The Resurrection of Jesus

The Resurrection of Jesus the Christ
As taught to me by Dr. Gene Scott every year for years in Los Angeles. The difference between Jesus and all other religious figures is the resurrection. Jesus can't be compared to any other person who started a religion or philosophy because of the resurrection. Mohammed never said he was going to rise from the dead. Buddha never said he would rise from the dead. Confucius never said he would rise from the dead. John Smith never even made that one up. Jesus said He was perfect, without sin. Jesus said He would die, a ransom for the world. Jesus said He would rise again. Anyone making that claim is one of three possibilities: He is crazy, he is a liar, or He is the Son of God. The resurrection is the difference and the proof.
As Gene Scott taught there are eight theories to disprove the resurrection.
Theory 1 . The disciples stole the body.
Theory 2 . The Jewish leaders stole the body.
Theory 3 . The Roman leaders stole the body.
Theory 4 . The women, in their grief, went to the wrong tomb.
Theory 5 . It was all hallucinations. They believed it but they had mass hallucinations.
Theory 6 . Resuscitation theory. He was dead but revived in the coolness of the tomb.
Theory 7 . The disciples lied.
Theory 8 . It's all true.
All these theories come down to two options:
Option 1 . The disciples lied.
They stole the body, (Theory 1), then they obviously lied (Theory 7).
The Jewish leaders stole the body (Theory 2)? This only explains the empty tomb. The disciples preached a walking, talking Jesus who then ascended into heaven. So they still are lying.
The Roman leaders took the body (Theory 3)? Again, the disciples are lying.
The women went to the wrong tomb (Theory 4)? The Jewish leaders and the disciples would have gone to the right tomb and found the body. Still, the disciples are liars when you consider the ascension.
Hallucinations (Theory 5)? If they hallucinated the whole thing, somebody would have gone to the tomb and found the body. So they still had to steal the body and lie about it.
Resuscitation (Theory 6)? Jesus waking up in the tomb after a failed crucifixion,
doesn't explain the ascension story, so the disciples lied.
Option 2 . The disciples reported honestly what they saw.
This leads you to Dr. Gene Scott's 4 reasons that they were telling the truth.
Reason 1 . Cataclysmic change for the better on the part of the witnesses.
Everybody agrees Peter was unstable, and with a group he could not be counted on to stand. He fled in fear and he denied his Lord; he was always in trouble because of his instability. After the resurrection, he is the man that preaches to a mocking mob, he fulfills his destiny to become the Rock, he dies with courage requesting that he be turned upside down because he is not worthy to die in the position of his Master. A cataclysmic change that can be identified to a point in history, and that point in history is where they began to tell this story of the resurrection.
John? He was one of the brothers called "Sons of Thunder." He wanted to call fire down from heaven on everyone that opposed him. He and his brother used their mother to seek the best seat in the kingdom. After they began to tell the story of the resurrection, John was a changed man. Instead of a "Son of Thunder," he's almost wimpish in his never failing expression of love. He is known as the "Apostle of Love", a cataclysmic change for the better.
Thomas is consistently a doubter. He's a realist; he questions everything. When Jesus is going to go through Samaria and faces death, and tells His disciples about it, Thomas then says, "Let us also go, that we may die with Him." That's courage, but he thought Jesus would actually die; that's a humanistic view. When Jesus is discussing going away, building mansions in heaven, says "Whither I go ye know, and the way ye know," all the rest of them are surely shouting about the mansions. Thomas is listening to every word. He says "We don't know where you are going; how can we know the way?" Now that's a consistent thumb-nail sketch of a personality trait. Who is it that's doubting when the resurrection comes? Same guy. "I won't believe 'till I touch Him, put my hands in the marks of death." The moment arrives. Jesus is there and says to Thomas, "Behold my hands and my side." Jesus says, "It is more blessed to believe without seeing." That is an axiomatic truth, but He did not condemn Thomas. He just stated that fact, and then He offered to submit to the test, which is what we are doing right now. He said, "Behold my hands and my side." And Thomas cried, "My Lord and my God." It is significant that in the most philosophic area of the world, where the Vedanta philosophies have produced Buddhism and the Eastern religions that flow out of it, it is Thomas that pierces the Himalayas to die a martyr near Madras, India, to be the herald of faith in the most challenging philosophic area of the world at that time, and never again does he waver an instant in faith - a total change from consistent doubter to an unwavering "faither."
Now you can say, a crisis will change people, but a lie will seldom change people for the better; I don't think that telling a lie would do that.
There are indirect evidences of truth. Mark wrote to Gentiles; you can count it in Mark's Gospel, he has Christ referring to Himself as "Son of Man" more often than any other Gospel. Count it yourself. Now if he was a liar, knew he was lying, trying to perpetrate a fraud, why would he have Jesus refer to Himself with a phrase that suggest humanity when his purpose is to try to represent Jesus as the Son of God? If he's a liar, he'd just have Jesus refer to Himself as the Son of God. But ironically, as God's little hidden evidences of honesty, in Mark's Gospel, written to Gentiles, designed to prove that Jesus was the Son of God, he had Jesus refer to Himself as the "Son of Man" more than any other Gospel.
