Is the resurrection real

Answer 1

One can say that the resurrection is real, while you can also say that the resurrection is fake. As nobody can prove it, go with what you believe.

Yes, the resurrection happened, period. As a young person searching out Christianity many years ago, and as an arrogant science student bent on proving the resurrection wrong, I looked at it from every angle. And came to a (reluctant!) conclusion that it happened. Since then, over 30 years later, I have yet to meet anyone who can give me any convincing evidence that it was 'faked'. All evidence, including the effect that this lowly carpenter from a backwater of the Roman Empire has on people, including the effect he had on me when I became a Chrstian, points to the resurrection being a unique and most wonderful event in human history. In my experience, all those who insist on its being a fake have either not looked at the evidence themselves, and have made their mind up before even considering the possibility of its being genuine, or dismiss it out of hand because of blind bigotry.

If you would like to read more, then a book called 'Who moved the Stone' by Frank Morrison, himself originally an arrogant atheist, who originally set out to prove that the resurrection was fake. However, during the writing of the book, Morrison realised that all evidence pointed to the genuine historic true event of the resurrection rather than it being faked, and he became a Christian as a result. It's well worth a read.

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A present-day court of law would consider the overwhelming amount of evidence in favor of the resurrection being "real" as "proof." Over 500 people saw Christ after His crucifixion. Jesus was seen doing all the things any other human would do, such as eating, talking, walking, you name it. Even if some of the witnesses had reason to lie, it would have been a small minority. The Jewish rulers were seen as very intimidating and most folks would not have wanted to be viewed as eyewitnesses. Some folks argued that eyewitnesses were hallucinating, but there's no historical examples of 500 plus people experiencing a mass hallucination. Many of the witnesses lost their lives because of their faith in Christ. The preponderance of evidence speaks for itself, as the previous er and millions of others have found over the years since Christ's death and resurrection.

And Jesus was just the first. Everyone will be resurrected someday, either as part of the "first" resurrection or the "second." Let the evidence be enough to persuade everyone to be part of that first resurrection.

Answer 2

Probably not. We can even look to the biblical evidence to demonstrate how unlikely the resurrection was.

The earliest account is in the epistles of Paul, who did not seem to realise that Jesus was an actual person who had lived and died in Palestine in the recent past. He also seems to have believed that when the risen Jesus appeared to Cephas, then the twelve, then to more than 500 (most of whom were still alive) then to James and all the apostles, that the appearances were all of the same nature as the appearance to himself, with no suggestion that any of those appearances somehow more real than the spiritual appearance he experienced. Paul seems to say that the risen Jesus did not show himself physically, but only through visions or dreams.

The first New Testament gospel to be written was Mark's Gospel, which in its original form ended at verse 16:8, with the young man telling the women that Jesus was risen and they told no one. The "Long Ending" (verses 16:9-20) was added to long afterwards to provide the necessary resurrection appearances and to more or less harmonise it with Matthew and Luke after they had begun to circulate widely. The absence of any resurrection story in the earliest gospel tells us something about the lack of evidence.

The authors of the other gospels wished to add something to show that the resurrection really happened, but they did not have a lead from Mark's Gospel prior to the "Long Ending". So each has a completely different story to tell about how the tomb was found to be empty, who met the risen Jesus and where. For example, only Matthew says that an angel came down and moved the stone, telling the women that Jesus had risen; and Jesus met the disciples later in a mountain in Galilee. But Luke says that the stone was already moved when the women arrived and that two men inside the tomb told the women that Jesus was risen; Jesus met the disciples in a room in Jerusalem and led them out towards Bethany, where he was taken bodily up into heaven on the evening of his resurrection.

Answer 3

A:

There is no reason to believe the resurrection of Jesus was real. Even some liberal theologians have come to this conclusion, although they remain Christians.

The evidence for the resurrection is supposedly to be found in the four New Testament gospels, but three of these gospels were based directly (Matthew, Luke) or indirectly (John) on Mark's Gospel, so that we really only have one original gospel. Although Mark now contains an account of the appearances of the risen Jesus, it originally ended at verse 16:8 with the young man telling the women that Jesus was risen and they fled in terror, telling no one. Our original gospel contained nothing about the risen Jesus apart from the word of an unknown young man in the tomb.

Of the four widely different accounts of the empty tomb, Archbishop Peter Carnley wrote:

"The presence of discrepancies might be a sign of historicity if we had four clearly independent but slightly different versions of the story, if only for the reason that four witnesses are better than one. But, of course, it is now impossible to argue that what we have in the four gospel accounts of the empty tomb are four contemporaneous but independent accounts of the one event. Modern redactional studies of the traditions account for the discrepancies as literary developments at the hand of later redactors of what was originally one report of the empty tomb...

There is no suggestion that the tomb was discovered by different witnesses on four different occasions, so it is in fact impossible to argue that the discrepancies were introduced by different witnesses of the one event; rather, they can be explained as four different redactions for apologetic and kerygmatic reasons of a single story originating from one source."

The evangelists who wrote the gospels went to great lengths to convince us that Jesus rose from the dead, but tripped over the details so much that modern scholarship has to reject these reports.

Answer 4

Resurrection is by no means real. Death is the final stage of life and there is no form of medicine that allows people to come back from the dead. The most famous resurrection was that of Jesus in Christian mythology who was crucified and arose after 3 days.