Circumstantial Evidence Supporting the Resurrection
When I was teaching Sunday school, I did a series of classes using Lee Strobel's works. The following is from The Case for Christ, chapter 14. While there may be the stray original item from me, I deserve no credit for what is written in this particular article. It is properly attributed to Lee Strobel in its entirety.
Eyewitness testimony is called direct evidence because people describe under oath how they personally saw the defendant commit the crime. While this is often compelling, it can sometimes be subject to faded memories, prejudices and even outright fabrication. In contrast, circumstantial evidence is made up of indirect facts from which inferences can be rationally drawn. Its cumulative effect can be every bit as strong - and in many instances stronger - than eyewitness accounts.
There are five things not disputed by anyone that provide a framework of circumstantial evidence that support the claim that Jesus rose from the dead.
The Disciples Died for Their Beliefs
When Jesus was crucified, his followers were discouraged and depressed. They no longer had confidence that Jesus had been sent by God, because they believed anyone crucified was accursed by God. They had also been taught that God would not let his Messiah suffer death. So they dispersed. The Jesus movement was all but stopped in its tracks.
Then, after a short time, we see them abandoning their occupations, regathering, and committing themselves to spreading a very specific message - that Jesus Christ was the Messiah of God who died on a cross, returned to life, and was seen alive by them. And they were willing to spend the rest of their lives proclaiming this, without any payoff from a human point of view (it’s not like a mansion on the Mediterranean awaited them). They faced hardship. They often went without food, slept exposed to the elements, were ridiculed, beaten, and imprisoned. And finally, most of them were executed in torturous ways.
Why? For good intentions? No, because they were convinced beyond a shadow of doubt that they had seen Jesus Christ alive again after death. What you can’t explain is how this particular group of men came up with this particular belief without having had an experience of the resurrected Christ. There’s no other adequate explanation.
Yes, but Muslims and Mormons and followers of Jim Jones and David Koresh have died for their beliefs as well. This may show they were fanatical, but it doesn’t prove what they believed was true. Muslims might be willing to die for their belief that Allah revealed himself to Muhammad, but this revelation was not done in a publicly observable way. So they could be wrong about it. They may sincerely think it’s true, but they can’t know for a fact, because they didn’t witness it themselves.
However, the apostles were willing to die for something they had seen with their own eyes and touched with their own hands. They were in a unique position not to just believe Jesus rose from the dead but to know for sure. And when you’ve got eleven credible people with no ulterior motives, with nothing to gain and a lot to lose, which all agree they observed something with their own eyes - now you’ve got some difficulty explaining that away.
People will die for their religious beliefs if they sincerely believe they are true, but people won’t die for their religious beliefs if they know their beliefs are false. While most people can only have faith that their beliefs are true, the disciples were in a position to know without a doubt whether or not Jesus had risen from the dead. They claimed they saw him, talked with him, and ate with him. If they weren’t absolutely certain, they wouldn’t have allowed themselves to be tortured to death for proclaiming that the Resurrection had happened.
The Conversion of Skeptics
There were hardened skeptics who didn’t believe in Jesus before His crucifixion - and were to some degree dead-set against Christianity - who turned around and adopted the Christian faith after Jesus’ death. There’s no good reason for this apart from them having experienced the resurrected Christ. Obviously, this is referring to James, the brother of Jesus, and Saul of Tarsus, who would become the apostle Paul.
But is there really any credible evidence that James had been a skeptic of Jesus? Yes, the gospels tell us Jesus’ family, including James, was embarrassed by what he was claiming to be. They didn’t believe in him; in fact, they confronted him. In ancient Judaism it was highly embarrassing for a rabbi’s family not to accept him; therefore, the gospel writers would have no motive for fabricating this skepticism if it wasn’t true. Later the historian Josephus tells us that James, the brother of Jesus, who was the leader of the Jerusalem church, was stoned to death because of his belief in his brother. Why did James’ life change? Paul tells us: the resurrected Jesus appeared to him. There’s no other explanation that satisfies.
And as for Saul, as a Pharisee, he hated anything that disrupted the traditions of the Jewish people. To him, this new countermovement called Christianity would have been the height of disloyalty. And so, as we know, he executed Christians every chance he had. Then suddenly he doesn’t just ease off Christians but joins their movement? How did this happen? Paul tells us himself in his letter to the Galatian churches that he saw the risen Christ who appointed him to be one of his followers.