Now, Jesus did refer to Himself as the "Son of Man" because Jesus was preaching to a Hebrew audience that read the book of Enoch and read the Book of Daniel where "Son of Man" was a messianic picture of coming in clouds of glory to set up His kingdom. So it's quite proper For Jesus to refer to Himself as the "Son of Man" in a messiah mentality, but if you are writing to Gentiles who don't know anything about the Old Testament, and trying to perpetrate a lie that Jesus is the Son of God, unless you're basically honest and telling the truth, you wouldn't have Jesus say "Son of Man" as often. Why not change what He said to serve your purpose? Inherent honesty. I could give you a dozen of those, but that is what historians call indirect evidence of honesty.
Reason 2 . Internal consistencies.
The fact that the disciples waited seven weeks is used by those who say they were lying as the time needed for them to cook up the lie. If they are smart enough to tell a lie of this nature, my judgment is, they would have figured that out. They waited seven weeks because Jesus told them to wait. That's the action of honest men, even though waiting that long hurts their story. If they were going to make up a lie.
Reason 3 . Price paid.
You don't pay the price these men paid to tell a lie. All of them, save John, died a martyr's death: Bartholemew flayed to death with a whip in Armenia; Thomas pierced with a Brahmin sword; Peter crucified upside down, St. Andrew crucified on St. Andrew's cross (from which it gets its name); Luke hanged by idolatrous priests, Mark dragged to death in the streets of Alexandria. These men paid beyond human belief for their "lie."
Reason 4 . They died alone.
St. Thomas Aquinas' greatest proof of the veracity of the disciples and the resurrection is that they died alone. Now, you can conceive of a group of men trying to save face, telling a story, having bet on the wrong man, crushed by His failure (as they would view it), trying to resurrect Him with a lie.
You can conceive of them staying together and group pressure holding together the consistencies of their lie, because they don't want to be the first one to break faith and rat on the others and collapse the whole thing. You don't have television, you don't have satellite, you don't have email, you don't have cell phones with cameras, and as long as you stay together under great pressure, you don't want to let the others down.
But now separate you, Bartholemew in Armenia, Thomas over in India, Peter in Rome. You have lost contact with each other. You can't pick up a phone and call anybody; nobody knows where you are, and since you know you are telling a lie and you don't really expect the generations forever to believe it, and you are being literally flayed to death, that is, skinned with a whip, your skin peeled off of you, all you have to do to get out is say, "It's a lie," and "Forgive me, I'm leaving town."
Thomas wouldn't know it; Peter wouldn't know it. The next time you see them you could say "Boy, I really tore them up in Armenia. I told the story, and nobody could forget it the way I told it." They wouldn't know you lied. Thomas is going to be pierced with a sword in India; you are never going to see these people again. All you have to do to get out of the pressure is say "It's a lie."
Peter is in Rome; a little more exposed, but with his life at stake, all you have to say is, "Sorry. Maybe I dreamed it," and wiggle out and head to France. As Thomas Aquinas said, it is psychologically inconceivable that these men, separated, each one paying the supreme price for their story and each one dying alone, that not one of the group wouldn't break away from his fellows and say, "Hey, it wasn't true!"
To die alone, and there's not one shred of evidence surviving 2,000 years of hard looking critics. You will never find one record anywhere on the face of this Earth where any one of these men ever wavered unto their terrible death in telling this story. Therefore, I came to the conclusion there's no way these men were lying. They were telling what they thought and experienced and saw as true. Now is the time people bring up the suicide bombers, the jihadist. They die for what they believe. They don't blow themselves up knowing that their story is a lie. They expect to find virgins in heaven waiting for them. If you are one of the guys making up the 72 virgins story, you don't go out and blow yourself up knowing it's a made up story. The disciples were telling the truth.
Well, if that's true, then what? All the rest of this is true, and I have a starting point for a faith in a God eternal. I can believe that Jesus Christ came through those grave clothes, through that rock, through that door, and sailed off in the blue. Therefore, it's not difficult at all to believe that that same substance of God, placed in Mary, came fourth as Jesus of Nazareth through the Holy Spirit. God says He places that same God substance in us when we trust Him. That is the true born again experience, a generator of life, a regeneration, a new creation that penetrates my cell structure and is placed in me as a gift from God when I connect by trusting His word. That's the genesis of all Christianity, properly seen, that Christ is in us the hope of glory. I don't have to become some mystic or far out freak to understand what Christianity is. I can now spend my life pursuing His words, including the authority He attaches to the Old Testament, and the promises that are written therein. And each time I grab hold of those and act on my belief, and sustain the action in confidence, that faith connection keeps in me a life substance the same as that that raised up Christ from the dead, as capable of changing my nature as radioactive material, invisible though it may be, can change your cell structure as you hold it.
God puts a life in us capable of regenerating, and that's why spirituality is the expressions of the spirit, and why spirituality is called the fruit of the spirit. It is that new life growing out through us which can only be maintained by faith in His word, but it was founded and based upon the solid rock of the provable quality of "He raised from the dead," and it gives me faith to believe that He will do the other thing He said, which is come again.