Category: Resurrection

Hello everyone and welcome back to Deeper Waters where we are diving into the ocean of truth! I want to thank everyone for their kind support first off in the passing of my grandmother. Some of you might be first time readers and hopefully regular readers who heard me speak at the funeral. We welcome your prayers and donations.

I spoke at the funeral about the resurrection for my grandmother and so I’d like to start looking at that topic here. As I begin it, it occurs to me that the first place we go to to learn about resurrection is not ourselves but rather God. God who is life in Himself can grant life to anyone he desires to, even if that person has already lost it. We also look to Jesus to see what his resurrection tells us about ours.

At the funeral, the first item of business when I spoke on this was to establish a basic defense of the resurrection. I only had a few minutes so there was an emphasis on basis. Here, I no longer have just a few minutes so I’d like to expound on some of the points that I made.

1 Corinthians 15 was the text I used. Let’s look at the first two verses.

1 Now, brothers and sisters, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand. 2 By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain.

Note what the fact Paul wants them to keep in mind here is the gospel. This is central. If you do not hold to the gospel, then you are not saved. Your faith is in vain. It is no accident that Paul opens up the chapter on the resurrection with talking about the gospel. No resurrection means no gospel.

Now we come to a most important verse.

3 For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures,

Some of you might be thinking “There are several verses that say Christ died for our sins.” If that’s the case, you’re looking at the wrong part of the verse. I don’t deny that that is important, but for a textual critic and a NT historian, the words “What I received I passed on” are immensely valuable.

The following verses are seen to be part of an early Christian creed. While the letter of 1 Corinthians was written between 54-57 A.D., this material comes earlier. (It is amazing how many atheists I have dialogued with on this topic who when hearing that the material dates early think that seeing sources that say 1 Corinthians was written at the above date disproves my point.)

The letter is at that date as stated, but the letter contains this creedal statement that pre-dates it. The position I take on this is consistent across the board. Talk to atheists. Talk to Christians. Talk to Jews. Talk to conservatives. Talk to liberals. Scholars in the field of NT studies date this material early. The earliest I’ve seen is within five years of the “resurrection event.” (By resurrection event, I mean the event under question and at this time not stating it as a historical event but rather the time that is argued about as historical. That there was a claim of resurrection is historical certainly.) The earliest is within a few months.

How do we know? Receiving and passing on is what is used to speak of oral tradition. Greek scholars will also point to the rhythm of the text and how Paul uses terms he doesn’t normally use. Good commentaries on 1 Corinthians can explain more of these. You can also find relevant information in the works of Habermas and Licona.

Why date it early? Paul says he received it and thus, the material would pre-date him. Receiving would come from Jerusalem, the mother church, and that would mean receiving teaching from the apostles. We note the times that Paul went to Jerusalem and each time, he was checking on the gospel already. He was not receiving it.

Again, if you’re skeptical, don’t just check conservative Christians. Check others. The material is early. In ancient history, a time of five years at the most would be a blip. Most historians of ancient history would love to have accounts five years after the events.

What about content? Well we can start looking at the content tomorrow.

Hello everyone and welcome back to Deeper Waters where we are diving into the ocean of truth. We’re going to look today at a new book that has come out recently. This is at the suggestion of my friend Brian Auten of the Apologetics315 blogspot. That is an excellent blog I recommend you go to and its link can be found on the sidebar. The book is Mike Licona’s “The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach.” It can be purchased here.

I will also be reviewing this book for the Tekton Ticker eventually. This is a new blog of J.P. Holding that can be found on the sidebar. If I do a review for JPH there, it will not be found at Deeper Waters. However, I invite you to check regularly and see what work I have done and do go to Tektonics.org and subscribe to the newsletter and eblock.

Also, I’m going to state upfront an important possible bias that I wish to avoid. Mike Licona is someone I know quite well. Still, I seek to be as impartial as I can whenever I go through this work, but I will point out some things about Dr. Licona that I think should encourage you to purchase his book.

Dr. Licona is someone who takes his work seriously. He has wrestled with doubts and so wishes to make sure that he is in the right when he comes down on a position. He is also as many of you might know, the main student of Dr. Gary Habermas and following in his footsteps in resurrection studies. He has debated atheists like Richard Carrier and Bart Ehrman.

