Yesterday, Christians across the globe celebrated the resurrection of Jesus Christ on Easter Sunday.
Nonbelievers and skeptics reject this central claim, believing the bodily resurrection to be impossible or made up.
But the evidence for Christ’s supernatural arising from the dead goes well beyond the millions of people who celebrate it as the cornerstone of their faith. Historical evidence paints a compelling picture.
On this episode of “Relatable,” Allie Beth Stuckey speaks with Christian apologist Wes Huff about the strongest reasons to believe Jesus really rose from the dead.
Huff begins with the reliability of the Gospel accounts.
“It seems that the gospel authors get the details right — the small details, things like geography and name correlation and even plant life in some instances,” he notes, “and so if they get the small details right, I don’t think it’s that big of a leap to say that they get the big details right.”
He argues that the Gospels rest on early eyewitness testimony. The disciples were either “deceived,” “deceivers,” or “telling the truth.” Given the evidence, Huff believes they were telling the truth because what they experienced radically transformed them.
“When you start to stack up the evidence of what’s going on, I don’t think they were deceivers. I don’t think they were deceived. And I do think that everything points to their life radically changing in a powerful way because they encountered their rabbi getting murdered and then rising from the dead,” he tells Allie.
The disciples were so profoundly transformed by what they had experienced, in fact, that they returned boldly to Jerusalem — the very city where Jesus was crucified — to proclaim the gospel, fully aware of the deadly risks they faced. Even after the martyrdom of Stephen served as a “warning shot,” they went back to “ground zero” and kept preaching.
“Jesus truly died. That’s a historical fact. … And then he appears to his disciples alive again. That’s a historical question: Dead, buried … seen alive. What do we do with that? How do we answer that historically? And I think there needs to be given an account for the disciples’ actions afterwards. They saw something, and it completely, radically changed their world,” says Huff.
He then addresses the “swoon theory” skeptics, who argue that Jesus was placed in the tomb badly wounded but not actually dead.
“If there’s one thing that the Romans were really good at. It was crucifixion — and making sure that people suffer and die,” Allie says.
“Every Roman guard, centurion, soldier who was responsible for Jesus’ death would have been on the hook if he did not die, and their lives would have been forfeit,” Huff agrees.
To hear more, watch the video above.
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