➡ This text discusses the historical evidence supporting the resurrection of Jesus Christ. It mentions that many early Christians, including Jesus’s brother James, were willing to die for their belief in the resurrection, which they wouldn’t have done if they knew it was false. The text also talks about archaeological evidence that supports the accounts in the Bible, such as inscriptions from Pontius Pilate and the discovery of a stone ossuary bearing the name of Caiaphas. Finally, it emphasizes that the existence of the Christian church for 2000 years is a significant evidence of the resurrection.
➡ In the first and early second centuries, many people claimed to be the messiah, promising to free the Jewish people from Roman rule and bring about a world without death. The Romans would kill these self-proclaimed messiahs, which usually ended their movements. However, some Jews continued to believe in a man who had been crucified and buried, claiming he was the messiah because he had risen from the dead. This belief is the only explanation for the rise of the church, and it’s celebrated during the holy week in the Orthodox Church.

The Josephus text is much more credible, where he records the basic facts of the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth, including being crucified under Pontius Pilate, and then that there were reports that he had been, that he had appeared to many after being resurrected. So there’s a whole. Right, but there’s reports of Bigfoot. Joe Rogan has a fascinating conversation about the central claim of Christianity, the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

I’m Doctor Steve, your patron professor, and we’re going to see how the philosopher Stephen Meyer handled Rogan’s objections and how the historical record does, in fact, affirm that Christ is indeed risen. And the world has never been the same. But this is an extraordinary event. Right? You’re talking about a resurrection of a person who died and came back and was the son of God. This is a big claim.

It is a big claim. What historians must do is evaluate the reliability of historical testimony. If what’s coming is historical testimony, one piece of historical testimony that’s always been extremely compelling to me is the testimony of James, who is mentioned in the New Testament as one of the. The witnesses to whom Jesus appeared after the alleged resurrection event. He was also mentioned earlier in the New Testament as one of his brothers, or half brothers, depending on whether you’re a Protestant or a Catholic Christian.

How you view that? But he was mentioned as one of his own family members who did not accept his crazy, messianic claims, and he did not believe in him. But something changed James mind. We later find that he becomes the leader of the Jerusalem Christian Church, the early jewish believers in Jesus. And there’s. But we also then know from Josephus that James was stoned to death, martyred for his witness to.

To the resurrection. Now, there’s a kind of very simple argument, but it goes back to one of the early christian writers, Eusebius, saying that people will lie to get out of trouble. They do it all the time. We see it in our politics, but people don’t lie to get into trouble. We’re just assuming that they would let him lie or do anything to get out of trouble. There were many, many early Christians who died claiming to have seen the resurrected Jesus.

But in the case of James, we know that he expressed that testimony, and we know it from an external to the Bible source, namely Josephus. What do you think of. I think this is an example of. Okay, here’s an historical claim. How can we evaluate the reliability of that witness? People will give their lives for an abstract philosophy that they believe to be true. People do not give their lives for a factual claim that they know to be false.

Now, what Myers just said there was pretty compelling. What he basically said is that while it is true, people die for what they believe to be the truth, even though it turns out to be a lie. You’ll be hard pressed to find anyone who dies for a factual claim they know is false. Again, people die for causes that they believe in, that turn out to be false all the time.

But no one dies for what they know to be false. Or as Myers puts it, we liar. We lie to get out of trouble, we don’t lie to get in. Right? And this is the case for virtually all of Christ’s apostles. For the exception of the apostle John, virtually all of the apostles that traveled with Christ, that ate with Christ, that witnessed his arrest, his crucifixion, those very same apostles, every one of them died a martyr’s death.

They were themselves executed because they all affirmed for decades, decades after the fact that Christ bodily rose from the dead. He wasn’t a ghost, he wasn’t a spirit. They didn’t have a dream, they didn’t hallucinate. They, you know, they didn’t get the wrong grave, they didn’t steal the body and make the whole thing up again. None of that fits with the historical fact that every single one of the apostles, for the exception of John, were executed because they refused to back down from the central historical claim of Christianity.

Christ is risen from the dead. The five or six leading figures, most important figures in that trial narrative, which take up about a quarter to a third of the four gospels, have all been independently attested by archaeological inscriptions in the last 50 or 60 years. There were some construction workers working in Caesarea maritima in Israel. In 1960, Ish turned over a big slab of rock, and on the back was an inscription from Pontius Pilate, listing himself as the governor of Judea with a tribute to Tiberius Caesar.