Atheist Michael Martin said that if you count Paul’s conversion for evidence for the truth of the Resurrection, you should count Muhammad’s conversion to Islam as being evidence for the truth that Jesus was not resurrected, since Muslims deny the Resurrection. No one knows anything about Muhammad’s conversion. He claims he went into a cave and had a religious experience in which Allah revealed the Koran to him. There’s no other eyewitness to verify this, and Muhammad offered no publicly miraculous signs to certify anything. And someone could easily have had ulterior motives in following Muhammad, because in the early years Islam was spread largely by warfare. Muhammad's followers gained political influence and power over the villages that were conquered and “converted” to Islam by the sword.
Contrast that with the claims of the early followers of Jesus, including Paul. They claimed to have seen public events that other people saw as well (and challenged people to check them out for themselves). These were things that happened outside their minds, not just in their minds. Furthermore, when Paul wrote 2 Corinthians - which nobody disputes he did - he reminded the people in Corinth that he performed miracles when he was with them earlier. He’d certainly be foolish to make this statement if they knew he hadn’t.
Remember, it’s not the simple fact that Paul changed his views. You have to explain how he had this particular change of belief that went completely against his upbringing; how he saw the risen Christ in a public event that was witnessed by others, even though they didn’t understand it; and how he performed miracles to back up his claim of being an apostle.
Changes to Key Social Structures
Some background is in order: At the time of Jesus, the Jews had been persecuted for 700 years by the Babylonians, Assyrians, Persians, and now by the Greeks and Romans. Many Jews had been scattered and lived as captives in these other nations.
However, we still see Jews today, while we don’t see Hittites, Perizzites, Ammonites, Assyrians, Persians, Babylonians and other people who had lived during that time. Why is that? Because these people got captured by other nations, intermarried, and lost their national identity.
Why didn’t that happen to the Jews? Because the things that made the Jews Jews - the social structure that gave them their national identity - were unbelievably important to them. The Jews would pass these structures down to their children, celebrate them in synagogue meetings every Sabbath, and reinforce them with their rituals, because they knew if they didn’t, there would soon be no Jews left. They would be assimilated into the cultures that captured them.
And there’s another reason these social structures were so important: they believed these institutions were entrusted to them by God. They believed that to abandon these institutions would be to risk their souls being damned to hell after death.
Now a rabbi named Jesus appears from a lower-class region. He teaches for 3 years, gathers a following of lower- and middle-class people, gets in trouble with the authorities, and gets crucified along with 30,000 other Jewish men who are executed during this time period.
But five weeks after he’s crucified, over 10,000 Jews are following him and claiming that he is the initiator of a new religion. And - and this is extremely important - they are willing to give up or alter all 5 of the social institutions that they have been taught since childhood have such importance both sociologically and theologically.
First, they had been taught ever since the time of Abraham and Moses that they needed to offer an animal sacrifice on a yearly basis to atone for their sins. God would transfer their sin to that animal, and their sins would be forgiven so they could be in right standing with him. But all of a sudden, after the death of this Nazarene carpenter, these Jewish people no longer offer sacrifices.
Second, Jews emphasized obeying the laws that God had entrusted to them through Moses. In their view, this is what separated them from pagan nations. Yet within a short time after Jesus’ death, Jews were beginning to say you don’t become an upstanding member of their community merely by keeping Moses’ laws.
Third, Jews scrupulously kept the Sabbath by not doing anything except religious devotion every Saturday. This is how they would earn right standing with God, guarantee the salvation of their family, and be in right standing with the nation. However, after the death of this Nazarene carpenter, this 1,500-year tradition is abruptly changed. These Christians worship on Sunday - why? Because that’s when Jesus rose from the dead.
Fourth, they believed in monotheism - only one God. While Christians teach a form of monotheism, they say that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are one God. That is radically different from what the Jews believed. They would have considered it the height of heresy to say that someone could be God and man at the same time. Yet Jews begin to worship Jesus as God within the first decade of the Christian religion.
And fifth, these Christians pictured the Messiah as someone who suffered and died for the sins of the world, whereas Jews had been trained to believe that the Messiah was going to be a political leader who would destroy Roman armies.
How can you possibly explain why in a short period of time not just one Jew but an entire community of at least 10,000 Jews was willing to give up these 5 key practices that had served it sociologically and theologically for so many centuries? What short of having seen Jesus risen from the dead?
