The Pastor’s Pen (The Very Rev. Dr. Curtis Crenshaw, Th.D.) Bodily Resurrection of Christ Easter comes early this year, and at this time we celebrate one of the most important historical events in world history: the bodily resurrection of Christ. It is really an easy proof if one accepts historical documents. It is a redundancy to say “bodily” resurrection, for that is what resurrection means, but because of heresies, we use the redundancy. The Jehovah’s witnesses, for example, deny that the Lord Jesus was raised in the same body in which He lived among people, saying that He was raised some kind of spirit creature. Islam even denies that He died, much less was raised from the dead. The Koran states regarding Christ: “yet they slew him not, neither crucified him, but he was represented by one in his likeness. . . . They did not really kill him; but God took him up into himself. . . .” (Koran, chapter 4). If one just accepts the four Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) as historical documents, we have dozens of eyewitnesses to the Lord’s crucifixion and bodily resurrection, not to mention the 500 brethren Paul speaks of in 1 Corinthians 15:6 who saw the Lord “at one time.” Have you ever studied Caesar’s Gallic War composed around 50 BC? Did anyone ever tell you to doubt its accuracy because of its manuscripts? There are only 10 good manuscripts, and the oldest is 900 years from the time Caesar wrote. Of the 142 books of the Roman History of Livy (59 BC to AD 17), only 35 books survive, and these are known from 20 manuscripts of any consequence, and of the 20, only one contains part of Books iii-vi and is dated in the fourth century AD. Of the 14 books of the Histories of Tacitus (AD 100), only 4 ½ survive, and of the 16 books of his Annals, only 10 survive, and the text of all his works that survive depend on only two manuscripts, one of the 9th century and one of the 11th century. The History of Thucydides (400 BC) is known to us from 8 manuscripts, the earliest being AD 900, and a few papyrus scraps dated around the time of Christ Himself. Plato died about 347 BC, and we have 7 manuscripts of his writings, the earliest dated in AD 900. Aristotle died 322 BC, and we have 5 of his manuscripts, the earliest being AD 1100. BUT now consider the New Testament. We have fragments of the Gospels dated close to the time of the apostles themselves. How many Greek New Testament manuscripts do we have? Over FIVE . . . THOUSAND six hundred, (5,600) written by multiple authors, though most of them are only of portions of the New Testament, yet we can put the New Testament together many times from these. Moreover, we have secular authorities who speak of the crucifixion of Christ such as Josephus, who lived about the same time as Christ, and writing in about AD 95, stated: Based on reports from some of our prominent members (the Jews), Pilate sentenced him to the cross, but those who had grown to love him did not cease in their affections, because he appeared alive before them on the third day (the divine prophets had mentioned this and many thousands of other wondrous things about him). The tribe of Christians who are named after him still exists. Another ancient historian, Tacitus, a Roman historian, writing about AD 116, stated: The founder of this name, Christ, had been executed in the reign of Tiberius by the procurator Pontius Pilate. Suppressed for a time, the deadly superstition erupted again not only in Judea, the origin of the evil, but also in the city [Rome], where all things horrible and shameful from everywhere come together and become popular. Do we know for sure that Pilate really existed? Absolutely. In 1961 there was discovered the “Pilate Stone,” dated about AD 31, which reads “The Tiberieum of the Caesareans, Pontius Pilate, Prefect of Judea, dedicates.” We also have coins with Pilate’s image on them minted in Jerusalem about AD 29. Lucian of Samosata wrote a satire about Christians about AD 170, and described Christ as the one “who was crucified in Palestine,” and he further says of Jesus: “that one whom they still worship today, the man in Palestine who was crucified because he brought this new form of initiation into the world.” If we can believe that Jesus was crucified by these historical documents, we can also believe that He was resurrected by the same documents. As Charles Colson once stated in a sermon I heard, who was a Watergate conspirator and went to jail: “I’ve argued cases to the Supreme Count on less evidence than there is for the bodily resurrection of Christ—and won those cases!” And as church historian Alister McGrath has rightly said: “There was never an argument about Jesus being crucified, buried, and the empty tomb. The discussions centered on how the tomb became empty.” Amen.