Significant because in the gospels, the ministry of Jesus is reported to have occurred when Tiberius was the roman emperor, Pilate was the governor. And we know all about in the trial the key role that Pilate played recently. And what year was this attributed to? Well, it’s attributed to the period of time in which Tiberius was emperor. So I think that was 15 through 15 to 30. I can’t remember the end of his emperorship, but it’s the time mentioned in the New Testament as to when Jesus did his thing.

In Jerusalem, under the traditional site of the high priest, was discovered a stone ossuary bearing the name of Caiaphas. And Caiaphas ben Joseph on two sides of an ornately decorated ossuary containing the bones of someone who was reburied by this practice. Jews undertook during that unique period of time, from about 20 bc to the destruction of the temple. So you have multiple figures from that key event who have been independently attested and established in that time period.

Herod Antipas, we know from his coins and his building projects. Jesus himself, Peter Annas, the other high priest. So you have these multiple lines of external corroboration for this really important account, and then you have external sources like Josephus and Tacitus. So there’s a weight of external corroborating evidence supporting the historicity of these narratives. And that gives you, I think, a good reason to take the narrative seriously and to evaluate their other claims.

It’s in fact a level of corroboration that I think is almost unprecedented for any document that old. Hey gang, here’s your chance of getting even with Nancy Pelosi. You know that she and her ilk have been getting insider trading secrets for decades now, enabling their returns to beat the market every single year. But thanks to a little known SeC database, guess what? We can have access to the very same trading secrets that these politicians are privy to.

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But one of the key differences is that the God of the Bible is the God who reveals himself in history. So most other divine encounters are at the level of sort of the, the private psychological processes, the level of introspection and intuition. This is why meditation, more than prayer, is generally so important for eastern religions. But the God of the Bible is very different than this. He’s the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

He’s the God who rescues his people from the, from Egypt to the promised land. He’s the God, who’s revealed himself in the transformative life, death and resurrection of Christ. And because God is a God of history and not private introspection, he therefore yields a truth that’s every bit as objective as the historical events that truth is wedded to. Hence there is a distinctively christian relationship between history and truth.

And that ultimately is why we believe in the resurrection. The single greatest historical evidence for the resurrection for 2000 years has been the existence of the christian church itself. The christian church is God’s evidence par excellence of the cosmically transformative life, death and resurrection of Christ. And the reason for that is because of the jewish origins of the church and its messianic hope. The JEws in the first century look forward to the coming of one anointed by God.

That’s what Messiah means. That’s the Hebrew or Christos in the Greek. The jewish hope was that an anointed one of God, the mashiach, would come as the son of David and rescue the jewish people from the tyranny of the Romans, and that he would be utterly unbeatable, because his anointing from God had the power to conquer death. The ability of the Messiah to conquer death is central to first century messianic belief.

And this is where the jewish conception of the resurrection from the dead comes in and the ushering in of a new creation. So what we have to remember is that Jesus of Nazareth was not the only messiah in town. There were indeed a whole host of self proclaimed messiahs in the first and early second centuries that you can find online, such as Simon Bargira, Simon bar Kokhba. There were literally over a dozen that came in the first and early second centuries claiming to be the ones who would liberate the jewish people from the tyranny of the Romans and usher in a new creation where death is banished, death is gone.

And the Romans knew how to deal with these would be messiahs. They knew that messianic movements had a built in futility to them. All you had to do was kill off the Messiah. And in effect, by definition, you have discredited them. You have destroyed the messianic movement associated with that person. Because a dead messiah is a contradiction in terms. Do you see how important our historical understanding is here? And that pattern is repeated over and over again in history.

Once the Romans killed the would be Messiah, then if you were a jew, you either needed to find another messiah or you just forgot this whole messianic nonsense in the first place. So given that historical context, what then is the only possible explanation for why a number of first century Jews were running around declaring for all the world to hear, risking their own executions. What’s the only explanation for these guys running around and declaring that a crucified, dead and buried man was indeed the jewish messiah, the Christos, the Lord and savior of the cosmos? The only historically viable explanation for why a group of first century Jews would ascribe to a dead and buried man the title of Christ is what it’s the one they gave Christo Sinesti Christ is risen.

He rose again, and in rising again, not as a phantom or a ghost or mistaken identity, only as the true conqueror of death itself could there ever have been such a testimony given by so many Jews at that time. That is why there’s no possible historical explanation for the rise of the church, apart from the rising of Christ from the dead. If you’re in the Orthodox Church, this week is our holy week.

We’re preparing to celebrate that resurrection just a few days, and I pray a very special blessing for all of us this coming Pascha Christ is risen. He is risen indeed. Also, as many of you know, we have just unveiled our brand new Turley talks app, our very own platform that can never, ever be canceled. It’s a beautiful personal app that you can download completely free just by clicking on the link below or by going to fight dot turleytalks.

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