This question - "Is the Resurrection Believable" is the big one. If not, then Jesus was nothing more than a good guy who made people feel better, and then he died. Many years ago, I felt sorry for people who believed the resurrection - sort of had a pity for them. "I feel sorry for those people, so foolish to put their hope in a foolish fable." I was too smart, too intellectually astute to believe that kind of religious nonsense. Science and empiricism were my intellectual platform and philosophical rationalism was my theme. "Those poor (foolish) people." Then things happened for me that made me look deeper.
Question 1: Is the Bible reliable? The bible has multiple accounts of the resurrection of Jesus and many accounts of Jesus appearing after he was raised from the dead. CS Lewis, an Oxford don who was the world's leading expert in ancient literature, from mythology to philosophy had his own journey with the bible. A secular humanist, he thought it was all so much nonsense. Then he began to read it. That's almost always one of the big steps. He actually began to read it, vs. just hearing about it. After reading it and studying it, he came to say that the Bible is completely unique among ancient literature. It is not like any of the mythologies because it has repeated specificity in its narratives. Days, places, people, details - are all laid out there - written with congruence as multiple witnesses speak of the same things they observed. And then, he saw even more credibility because the testimonies have enough variation to be "the way human beings really tell it." Lewis who did not want to believe the Bible, came to believe it after studying it deeply. An ancient literature scholar.
Secondly, there is a vast science of studying the reliability of ancient literature called "textual criticism." Text criticism studies the number of copies of ancient documents, their dates of proximity from original writings and the agreement or variation of the copies from one another. The closer to the original dates, the better chance of accuracy. The more copies that agree, the better chance of reliability. Of all ancient literature - yes the stuff you read in school, from Chaucer to Babylonian texts, the Bible far exceeds any of these texts in reliability studies. The second closest is Homer's Illiad, and it's not very close. This means when you read the Bible you can have far greater confidence in it's reliability than in any other ancient literature. It's many hundreds of times more reliable than the Illiad.
Question 2: Is the supernatural possible? It's interesting to me how often people like to say they believe in the supernatural. They talk about angels and interventions and "coincidences." But when it comes to objective matters of the supernatural they retreat quickly from this possibility. This suggests that for most people the idea of the supernatural is "a fun idea on my own terms of things going my way" because of supernatural reasons. This makes the supernatural smaller than me. I get to play with it as I wish. But the resurrection is an objective supernatural event. It is outside of me, and this means it would have implications for me. This is where people tend to say "I don't want that kind of supernatural." But at the same time, they say things like, "I felt my mother's presence with me the other day - even though she died years ago."
Here's the bottom line. If there is a God who made all life, then we and all life are "under" Him. He is bigger. This means He can intervene if He wishes - though this is not His normal practice.
Question 3: The body of Jesus - how come it wasn't in the tomb? There are four possible explanations for this. 1. The Jewish leaders and council took it. The problem with this is that the Jewish leaders needed him to be dead more than any other group. If the body was missing, it would perpetuate the concept that he rose from the dead. The Jewish leaders would never have taken it. They wanted all of this to be over with and nothing would help that more than having a dead body in the tomb. 2. The Romans took it. This scenario has similar problems to #1. Jesus had developed quite a following and it was creating difficulty for the Romans. They too wanted him dead in a tomb. To remove the body would grow the possibility that He really was God's son and had power over the grave. The Romans wanted a dead body right where it was buried. 3. The Disciples took it. This doesn't work because the accounts testify that the Romans placed centurion guards at the tomb. The disciples wouldn't have been able to get through them. Secondly, most of the disciples gave their lives for the reality that Jesus was alive. Most were executed for testifying to the resurrection of Jesus. If they had taken the body, they would have known that he didn't actually rise from the dead. When the pressure got hot and they were going to be killed for it, if they knew they had pulled a hoax they wouldn't have died for it. THey would have said, "okay, okay - it was a hoax." 4. He wasn't really dead. This suggests that he was put in the tomb unconscious. The problem there was that he was "finished off for sure" by a roman spear, plunged into his side. His deadness, was next confirmed by Pilate who sent a guard to find out if he was really dead, because Pilate was surprised. The guard testified to Pilate that "yes, he was really dead." They were experts at crucifixions. Finally, if he were unconscious and then "came out of it" it would not be possible for Him to remove the stone from the tomb from the inside. Such stones were removable from the outside only and they weighed many hundreds of pounds.
Is the resurrection believable?
I used to think "those poor people, how can they believe that?" Then I examined it for myself instead of listening to what others had to say. And that has made all the difference.