For these debates, he has prepared thoroughly, often several hours a week reviewing facts and traveling around the country in order to talk to people with areas of expertise in other fields. He has a singular devotion to the truth and to doing history right.

That’s something else I like from looking through this book. He gives out his method in step-by-step detail in describing the history of the event. I believe that as people come to read this book, that they will not only come to a knowledge of the truth of the resurrection, but the best way to arrive at that historically. They will learn to learn history the way a historian does.

This is also important today because the resurrection is the keystone of our faith. Paul told us that if Christ be not raised, we are still in our sins and our faith is in vain. If Christ is raised, everything else is different however. It means that God has spoken in space and time and has revealed Himself in His Son.

Over the next few weeks, I plan to go through this book and review it. The review will be found in full when it is done at the Tekton Ticker and I once again urge everyone to go and support my ministry partner as his ministry is one that you should be familiarizing yourself with.

For now, if you have the resources also, go to Amazon and pick up a copy of this book and learn to defend the resurrection and know why it matters.

Hello everyone and welcome back to Deeper Waters where we are diving into the ocean of truth. Lately, we’ve been covering the doctrine of God, but we’re going to take a break for today. Why? Because I’m going to be gone all this weekend so there won’t be another blog until Monday evening. As you should know, this weekend is Easter and so we are looking forward to celebrating the coming resurrection holiday, so why not write about what it means to me that the resurrection is coming? Before that however, I have my prayer requests. First off, I ask that you pray for my Christlikeness that I will give honor where honor is due and get my thought life under control. Second, I ask for prayers for my financial situation. Finally, I ask for prayers for a third related area in my life. For now, let’s get to the topic.

Dr. Habermas is most likely, and certainly in my mind, the leading defender of the resurrection today. A story that is well-known about him is the death of his first wife Debbie very suddenly to cancer. He tells of how his students would come to him and say “At times like this, aren’t you thankful for the resurrection?” He had to smile for two reasons. First, his students were using his own technique against him. Second, it worked.

The resurrection does make all the difference. As I write this, I have a grandmother who is very ill and I realize that because of the resurrection, any good-bye that takes place is only temporary. Ravi Zacharias has said that the line that brought about his conversion was the passage in the Bible where Jesus says “Because I live, you will live also.”

If Christ is not raised, we are still in our sins, true. We also have no hope for the future. It is most certainly that we should just eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die. However, it could even be asked “Why eat, drink, and be merry?” Such actions are merely a placebo to deny the ultimate reality. We don’t do them to celebrate life but we do them to forget life. We need to forget that there is nothing where we are going, the nihilistic worldview that Solomon was taking on in Ecclesiastes.

Because of the resurrection though, we have hope. Everything will be made right. Any pain we have will be redeemed to us. Any time taken from us will be restored to us. We have spoken of eternity lately and we will indeed get all of that time back and more. We have temporary pain here. We will have eternal joy and pleasures there. We will be in the fellowship of the God who loves us and sent his Son to save us.

Because of the resurrection, everything we go through here is ultimately worth it. It is not just rising to live again. It is rising to truly live for the first time. The life we have now will be but a shadow of the real life that awaits us. We will have life with God, life the way he designed us to have it, and anything that is his design will be good.

Happy Easter everyone! He is risen! He is risen indeed!

I hope everyone has had a blessed Easter and I hope we’re still getting readers that have joined in from the suggestion of Slipstream. That’s a ministry broadcast out of the U.K.. A link to their ministry can be found on the right side of this page. A number of other Christians have been following through with blogs on the resurrection. A list of them can be found on the blog from the Thursday before this blog.

Today, we talk about the resurrection.

He is risen!

He is risen indeed!

Slipstream invites all readers to go to their website to hear Gary Habermas give a talk on the resurrection. I encourage that as well and recommend his excellent website of www.GaryHabermas.com. For an excellent book on the topic, get the book he co-authored with Mike Licona called “The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus.” The book also comes with a game where you can quiz yourself on the material that you’ve read to see how much you’ve learned. 

