Resurrection appearances

Christianity would never have taken off without Christ’s resurrection. The apostles witnessed the risen Christ and it transformed them into fearless proclaimers of their Lord and Saviour, died and risen to bring us salvation. Their transformation is enough to show it really happened.

Here is the evidence, the main facts as they are recorded in the Gospels:

The roman centurions ensured Jesus was dead on the cross, by piercing his side with a spear.
His corpse was laid in an unused sepulchre, dug out of the rock, and a heavy stone was rolled over the entrance and sealed by the roman soldiers who guarded it to make sure the disciples would not come and steal the body and claim he was risen. (The Jewish leaders had taken note that Jesus had taught that he would rise after three days).
There was an earthquake, and the guards fainted, and then fled in fear.
Mary Magdalene came to embalm the corpse and saw the tomb was open, and the stone had been rolled away.
She went and told Peter who ran with John to the tomb.
Peter and John saw the tomb was empty, and went away.
Mary stayed, and saw Jesus who spoke with her and told her “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God” (John 20.17).
The same evening, when the disciples were behind locked doors for fear of the Jews, Jesus came into their midst and showed them the wounds of his crucifixion and the spear-wound in his side. He spoke to them and asked “have you anything here to eat?” (Luke24.41) so that, as he ate the fish they gave him, they could see he was not a ghost. He also said to them: “As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you” (John 20.21).
A week later he came there again, showing himself in the same way, particularly to Thomas, one of the eleven faithful disciples who had been absent the time before. “Put your finger here, and see my hands,” said Jesus to him, “and put out your hand and place it in my side. Do not disbelieve, but believe” (John 20.26-27).

More appearances of the risen Jesus are recorded, but the most significant is the last just mentioned, for Thomas had doubted the report of Jesus’ resurrection. When he saw the risen Christ, he answered Jesus in an expostulation of faith: “My Lord and my God!” Jesus’ response to that was by no means to rebuke Thomas for blasphemous exaggeration. Rather, he says, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed” (John 20.28 NIV). This was his way of saying, “Happily, you have finally got it, Thomas! That is indeed who I am – both Lord and God”.

Numbers of unbelievers down the centuries have sought to discredit Jesus’ resurrection, and several, checking it out, have changed their opinion, writing books to explain how the evidence led them to conclude that Jesus was indeed the divine Son of God. If we, too, come to that conclusion, we have the basis of real hope for answers that come from the most authentic of sources, God himself.

This leads us to listen with more confidence to the truths Jesus brought which can enlighten us as we face our deep existential predicament as human beings.

We will examine these life-giving teachings in blog posts to come.

Clive Every-Clayton

July 27, 2023 0

Resurrection predictions

In an autobiography I read long ago, written, if I remember rightly by a Jewess, she recounted reading a Gospel for the first time, not knowing anything of it. As she read, she was profoundly touched by the excellence of the person of Jesus, his moral life, his wisdom and teaching – to the point that she thought this must be a prophet sent by God, like those in the Old Testament. As she read finally of his betrayal, arrest, trial and condemnation by the authorities, both religious and Roman, she grew more and more apprehensive of the outcome, wondering how God would get his prophet out of such circumstances. But when she reached the crucifixion and the death of Jesus, she closed the book, broke down in dismay and set a time of grieving for so great a man.

After that period of sorrowing, she finally picked up the Gospel again, and you can imagine her amazement, relief and joy as she read on and discovered that Jesus rose from the dead and appeared to his disciples, eating and speaking with them. It led her to faith in Jesus as her Messiah and Saviour.

The fact that Jesus rose from the dead is the decisive factor in demonstrating that he was who he said he was: he was “declared to be the Son of God with power by his resurrection from the dead,” says the New Testament (Romans 1.4). I will share the evidence for this historic fact in the next blog; this time I want to bring out something else just as amazing: Jesus actually clearly predicted on three separate occasions that he would rise from the dead.

Did you ever hear of someone predicting their resurrection? That just doesn’t happen! If anyone was so brazen as to make such a claim, the ensuing reality that he remained dead would quickly disillusion any who had believed him. But Jesus predicted his death and resurrection and it happened! Matthew, Mark and Luke all record these clear predictions, as well as other allusions Jesus made to it, which John also recorded. So all the Gospels contain the absolutely unique prophecy by Jesus of a humanly impossible event, which occurred three days after his death (and even the three day delay was foretold by Christ!). This has no equal in world religions, and it constitutes enough evidence to convince the most hard-minded unbeliever, if he has the honesty to face up to it.

“Jesus began to teach them that the Son of Man [i.e. himself] must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed, and after three days rise again. And he said this plainly” (Mark 8.31-32 c.f. parallels in Matthew 16.21 and Luke 9.22). Again: “The Son of Man is about to be delivered into the hands of men, and they will kill him, and he will be raised on the third day” (Matthew 17.22-23 c.f. parallel in Mark 9.31). Then a third time, Jesus took the disciples aside and said to them: “Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem, and everything that is written of the Son of Man by the prophets will be accomplished. For he will be delivered to the Gentiles, and will be mocked and shamefully treated and spit upon; they will scourge him and kill him, and on the third day he will rise” (Luke 18.31-33 c.f. parallels in Matthew 20.17-19 and Mark 10.33-34).

These precise predictions are certainly among the most extraordinary facts recorded by the Gospel writers; and what is even more mind-boggling is that they turned out to be true: it all happened just as Jesus said it would.

Clive Every-Clayton

July 27, 2023 0

Have you read any of the gospels?

