(quoting my stuff from another topic)

Since it’s just the resurrection, I’ll give you five pieces of circumstantial evidence that point to the resurrection of Jesus, and briefly delve into some detail on each of them. I’ll pretty much be quoting and paraphrasing the book here.

Exhibit 1 - The Disciples died for their beliefs.

When Jesus was crucified, his followers were discouraged and depressed. They no longer had confidence that Jesus had been sent by God, because they believed anyone crucified was accursed by God. They also had been taught that God would not let his Messiah suffer death. So they dispersed. The Jesus movement was all but stopped in its tracks.

Then, after a short period of time, we see them abandoining their occupatioins, regathering, and committing themselves to spreading a very specific message - that Jesus Christ was the Messiah of God who died on a cross, had returned to life, and was seen alive by them.

They were willing to spend the rest of their lives proclaiming this, without any payoff from a human point of view. It’s not as though there were a mansion awaiting them on the Mediterranean. They faced a life of hardship. They often went without food, slept exposed to the elements, were ridiculed, beaten, imprisoned, and finally, most of them were executed in torturous ways.

For what? For good intentions? No, because they were convinced beyond the shadow of a doubt that they had seen Jesus Christ alive from the dead. There is no other adequate explanation for the behavior demonstrated by the disciples. When you’ve got eleven credible people with no ulterior motives, with nothing to gain and a lot to lose, who all agree they observed something with their own eyes, you’ve got something that is hard to simply explain away.

People will die for their religious beliefs if they sincerely believe they’re true, but people won’t die for their religious beliefs if they know their beliefs are false. Sure, some Muslims are also willing to die for their beliefs, but they can never truly know if their belief is true or not. The Disciples on the other hand were willing to die for something they had seen with their own eyes and touched with their own hands.

Exhibit 2 - The Conversion of the Skeptics

Another piece of circumstantial evidence is that there were hardened skeptics who didn’t believe in Jesus before his crucifixion, and were to some degree dead-set against Christianity, who turned and adopted the Christian faith after Jesus’ death. There isn’t a good reason for this apart from them having experienced the resurrected Christ.

James, the brother of Jesus, for example was embaressed of Jesus. The gospels tell us that Jesus’ family was embarrassed by what he was claiming to be. They didn’t believe in him and even confronted him. In ancient Judaism, it was highly embarrassing for a rabbi’s family not to accept him. Therefore the gospel writers would have no motive for fabricating this skepticism if it weren’t true.

Later, the historian Josephus tells us that James, the brother of Jesus, who was the leader of the Jerusalem church, was stoned to death because of his belief in his brother. Why did his life change? Paul tells us, that the resurrected Jesus appeared to him. There’s no other explanation.

Paul is another example, as a Pharisee, he hated anything that disrupted the traditions of the Jewish people. To him, this new countermovement called Christianity would have been the height of disloyalty. In fact, he worked out his frustration by executing Christians when he had a chance. And then suddenly he not only eases off of Christians, but joins their movement!

Biblical scholars all agree that Paul wrote Galations, and in it, he explained what caused him to take a 180 degree turn and become the chief proponent of the Christian faith. By his own pen he says he saw the risen Christ and heard Christ appoint him to be one of his followers.

Exhibit 3 - Changes to Key Social Structures

In order to understand this category of proof, you need some background information. At the time of Jesus, the Jews had been persecuted for seven hundred years by the Babylonians, Assyrians, Persians, and now by the Greeks and the Romans. Many Jews had been scattered and lived as captives in these other nations.

However, we still see Jews today, but we don’t see Hittites, Perizzites, Ammonites, Assyrians, Persians, Babylonians, or other people groups who had been living in that time. Why? Because those people got captured by other nations, intermarried, and lost their national identity.

Why didn’t that happen to the Jews? Because the things that made the Jews, well, Jews - the social structures that gave them their national identity - were unbelievably important to them. The Jews would pass these structures down to their children, celebrated them in synagogue meetings every Sabbath, and reinforce them with their rituals, because they knew if they didn’t, there soon would be no Jews left. They ld be assimilated into the cultures that captured them.

Another reason that these social institutions were so important, is because the Jews believed that the institutions were entrusted to them by God. They believed that to abandon such things would be to risk their souls being damned to hell after death.

So up comes a rabbi named Jesus from a lower-class region. He teaches for three years, gathers a following of lower- and middle class people, gets in trouble with the authorities and gets crucified along with thirty thousand other Jewish men who are executed during this time period.

But five weeks after he’s crucified, over ten thousand Jews are following him and claiming that he is the initiator of a new religion. They’re even willing to give up or alter all five of the social institutions that they’ve been taught since childhood have great importance, both socially and theologically.

The change seen here is far from minor, it’s huge! To put it into the perspective of a modern peron’s mind, think of your most cherished belief. Is it that your parent are good people? That murder is immoral? Think about how radical something must be to get you to change or give up that belief - that’s how significant it was to the Jews of that day. Not just one or two either, entire communities of people abandoned their beliefs, even though they were jeopardizing their own well being, and damnation if they were wrong.

What’s more, they weren’t doing this because they had come upon better ideas. They were VERY content with the old traditions. They gave them up because they had seen miracles that they could not explain and that forced them to see the world another way. Traditions typically don’t matter much to us “Western Individualists”, but these people did value tradition. They lived in a period where the older something was, the better. In fact, for them the farther back they could trace an idea, the more likely it was to be true. so to come up with new ideas was the opposite of the way we are today.