The case for the resurrection today is focusing on the facts of the empty tomb and the resurrection appearances, both of which are attested to in the creed in 1 Cor. 15:3-8. Now some may say the empty tomb is not mentioned explicitly, yet to say that Jesus was buried and that he rose again would in the mind of a Jew imply an empty tomb. There was no concept of Jesus resurrecting and a body still being in that tomb.

The appearances point to the fact that the disciples claimed to have seen the resurrected Christ. Paul mentions that there were 500 who say him at one time. He’s practically telling the people that they can go and ask for themselves. The witnesses were there. The story would be well-known especially since this was an early Christian creed. It would be known who these witnesses were.

The appearance to Paul is quite important in that Paul was one who was a skeptic and went on to die for his faith. There is no reason why Paul would embrace a faith he sought to persecute unless he believed it was true for some reason and a stron g way he would have come about that conclusion is by having an appearance of Christ to him. Some attempts to explain away the conversion of Paul are quite hysterical, particularly one like Dan Barker who says that Paul might have been struck by lightning. 

The most noted attempt to explain the appearances is hallucination. Hallucination doesn’t work though as first off, they don’t explain the empty tomb. Second, people have to be in a suspectible state of mind to have hallucinations. The apostles were not. Third is the problem that if hallucinations had taken place, they would have been in Jesus in Abraham’s bosom or something like that. They would not have been hallucinations of a resurrection. Fourth is the problem of group hallucinations. That all of these people would hallucinate the same thing is extremely unlikely. 

Another case can be made based on who it was. The argument for the resurrection of Christ fits in with biblical prophecy and the claims of who Jesus was and one can build a whole doctrine of atonement around the resurrection. It is the missing piece that fills in the gaps in the puzzle.

This is why N.T. Wright believes the resurrection of Jesus Christ is the most likely explanation for all that followed and this can be seen in his work “The Resurrection of the Son of God.” If you want your PH.D. in the study of the resurrection, you need to go with that one. 

There’s something else about this creed in 1 Cor. 15. It can be dated to within one year of the events. This is a gold mine in ancient history. In that kind of study, we consider ourselves fortunate if we have an account just 100 years after the events took place. 

A lot of my readers are already Christians and I’ve pointed to the work of others for a lot of this as a single blog cannot go into all of this. Perchance later on I might do a series on the resurrection. I’d be amiss to not end this with the application of the resurrection truth.

I do not tend to be an emotional person. I would like to tell you that my life is filled with passion for Christ, but I would not say it is. A friend of mine pointed out to me recently that that’s not what really matters. What matters is how you act and not how you feel. There’s a lot of truth to that and we’ve easily confused the two.

There were times today though that I really did stop to think, “Yes. He is risen.” There are times I think that we have sadly heard the story so much all of our lives that the grandeur of it has not sunk in. Imagine if you lived right next door to a beautiful cathedral and you could walk outside and see it any time. You might be at a disadvantage compared to a tourist who can only see it when they travel a great distance and then feel blessed to be there.

I think we do that with the resurrection also. We’ve got so familiar with it that it doesn’t stun us as it should. We can hear about the resurrection but does it really sink in? As I ponder this, I think this is the problem a lot of marriages go through. Too many people in them don’t stop to remember the joy of their honeymoon and take for granted that they’ve got the other person. They seem to lose sight of the wonder that this person really is in their lives.

The resurrection should be something that stuns us. We must remember that death is a defeated foe. We do not say good-bye to loved ones in the Lord. We say “Until we meet again.” It’s only a temporary separation. It is not eternal.

It also doesn’t stop from us. Resurrection is not just of us. It’s resurrection cosmos. C.S. Lewis showed this well in the Chronicles of Narnia. When a deeper magic takes effect, even death itself will work backwards. We are not going to Eden though. We are bypassing Eden. We are getting something that will make Eden look paltry. 

The resurrection is good news. It is because of that that I believe we have hope in this world.

He is risen!

He is risen indeed!

Some of us have been working with the ministry of Slipstream this weekend. You can find a link to Slipstream on the side of my blog and you can find a list of fellow blogs participating on the blog post I made Thursday. Last night, I blogged on the crucifixion and how we call it “Good Friday.” Tonight, I’d like for us to think a bit about what that Saturday with Jesus in the tomb must have been like.

