Prove It! - Pt. 5

 

When the day of Pentecost arrived, they were all together in one place. And suddenly there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. And divided tongues as of fire appeared to them and rested on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance. Now there were dwelling in Jerusalem Jews, devout men from every nation under heaven. (Acts 1:1-5 ESV).

 

Sometimes we have failed to understand one of the greatest affirmations of the resurrection of Jesus is simply the existence of the Christian church. However, it is one of the strongest proofs for the resurrection. Even the most skeptical NT scholars admit that the disciples at least believed that Jesus was raised from the grave. I like the way William Lane Craig gives us three possible causes: Christian influences, pagan influences, or Jewish influences. We should spend a bit of time looking at the plausibility of each of these.

 

First, shouldn’t we ask if it could have been later Christian influences? Craig writes, "Since the belief in the resurrection was itself the foundation for Christianity, it cannot be explained as the later product of Christianity." Further, as we saw, if the disciples made it up, then they were frauds and liars--alternatives we have shown to be false. We have also shown the unlikeliness that they hallucinated this belief.

 

Second, what about pagan influences? After all, it is true that there were many myths of dying and rising savior-gods at the time of Christianity. Some have suggested that the disciples were simply deluded by those myths and copied them into their own teaching on the resurrection of Christ. However, serious scholars have almost universally rejected this theory since WWII, for several reasons. It has been shown that these mystery religions had no major influence in Palestine in the first century. Also, most of the sources which contain parallels originated after Christianity was established. And most of the similarities are often apparent and not real. They were a result of sloppy terminology on the part of those who explain them. For example, one critic tried to argue that a ceremony of killing a bull and letting the blood drip all over the participants was parallel to holy communion. Last, the early disciples were Jews, and it would have been unthinkable for a Jew to borrow from another religion. For they were zealous in their belief that the pagan religions were abhorrent to God.

 

Jewish influences cannot explain the belief in the resurrection, either. First century Judaism had no conception of a single individual rising from the dead in the middle of history. Their concept was always that everybody would be raised together at the end of time. So, the idea of one individual rising in the middle of history was foreign to them. Thus, Judaism of that day could have never produced the resurrection hypothesis. This is also another good argument against the theory that the disciples were hallucinating. Psychologists will tell you that hallucinations cannot contain anything new; that is, they cannot contain any idea that isn't already somehow in your mind. Since the early disciples were Jews, they had no conception of the messiah rising from the dead in the middle of history. Thus, they would have never hallucinated about a resurrection of Christ. At best, they would have hallucinated that he had been transported directly to heaven, as Elijah had been in the OT, but they would have never hallucinated a resurrection.

 

These things ultimately point us to the beginning of the Church with the First Pentecost with the Jews and continuing with the Second Pentecost with the Gentiles. From that beginning the Church began to grow expanding through the years to the entire globe. This could not have been sustained for this length of time and with this magnitude of belief. Jesus is indeed risen!