Three days ago people around the world celebrated Easter and the Christian claim to the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth from the dead. That resurrection claim stands at the center of perhaps the greatest collision of worldviews. The Christian belief in a God, spirit world, and the eternal life of the soul, crashes head-on with the materialist belief that Newtonian physics and molecular realities are the ultimate governing forces in the universe.

What are the consequences of these two diverging worldviews? The Apostle Paul asserted that without the resurrection of Jesus the Christian faith is worthless. The atheistic scientist believes that the resurrection is the final stages of fantasy leftover from a pre-modern world—flights into wishful thinking. The stakes in the games are high as we attempt to resolve the question, is the universe free from objective meaning, or is it a universe designed by a God who loves you enough to come back to rescue you?

Previously I’ve recommended Gregory A. Boyd and Paul Rhodes Eddy’s book Lord or Legend?  In Lord or Legend? they investigate the claim that the Christian community exaggerated Jesus into a legendary and god-like status through their oral transmission and writings. It’s a fascinating investigation into the first century Jewish context and the oral traditions that gave rise to the Jesus account.

In this article I’m pulling from Justin Bass’ book The Bedrock of Christianity. What do the latest findings in the historical data tell us about the resurrection? And what if we discounted all the evidence atheist and agnostic scholars didn’t agree upon. What are the unalterable facts we’d still be left to grapple with? Justin’s argument isn’t built on the inerrancy or the inspiration of the Bible. It’s built on the historical reality of a Jesus hanging on a brutal Roman cross and the extraordinary circumstances surrounding it. In this article we’ll have time to look at three out of the six facts Bass lays out in his book. Next week we’ll finish our exploration with the remaining three.

Fact #1 The Inexplicable Conversion of Saul of Tarsus

Saul of Tarsus, who studied under Rabbi Gamaliel, had a transformative encounter on the road to the city of Damascus only two to three years after Jesus’ death. This newly converted follower of Jesus left history with an abundance of trustworthy sources from which scholars can assemble a reliable picture of his beliefs and goals. These sources also give us a framework to understand the early Christian movement. This Saul, converted to Paul, speaks of his own history, conversion, and interaction with the first disciples and eye-witnesses to Jesus’ ministry. He and Peter, a disciple within Jesus’ inner circle, met each other somewhere between 33 CE and 38 CE—within five years of Jesus’ crucifixion. In his letter to the Galatians (1:18) Paul describes the fifteen days he and Peter spent together, an episode that is uncontested by scholars.

Paul, who initially believed Jesus to be a false prophet, wrote his first two letters (agreed upon by scholars to be authentically Paul’s) to the Galatians in 48 CE and the Thessalonians in 50/51 CE Remarkably, these were penned within twenty years of the death of Jesus. These letters demonstrate a fully formulated Christian theology that proclaimed Jesus to be the Son of God, Savior, and Lord of the world—the exact opposite of his initial convictions that this belief was blasphemous.

Fact #2 The Creedal Tradition of 1 Corinthians 15:3-7

Scholars are unanimous in believing that a creedal tradition found in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians originated prior to Paul and certainly within ten years of Jesus’ death. It is very likely Paul would have received this oral tradition during his fifteen days with Peter, and later with Jesus’ brother James (Galatians 1:19). That places the tradition within three to five years after the death of Jesus.

For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, 4 that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, 5 and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. 6 After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. 7 Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, 8 and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born. ~1 Corinthians 15:3-7

 N.T. Wright describes this formula, which Paul recites, as something the Corinthian church would have been entirely familiar with and would have accepted as the unalterable bedrock of the Christian community’s tradition. Bart Ehrman writes that if this tradition goes back to “before the time when Paul himself joined the movement around the year 33 CE, some three years after Jesus had died…it would be very ancient indeed! This passage almost certainly contains a pre-Pauline confession, or creed, of some kind.” Ehrman, How Jesus Became God, pg 138-139

The importance of the scholarly consensus agreeing to the veracity of this creedal relic cannot be overstated. It anchors the Christian tradition extremely early in history. Effectively, the entire belief system and theology of a dying and rising messiah fully materialized within three to five years of Jesus’ death. This leaves no room for the legendary inflation hypothesis in which the disheartened disciples had to reinvent the oral traditions of Jesus into mythological status to explain his Messianic importance after his untimely death.

Fact #3 The Crucifixion of Jesus

Both the creedal tradition and historical facts agree on the historicity of Jesus’ death by crucifixion—which took place under the governor Pontius Pilate during the reign of Tiberius Caesar. Neither Jesus’ friends, nor his detractors diverge from this narrative. John Dominic Crossan writes in his book Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, “That Jesus was crucified is as sure as anything historical can ever be.”

Of course Jesus’ death was attested to by the Apostle Paul and by all four gospel accounts. It was also confirmed by non-Christian sources: Josephus (Ant. 16.63-34), the Roman historian Tacitus (Annals 15.44), and Lucian of Samosata, who calls Jesus “that crucified sophist” (The Passing of Peregrinus, 11-13).

We have plenty of evidence to show that crucifixion was a contemporary form of capital punishment by the Roman empire. It was an impossibly barbarous and cruel way to prolong maximum suffering upon a person. Josephus retells of literally tens of thousands of Jews crucified after the second Jewish revolt. And archaeological evidence has demonstrated some of the various manners with which the Romans carried out this act.

Both Josephus and Philo of Alexandria testify that crucified Jews were often taken down and buried before sunset, in keeping with Mosaic Law. Remarkably, Philo even describes crucified Jews removed on the eve of a holiday such as Passover in order to secure the body for to the family for proper burial.

Conclusion:

The crucifixion of Jesus was an entirely plausible and well attested event. It is the claim of his resurrection that still bewilders us. The question we still have yet to answer is, what happened to Jesus’ body? As Justin Bass writes, “Was he left to be eaten by wild dogs? Or was he given a proper burial in a tomb on the eve of Passover?” That lingering mystery is where we will leave our conversation dangling for this week.  

So far we have heard the summary of how scholarship has affirmed the crucifixion of Jesus on a cross under the governor Pontius Pilate during the reign of Tiberius Caesar. Scholarship has also pinned down Christian tradition to a creedal statement originating from as early as three to five years after Jesus’ death on the cross. Additionally, within the first three years of Jesus’ death, we encounter a surprising Jewish convert who became a follower of “The Way” that he once considered blasphemous.

These are uncontested facts recognized by scholars with no religious persuasion. They are by no means all-encompassing or all-persuasive, but they begin to assemble an early footprint of Christian history that everyone recognizes. Next week we will investigate three more facts and what they mean for our understanding of the Christian claim of a resurrection. Is the Jesus of the Christian tradition a legendary status that fails to meet historical criteria, or did a phenomenal event transpire that demands a careful assessment of the Jesus story? Join us again next week for the conclusion. 

Tags: #resurrection #facts #jesus #death #burial #bedrock of christianity