There are all these apostles and they had believed that Jesus was the Messiah. Their dreams had just been dashed to the ground. They may not have known much about the Messiah, but they surely knew that a Messiah would not be crucified. To be crucified was to be under the curse of God. Jesus had been making some unique claims. It would seem that those claims were false due to the treatment that he had.

But now they must be on the run somehow. It was bad enough that their Messiah had been crucified. They were the ones who had followed him. If the priests were looking for others who would be a threat after the movement Jesus had started in his 33 years, the apostles would have been next on the list.

They had left everything to follow him, so what did they have? Pretty much nothing. They would have been shamed by all their family and friends for being duped by a false Messiah. Not only that, all their hopes and dreams of Israel being freed from Roman power were gone as well. Their great light had died. He had spoken so well and worked so many miracles, that it would be a wonder to know exactly what was going on in their minds on that Sabbath Saturday.

Let’s not forget the women also. The women had been the financial contributors often of the ministry of Jesus and had been there for him. They were followers in many ways just as the men were, which was quite revolutionary in the time of Christ. Jesus had treated them the way no teacher ever had.

Yet they had watched him on the cross. They had seen his skin ripped off of him. His internal organs would have been exposed. They had seen him as the nails were driven into his wrists and his feet. They had watched him die on that cross. They had been there when he was buried. They were watching and seeing the stone be sealed shut on that tomb.

And seeing it be sealed shut on their hopes of him being the Messiah. The stone was as strong a “no” as you could possibly want.

What were they doing that day? It was a day of rest, so they wouldn’t be doing much. Where the apostles looking out the windows constantly behind locked doors wondering if Caiaphas would be coming by soon seeking to put to death the followers? Were the women being scolded by their husbands for being duped by a charlatan and giving so much of the money they had to him? 

What about the leading Jews on the Sanhedrin? Were they celebrating their victory? They had managed to not only put to death that wicked deceiver, but they had done so with the help of the crowd. Truly, they had been the saviors of Israel. Because of the action of crucifying a blasphemer, they had avoided bringing God’s judgment on their nation. Their future ancestors would look back and be thankful.

What about Pilate? He had heard and seen a number of things? There’s a legend that there’s a lake where one can see the spirit of Pilate still trying to wash his hands of the crime he committed. What was he thinking? Had he sold himself out to the Jews? What about his wife? She had told him to do nothing to that righteous man. What if he was a righteous man? What if he had put to death a righteous man?

We don’t know about that day. Nothing was written, but it is something worth speculating about. When we think of how dark that day must have been, we can see how wonderful things were when that day was reversed.

And that is our topic for tomorrow.

Good. What does the word mean? The word good in Aristotle referred to that which is desirable for its own sake. Ultimately, the true good for himw as happiness. We Christians locate that goodness in God. We have things that we consider good by their nature, but that is because they possess being and insofar as they are, they are good. For actions and events, we have a different criteria. For some reason, we call this day “Good Friday.”

Have you ever wondered about it?

Do we see Mormons celebrating the day that Joseph Smith was killed? Do we see Jews celebrating the day that Moses died? Do we see Muslims celebrating the day that Muhammad died? Do we see Buddhists celebrating the day that the Buddha died?

Yet we choose the day that our Lord died, and of course I know that he rose again, and we call that good. There is a lot in that statement. Tonight, let’s look at that.

I wish to remind everyone about Slipstream ministries, which can be found in the links section at the right, whose request on their podcast is responsible for my writing this series this Easter weekend instead of the usual Trinitarian study. It seems Deeper Waters has had more hits than usual and if you came from Slipstream or another blog that is doing this event, welcome aboard. I hope you enjoy what you read and I hope that you will stick around afterwards. Unless noted in advance, Deeper Waters will bring you a new blog every evening.

Good. Let us make it clear. I do not believe we are saying the death of the innocent Son of God in itself was good. It was a sinful act done by wicked men and as such it was not good. Does that mean it was not used for good? Of course it was! That’s the glory of God. He takes what is even meant to be used against him and uses it for his own glory.