Have you read any of the Gospels? I’d be interested to know the impact that a serious reading of a Gospel would have on an adult who had never been exposed to Christian things before…

You may have difficulty believing in the supernatural, but when you read of the miracles performed by Jesus, the visit of angels announcing his birth to a virgin, Jesus casting out demons who recognised him as “the Holy One of God”, and saying, “You are the Son of God” (Luke 4.34,41) – you must admit, these Gospel reports are quite consistent with the activity of an all-powerful God.

Did you know that Jesus multiplied a few loaves and fishes so as to feed a crowd of 5,000 people? That he touched a leper and his leprosy was cleansed? That on three occasions he raised back to life individuals who were dead? That he calmed a storm by rebuking the wind and the waves with his authoritative word? That he turned large quantities of water into wine at a marriage feast? That he gave sight to a man born blind? That he healed every person in the crowds who came to him for help?

Evidently, here is a totally unique man with supernatural power to do good in various forms to people in all kinds of needs. His miraculous works bore witness to his divine power. “The works that the Father has given me to accomplish, the very works that I am doing, bear witness about me that the Father has sent me,” said Jesus (John 5.36). He further said, as he might say to you today: “If I am not doing the works of my Father, do not believe me. But if I do them, even though you do not believe me, believe the works, that you may know and understand that the Father is in me and I am in the Father” (John 10.37-38).

I have written about the witness born to Jesus by himself and by the Father; here, his miraculous works bear witness to him too. As he had promised, he sent the Holy Spirit of God on the apostles (recounted in Luke’s second book in the New Testament, “The Acts of the Apostles”, chapters 1 and 2), and they were thus divinely equipped to write the Gospels. Of John’s Gospel It was attested: “we know that his testimony is true” (c.f. John 21.24).

And as the apostles preached Christ in their first proclamation as Lord and Messiah they insisted again and again that they had seen Jesus alive after he had risen from the dead: “This Jesus… killed by the hands of lawless men, God raised him up, loosing the pangs of death… This Jesus God raised up, and of that we all are witnesses” (Acts 2.23-24, 32). “You killed the Author of life, whom God raised from the dead. To this we are witnesses” (Acts 3.15). “The God of our fathers raised Jesus, whom you killed… we are witnesses to these things” (Acts 5.30-32). So Luke sums up “With great power the apostles were giving their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus” (Acts 4.33).

Jesus’ resurrection from the dead constitutes the final divine attestation to the deity of Jesus: as such it deserves particular attention.

Clive Every-Clayton

July 27, 2023 0

Assess the evidence

To assess the evidence for Jesus’ identity, there is no other way than to start with the four Gospels. We cannot avoid the question of the authenticity of the Gospel accounts; this can go deep and technical, and there are good books by competent scholars available for those who want such authoritative information. For example, Professor Richard Bauckham, author of a scholarly work, “Jesus and the Eye-witnesses: The Gospels as eye-witness testimony”, says the Gospels are “biographies of a contemporary person, based as such biographies were expected to be, on eye-witness testimony”.

Two of the Gospels were penned by Matthew and John who were members of Jesus’ inner circle of 12 apostles. Mark was a young man who knew Jesus and was close to the apostle Peter. Luke was a medical doctor, and “a historian of the first rank”, according to Sir William Ramsey specialist in ancient Middle East studies who, after twenty years research in the ancient Near East, avers Luke “should be placed among the very greatest of historians”. In the opening of his Gospel, Luke (who travelled with the apostle Paul on some of his journeys) shares his scholarly method of personal research of the “things that have been accomplished among us”. He affirms that he has “carefully investigated everything from the beginning”, having received them from “eye-witnesses” in order “to write an orderly account” (see Luke 1.1-4).

Oxford don C.S. Lewis, specialist in medieval literature considers the Gospels’ genre to be “reportage… pretty much close up to the facts”, and definitely neither fable, myth or legend.

Other scholarly works demonstrating the reliability of the Gospels are “The Historical Reliability of the New Testament” by Craig L. Blomberg and “Can we Trust the Gospels?” by Peter J. Williams, principal of Tyndale House, Cambridge, which is full of details indicative of their trust-worthiness. But I like the simple words of another professor, J.I. Packer, a biblical scholar of worldwide reputation, who has written: “There is no good reason to doubt the authenticity of what the Gospels say of [Jesus]. They were evidently written in good faith and with great care by knowledgeable persons (cf. Luke 1:1-4, John 19:35, 21.24). They were composed at a time when Jesus was still remembered, and misstatements about him could be identified. They were accepted everywhere, it seems, as soon as they were known, though the early Christians as a body were not credulous and detected spurious gospels with skill. The consensus of the centuries has been that these four portraits of Jesus have a ring of truth… It is not credible that he should have been made up. It is safe to say that not even Shakespeare, who created Lear, Hamlet and Falstaff, could have invented Jesus Christ!”

That last thought is worth a moment’s reflection. How would it ever be possible for four budding writers in the middle of the first century AD, seated round some ancient table in a tavern in Jerusalem, enjoying a time exchanging their various writing projects, to come up with the idea of inventing the gospel story? If Shakespeare couldn’t do it, how much less could four different unknown creative writers?

Someone has well said that it would take a Jesus to invent a Jesus. If Jesus did not exist, some unknown moral genius must have written the Sermon on the Mount! W. Robertson Nicholl has well said: “The Gospel has marks of truth so great, so striking, so perfectly inimitable, that the inventor of it would be more astonishing than the hero.” And Peter J. Williams would add: “It is far simpler to suppose that the founding figure of the new religion was the creative genius for these stories [the parables] than to suppose that several later creative geniuses all credited their less creative founder with their great compositions.”

The last word to Professor J.I. Packer: “We may be confident, then, that in reading the Gospels we meet the real Jesus.” (In Truth and Power, Eagle, 1996, p. 31-32).

Clive Every-Clayton

July 27, 2023 0