These kinds of changes may not seem that monumental to a modern American culture in which people dabble in various belief systems and mix and match to create their own spirituality. Keep in mind that this is an entire community of people who are abandoning treasured beliefs that have been passed on for centuries and that they believed were from God Himself. They were doing it even though they were jeopardizing their own well being, and they also believed they were risking the damnation of their souls to hell if they were wrong. What is your most cherished belief? Think about how radical something must be to get you to change or give up that belief you treasure so much, then you’ll begin to get close to how incredibly monumental this was.
What’s more, they weren’t doing this because they had come upon better ideas. They were perfectly content with the old traditions. They lived in a period in which the older something was, the better. In fact, for them the farther back they could trace an idea, the more likely it was to be true. So to come up with new ideas is the opposite of how we are today. They gave them up because they witnessed miracles they couldn’t explain and that forced them to see the world another way.
Communion and Baptism
It’s only natural that religions would create their own rituals and practices. All religions have them. So how does that prove anything about the Resurrection?
Considering Communion: What’s odd is that these early followers of Jesus didn’t get together to celebrate His teachings or how wonderful He was. They came together regularly to have a meal for one reason: to remember that Jesus had been publicly slaughtered in a grotesque and humiliating way. Think about this in modern terms. If a group of people loved John F. Kennedy, they might meet regularly to remember his confrontation with Russia, his promotion of civil rights, and his charismatic personality. But they’re not going to celebrate the fact that Lee Harvey Oswald murdered him! But early Christians realized that Jesus’ slaying was a necessary step to a much greater victory. His murder wasn’t the last word - the last word was that he had conquered death for all of us by rising from the dead. They celebrated his execution because they were convinced they’d seen him alive from the tomb.
Baptism: The early church adopted a form of baptism from their Jewish upbringing, called proselyte baptism. When Gentiles wanted to take upon themselves the Law of Moses, the Jews would baptize them in the authority of the God of Israel. But in the New Testament, people were baptized in the name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit - which meant they had elevated Jesus to the full status of God. And baptism was a celebration of the death of Jesus, just as Communion was. By going under the water, you’re celebrating his death, and by being brought out of the water, you’re celebrating the fact that Jesus was raised to newness of life.
And what about the charge that these sacraments were merely adapted from the so-called mystery religions? First, there’s no hard evidence that any mystery religion believed in gods dying and rising until after the New Testament period. So if there was any borrowing, they borrowed from Christianity. Second, the practice of baptism came from Jewish customs, and the Jews were very much against allowing Gentile or Greek ideas to affect their worship. And third, these two sacraments can be dated back to the very earliest Christian community - too early for the influence of any other religions to creep into their understanding of what Jesus’ death meant.
The Emergence of the Church
When a major cultural shift takes place, historians always look for events that can explain it. So let’s think about the start of the Christian church. There’s no question it began shortly after the death of Jesus and spread so rapidly that within a period of maybe 20 years it had even reached Caesar’s palace in Rome. Not only that, but this movement triumphed over a number of competing ideologies and eventually overwhelmed the entire Roman empire. Now if you were a martian looking down on the first century, would you think that Christianity or the Roman Empire would survive? You probably wouldn’t put money on a ragtag group of people whose primary message was that a crucified carpenter from an obscure village had triumphed over the grave. Yet it was so successful that today we name our children Peter and Paul and, largely, not Caesar and Nero.
Cambridge New Testament scholar C. F. D. Moule: “If the coming into existence of the Nazarenes, a phenomenon undeniably attested by the New Testament, rips a great hole in history, a hole the size and shape of Resurrection, what does the secular historian propose to stop it up with?”[1]
If someone wants to consider this circumstantial evidence and conclude that Jesus did not rise from the dead - fair enough. But they’ve got to offer an alternative explanation that is plausible for all 5 of these facts. Remember, there’s no doubt these facts are true; what’s in question is how to explain them. And so far, no explanation better than the Resurrection has been found.
Sir Lionel Luckhoo, a brilliant attorney whose 245 consecutive murder acquittals earned him a place in The Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s most successful lawyer, was knighted twice by Queen Elizabeth and spent years studying the Resurrection only to conclude: “I say unequivocally that the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus Christ is so overwhelming that it compels acceptance by proof which leaves absolutely no room for doubt.”[2]
[1] C. F. D. Moule, The Phenomenon of the New Testament, 3.
[2] Ross Clifford, The Case for the Empty Tomb, 112.