What is good is that the ultimate act of evil really brought about the ultimate good. We have been blogging lately on the Trinity and I would like those of us who have been thinking Trinitarian to consider the way that we look at the cross in light of the claims of Christ. Either Jesus was claiming to be God and was not and considering the level at which he made the claims, it was then the most righteous act that could be done putting to death the most wicked blasphemer of all, or he was who he said he was, and then it was the most wicked act that could ever be done putting to death the only righteous one who ever lived.

No one leaves the cross neutral.

Why is this called Good Friday? It is because of the good that came out of it. It was the greatest good. God’s plan worked. He did it at the greatest cost possible. He did not use a created being, a mere tool to bring about man’s redemption, but rather he gave his only Son. 

In the Brothers Karamazov, the skeptic Ivan asks his brother, the religious one, Alexei, a question. If he could build a perfect world but know that in order to do that, he would have to make one innocent person suffer the worst pain possible, would he do such?

Apparently, God would and did, and he made it so it wasn’t one of us, but the Son took it on instead.

Look at the cross. It should have been you. It should have been me. This is one reason I’m hesitant to condemn my brother for his sins. I will condemn the sins, but even so, I will not do so with glee. My brother needs my encouragement to not walk that way again. I deserve the cross just as he does. 

Good Friday reminds us that God is in control. The crucifixion was not an accident. God knew it from all eternity. How does this work? I will not even claim to know. Eternity is such a mind-boggling concept, but I believe that that is true based on my philosophical ponderings and my exegesis of Scripture.

If God is in control, that also means redemption is not an accident. We are not a mere afterthought. We have always been there. I consider it a very orthodox statement that if God ceased to think about you, he would cease to exist as God. God knows all things at all times. That includes you. If he lost thought of you, then he would be temporal. Maybe an OVT can accept that. I cannot.

The main area that needs to be covered is how the followers of Christ handled this event when it happened. How would they have seen it? That will be our topic tomorrow.

Recently, I went to the apologetics315 blogspot to find some apologetics MP3s to listen to. While there, I got a link to a ministry in the U.K. called Slipstream where Gary Habermas was speaking on the resurrection. The request was that on Thursady, Christian bloggers should write on the resurrection. Well, it’s Easter weekend and we’re going to interrupt our current Trinity study to look at the resurrection. New readers of the blog are invited to stick around afterwards and continue diving with us into the deeper waters of the Christian faith. For now, here are the other blogs you can read that are to be writing about the resurrection.

gkcorner.blogspot.com/

Tonight readers, we are going to break out of the regular Trinitarian studies routine and look at a recent event. This would be a debate that took place between Mike Licona and Bart Ehrman with the question being “Did Jesus Rise From The Dead?” Mike Licona has the website www.risenjesus.com and is the author of “Paul Meets Muhammad” and co-author of “The Case For The Resurrection of Jesus” along with Gary Habermas. I believe Licona is on his way to becoming the next great authority on the resurrection.  Ehrman is the James A. Gray distiniguished professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has written numerous books including most recently, “Misquoting Jesus” and “Jesus Interrupted.”

These two met to debate the question. I have chosen tonight to write on my thoughts on the debate.

I have no doubt that both of these men possess great knowledge in the area of history. Naturally, readers do know that I agree with the outcome that Licona was supporting. That’s part of what made this a problem. The case was there but these two men were talking past each other.

To begin with, let’s look at the question. The question was not a historical question. It was a question about the nature of history.  I ask that you keep this in mind as we go through the review of the debate.

Mike Licona made his argument from basic facts that are practically universal amongst New Testament Scholars. The first is that Jesus was crucified and thus, dead afterwards. The second was the appearances to the disciples. The third was the appearance to Paul. Licona argued that based on these and the problem of hallucination theories, the best case to be found is the resurrection. It’s not ad hoc, it explains all the evidence, and the only extra ingredient needed is that God exists. For a fuller explanation of this argument, see the book, “The Case For The Resurrection of Jesus.”

