by

GF Herrin

The certainty of Jesus’ Resurrection is paramount to the Christian faith. Recent skeptic/philosopher’s attempts to explain away the greatest miracle ever by saying the resurrection must have been a spiritual, existential,  or hallucinatory experience that the disciples all went through.

False scholars such as Rudolf Bultmann, who suggests that the resurrection of Christ was invented by His disciples or Bart Ehrmann,who casts doubts on the Gospel accounts, try to make people doubt the literalness of Jesus’ rising from the dead.

Some lines of thoughts from skeptics go this way:
It is highly improbable for a miracle to occur.
Since it is highly improbable that miracles occur, they probably do not.
Since miracles do not occur, the Resurrection of Christ did not occur either.

This line of thinking completely throws away the rare occurrences when miracles actually DO occur.
Since some skeptic theologians cannot believe in supernatural events, they must explain away the Resurrection as some kind of spiritual awakening or a hallucination that the disciples must have experienced.
However, we know from the written accounts of the New Testaments that Jesus’ resurrection was not a dream or apparition.  It was a physical, real resurrection in Christ’s glorified body.

Paul writes, “For I delivered to you first of all that which I also received: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures, and that He was seen by Cephas, then by the twelve. After that He was seen by over five hundred brethren at once, of whom the greater part remain to the present, but some have fallen asleep. After that He was seen by James, then by all the apostles” (1 Cor. 15:3-7).

The fact that 500 people saw Christ in His resurrected body at once dispels any possibility of the sighting being some kind of hallucination. After all, how could 500 people experience the same hallucination at the same time?

Luke attests to the fact that Christ, in His Resurrection was not a ghost or spirit, but was physically real.

“’Behold My hands and My feet, that it is I Myself. Handle Me and see, for a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see I have.’ When He had said this, He showed them His hands and His feet. But while they still did not believe for joy, and marveled, He said to them, ‘Have you any food here?’So they gave Him a piece of a broiled fish and some honeycomb. And He took it and ate in their presence”(Luke 24: -39 – 43).

Jesus could not have eaten food if He had only been a spirit\.  Therefore, He must have been physically resurrected.  The New Testament text shows Jesus’ Resurrection was real not fake. The 12 disciples and the others who saw Christ were unique in that they alone knew whether or not Christ had appeared to them after His death on the cross. That they were willing to die painful and horrible deaths for proclaiming the Resurrected Christ speaks to the truth of the event.  It was physical, and personal and it showed that His sacrifice for our sins was accepted by God the Father and we can take comfort in knowing we who believe in Him will be resurrected one day, too.