These changes to the Jewish social structures were not just minor adjustments that were casually made, there were absolutely monumental. This was nothing short of a social earthquake, and earthquakes don’t happen without a cause.

Exhibit 4 - Communion and Baptism

(I’m going to simply write what is in the book verbatim here, this section is difficult to paraphrase, plus it’s short)

Moreland pointed to the emergence of the sacraments of Communion and baptism in the early church as more circumstantial evidence that the Resurrection is true. But I had some doubts.

“Isn’t it only natural that religions would create their own rituals and practices?” I asked. “All religions have them. So how does that prove anything about the Resurrection?”

“Ah, but let’s consider Communtion for a moment,” he replied. “What’s odd is that these early followers of Jesus didn’t get together to celebrate his teachings or how wonderful he was. They came together regularly to have a celebration meal for one reason: to remember that Jesus had been publicly slaughtered in a grotesque and humiliating way.”

“Think about this in modern terms. If a group of people loved John F. Kennedy, they might meet regularly to remember his confrontation with Russia, his promotion of civil rights, and his charismatic personality. But they’re not going to celebrate the fact that Lee Harvey Oswald murdered him!”

“However, that’s analogous to what these early Christians did. How do you explain that? I explain it this way: they realized that Jesus’ slaying was a necessary step to a much greater victory. His murder wasn’t the last word - the last word was that he had conquered death for all of us by rising from the dead. They celebrated his execution because they were convinced that they had seen him alive from the tomb.”

“What about baptisim?” I asked.

“The early church adopted a form of baptism from their Jewish upbringing, called proselyte baptism. When Gentiles wanted to take upon themselves the laws of Moses, the Jews would baptisze those Gentiles in the authority of the God of Israel. But in the New Testament, people were baptized in the name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit - which meant that they had elevated Jesus to the full status of God.”

“Not only that, but baptism was a celebration of the death of Jesus, just as Communion was. By going under the water, you’re celebrating his death, and by being brought out of the water, you’re celebrating the fact that Jesus was raised to newness of life.”

I interrupted by saying, “You’re assuming that these sacraments weren’t merely adopted from the so-called mystery religions.”

“And for good reasons,” Moreland replied. “First, there’s no hard evidence that any mystery religion believed in gods dying and rising, until after the New Testament period. So if there was any borrowing, they borrowed from Christianity.”

“Second, the practice of baptism came from Jewish customs, and the Jews were very much against allowing Gentile or Greek ideas to affect their worship. And third, these two sacraments can be dated back to the earliest Christian community - too early for the influence of any other religions to creep into the understanding of what Jesus’ death meant.”

Exhibit 5 - The Emergence of the Church

(I’m starting to get tired, but this section is short, so I’ll just direct quote it as well.)

Moreland prefaced this final point by saing, “When a major cultural shift takes place, historians always look for events that can explain it.”

“Yes, that makes sense,” I said.

“Okay, then let’s think about the start of the Christian church. There’s no question it began shortly after the death of Jesus and spread so rapidly that within a period of maybe twenty years it had even reached Caesar’s palace in Rome. Not only that, but this movement triumphed over a number of competeing ideologies and eventually overwhelmed the entire Roman empire.”

“Now, if you were a Martian looking down on the first century, would you think Christianity or the Roman Empire would survive? You probably wouldn’t put money on a ragtag group of people whose primary message was that a crucified carpenter from an obscure village had triumphed over the grave. Yet it was so successful that today we name our children Peter and Paul and our dogs Caesar and Nero!

“I like the way C. F. D. Moule, the Cambridge New Testament scholar, put it: ‘If the coming into existence of the Nazarenes, a phenomenon undeniably attested by the New Testament, rips a great hole in history, a hole the size and shape of Resurrection, what does the secular historian propose to stop it up with?’”

While this wasn’t Moreland’s strongest point, since other religious movements have popped up and spread too, circumstantial evidence doesn’t rely solely on the strength of one fact. Rather it’s the cumulative weight of several facts that together tip the scales toward a conclusion. And to Moreland, the conclusion is clear.

“Look,” he said, “if someone wants to consider this circumstantial evidence and reach the verdict that Jesus did not rise from the dead - fair enough. But they’ve got to offer an alternative explanation that is plausible for all five of these facts.

“Remember, there’s no doubt these facts are true; what’s in question is how to explain them. And I’ve never seen a better explanation than the Resurrection.”

I mentally played back the tape of circumstantial evidence: the willingness of the disciples to die for what they experienced; the revolutionized lives of skeptics like James and Saul; the radical changes in social structures cherished by Jews for centuries; the sudden appearance of Coummunion and baptism; and the amazing emergence and growth of the church.

Given all five uncontested facts, I had to agree with Moreland that the Resurrection, and only the Resurrection, makes sense of them all. No other explanantion comes close. And that’s just the indirect evidence. When I added the potent proof of the empty tomb of Jesus, and the convicing testimony about his post-Resurrection appearances, the case seemed conclusive.

That was also the assessment of Sir Lionel Luckhoo, the brilliant and savvy attorney whose asounding 245 consecutive murder acquittals earned him a place in The Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s most successful lawyer. Knighted wtice by Queen Elizabeth, this former justice and diplomat subjected the historical facts about the Resurrection to his own rigorous analysis for several years before declaring, “I say unequivocally that the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus Christ is so overwhelming that it compels acceptance by proof which leaves absolutely no room for doubt.”