Ehrman did not dispute these and in fact, does not. However, he came with the arguments that the gospels contradict themselves, they’re anonymous, and they’re dated late. He also threw out as an argument that the disciples were fishermen and so they wouldn’t be educated to write the fine Greek of the New Testament. The first problem is that not all of them were fishermen. In fact, Peter, James, and John were the only ones who were writers that I can think of that we know were fishermen. Matthew was a tax collector. He would have known how to fill out records in the appropriate language. As for Mark, I do not know for sure what he did so we cannot assume he was a fisherman. Luke is believed to have been a doctor and would have been familiar with reading and writing. As for fishermen, John’s family owned a fishing business and as a result, he would have been trained in reading and writing as well.

Licona rightly pointed out that we can talk about contradictions all we want, but that won’t change the facts that were presented. Often, this turns into a debate on inerrancy. Now I believe in inerrancy, but that is not what is necessary to show the resurrection of Christ. You can have the gospels simply be historical documents with basic reliability. For information countering Ehrman’s claims, I recommend going to www.tektonics.org and looking under the E section for Bart Ehrman.

Ehrman also asked why is it that Mike Licona started off as a Christian and then investigated and remained a Christian. It’s amusing Ehrman asks is that any shock while at the same time he says that he started off as a Christian and left the fold. What’s that to teach us? I’d say it means that there are often other factors. Ehrman contributes a lot of doubt to the problem of evil, for instance. Keep in mind other writers started off skeptics and became believers, such as Simon Greenleaf, author of “The Testimony of the Evangelists”, which can be read online. 

Ehrman stated repeatedly that if you posit God to explain the resurrection, you’re not doing history then. You’re doing theology. Ehrman had a problem with the idea of miracles saying that they were automatically the least probable event.

Ehrman also said that Jesus was crucified didn’t matter. He could have been stoned instead. In fact, it did matter. This was seen as the most shameful death of the time which fit the Israelite idea of “Cursed is anyone who dies on a tree.” Since Jesus died that kind of death, he would have been seen as under God’s curse. Yet this was a benchmark of the Christian message. 

Ehrman also said the appearance were really one event, yet said Paul’s case was more difficult to explain than that of the disciples’. Seems to me like that’s two events. One kind of event was an appearance to believers. Another kind of event was an appearance to skeptics. One wonders also about Ehrman’s request of “How did Paul know it was Jesus?” and his desire to throw out the idea “Don’t tell me God told him.” What’s wrong with that is that that is what Acts 9 says. The voice answered and said “I am Jesus.” It’s like saying, “I want to know what really happened, but don’t suggest the explanation the text gives.”

While Licona had the good information, Ehrman was wanting to try to get Licona to not do theology or philosophy at all, which was the problem. The whole debate had to have a philosophical underpinning to it. I believe Licona should have said “Yes. I am doing theology as well, but my theology is based on the historical evidence.”

During Q&A, it was rightly pointed out to Ehrman that the writers could have used scribes which would have answered the question on the Greek. Kudos goes to Dr. Thomas Howe who spoke of how in one of his books, Ehrman said that when a reader reads a text, they change the text. If that’s the case, how could we know what Ehrman wrote. Ehrman replied saying “I’ll e-mail you” to which the reply was “I’ll be reading that text also.”

My personal part in this was after the debate going to Ehrman and asking about his claim that history can’t tell us about acts of God. I asked if he could historically prove that. The reply was that history can only tell you what humans can do. (In reality, that would be false even on naturalistic premises. History can tell us about non-human characters like comets, the bubonic plague, animals, etc.) I asked “Can you historically prove that?” The answer was “No.” To which I just said, “Okay.” I believed the point was established. Ehrman wasn’t doing purely history either. No one was and no one could and one wishes Licona had brought in the context of the resurrection. This would include reasons for believing God exists, the fulfillment of OT prophecy, the hope of a Messiah, the systematic theology built up around the atonement and the concept of resurrection, etc.

Overall, it was good of Ehrman to come to an environment where he was definitely in the minority, and it made me think that many who were uninitiated in apologetics would have left a presentation like Ehrman’s skeptical. In this case, I am thankful for him. I would like him to create more skeptics. I mean that in the sense of I want people who are asking hard questions about the resurrection instead of those who are not growing in their faith. I would rather have a small number committed to the facts and able to present them than a thousand with a simple idea faith that has no backing to it.

Maybe, just maybe then, we’ll see the revolution we need in the church.