded. This arch-Jew became the apostle to the Gentiles, arguing that Gentile converts need not become Jewish in order to become Christian. If this was merely a hallucination, it spawned the most radicall re-thinking of the Jewish faith that has been seen. This good Jew became Trinitarian — he worshipped the risen Christ. For a monotheistic Jew this would be anathema — his soul would be in mortal jeopardy. It needed more than a hallucination to sustain Paul in his faith in the resurrection of Jesus.

Shalom.

Lawrence

What I also find amazing, is what may be rightly considered as one of the dumbest lies ever.

After Jesus rose, the lie which was to be spread around was, ‘Say the disciples came and stole the body while you slept’ (I think it’s in Matt 28).

1. If that was the case, they would have been killed immediately for not doing their job properly.
2. How on earth could they state that the disciples stole the body if they were sleeping?

I do not find the rise of Christianity to be all that remarkable. I do find that Jesus was a remarkable individual. One who clearly had a following who believed strongly in his ideas and who were motivated to promote them. I believe many of them thought they actually saw Jesus, just as many people believe they see their deceased loved ones. I do not take the Gospel accounts of “the 500″ to be factual, but I do believe that some number of Jesus’ followers believed they saw him after his death. I know my own brother believes he saw my wife a few months after she died, and talked with her. It was enough to turn him to Christianity. (I believe Paul was moved in much the same way, except that he believed he saw Jesus.) I believe that he believes he saw her, but that it was an hallucination. As much as I have wanted to see her, I have not. My regular visits to her tomb are reminders that she “is still dead.”

I have not seen a comparison of the Messiahs of the couple of hundred years surrounding Jesus. I suspect that, if one were done, we would find that all the Messiahs except Jesus preached war … Jesus preached peace and sharing of goods and things that made people feel good … I believe that is a why a religion about him lived on.

I personally doubt that anyone ever asked to see the body of Jesus. I would expect that most folks know what happened to it. Then when some of those who loved him “saw him,” they thought they were seeing a spiritual body. Other people later called this a resurrection.

Anyway, I am rambling, and neither of us is going to convince the other to see this differently. I will continue my reading. My views may again change, someday, or they may not. At any rate, thank you for allowing me to lay out my thoughts. It has been a good exercise for me, and I appreciate hearing from you your points, and I also appreciate the sincerity of your beliefs.

I’m not sure what “extraordinary” evidence Crossan would be looking for.

I find the growth of the church to be pretty remarkable. In the face of death, after having just witnessed their leader brutally murdered… what caused the disciples to get back together and preach the resurrection of their leader even unto the point of martyrdom?

What caused Paul the Pharisee, three–four years after the crucifixion, to cease killing Christians and to become their most prominent defender and teacher?

(And again, what caused the Pharisees and the Romans to utterly fail in squelching the ragtag church? The church which had no wealth, no political power, no armies, and no reason on this earth why it should have had survived?)

Within seventy years after the resurrection of Jesus, the 27 books of the New Testament had been written — and within a hundred or so years after that, numerous illegitimate gospels sprung up, among other such things. The Christian movement had become an established presence within the Roman Empire, despite the grim end met by so many of their leaders. And by year 100, the Roman emperor Nerva ceased state-sanctioned persecution of the Christians.

To me, all of that is pretty remarkable.

My dad tells me that it is easy for myth to spread; and he’s pointed to the fact that within decades of the moon landing, a movement sprung up which still exists today that believes that the whole landing was staged.

And he’s absolutely correct; myth, especially when it can be wrapped up in an attractive package (people love to distrust their government), can spread easily.

The difference is that no one is threatening the conspiracy theorists with death. No one is crucifying them upside down, stoning them out of their cities (or to death), dragging them behind horses until dead, hanging them, beheading them, or any of the other fates early Christians were accustomed to.

The apostles eye-witnessed the death of Christ. When their heads were on the chopping block, there would have been no reason for them not to deny the resurrection of Christ if they knew for a fact it was a lie. People don’t die for what they know is a lie. Only when convinced that something is true would someone die for something.

And I find that remarkable.

The unlikely conversion of Paul, the growth of the church, its steadfastness against persecution… All of it leads me to believe that Paul knew what he was talking about when he argued the case of resurrection with the Corinthians.

I dislike relying on experience because experience can change, but at the same time I know that I believe because I have been given faith to believe.

Your honest searching of the matter shows that you are not nearly as hardened of heart as you could be, and I pray that while your heart is yet tender, you do find a sure faith in the risen Savior.

One last thing comes to mind: Occam’s razor. All other things being equal, the simplest explanation tends to be the best. First century history doesn’t record any denials that Jesus was crucified to death, and even several second century sources attest to a man called Jesus being crucified.

So which requires a more convoluted explanation: that the Romans and Pharisees did not produce the body of Christ because they could not produce the body [OR] the cowardly disciples who most of the time had no idea what Jesus was even talking about somehow managed to outwit the Pharisees and the Romans in order to preach a message of resurrection that they’d stick to even unto death [OR] some other equally convoluted conspiracy theory?

As I enter into the winter season of my life, this subject is of growing importance to me. For years I was a believer. Then, almost 8 years ago, my wife passed away. I knew of course that people die, and that life has to go on for their survivors, but it hit me very, very hard. My faith began to dwindle and then fall apart. I put it back together after a while, partly from reading scholarly works on the resurrection, but the reassembled did not last. Today I am still searching.

I recently finished reading a dialogue between the noted historians and theologians John Dominque Crossan and N.T. Wright. They presented differing views on the resurrection, with Wright defending the resurrection and Crossan saying that it did not occur. He pointed to such things as Paul not having mentioned the tomb in any of his epistles, with the empty tomb only being mentioned in the gospels, which were written a good bit later. (The implication is that the tomb stories were later embellishments. Paul’s material was pretty early after Jesus’ death, some 15–25 years, while the gospels were typical > 40 years after his death. Given the relatively short lifespans of people in those years, it is unlikely that the gospels were written by people living at the time that Jesus lived, or that they were read by people who had lived then.) He also noted that the typical fate for a crucified person was to be left on the cross to be eaten by wild animals, or to be thrown in a shallow grave with the same ultimate fate.

To me, Crossan’s version seems more reasonable. It seems to me that supporting a claim of an unnatural (supernatural) event, such as a resurrection, would require some pretty extraordinary evidence. That seems to me to be lacking.

At this late stage in my life, I find myself asking “do I want my grandkids to pray to someone who has been dead for 2,000 years?” At the same time, I ask “If Jesus really was resurrected, then I should lead my grandkids to follow him.”

So, to me, you are onto an important question. A very important one. But I do not believe that the answers are, by themselves, satisfactory. Perhaps it is only through the experience of Jesus that one can come to have confidence in the resurrection. I do not know, as that is an experience I do not feel. I thought I did at one time, but things change.

Thanks.