The Resurrection is more than a story... Part 2 of 3

The resurrection was inconceivable for the first disciples. It was as impossible for them to believe, as it is for many of us today. Granted, their reasons would have been different from ours. The Greeks did not believe in resurrection. In the Greek worldview, the afterlife was liberation of the soul from the body. According to the Greek worldview the resurrection would never be part of life after death.

As for the Jews, some of them believed in a future general resurrection when the entire world would be renewed, but they had no concept of an individual rising from the dead. The people of Jesus’ day were not predisposed to believe in resurrection any more than we are.

Celsus, a Greek philosopher who lived in the second century A.D., was highly antagonistic to Christianity and wrote a number of works listing arguments against it. One of the arguments he believed most telling went like this: Christianity can’t be true, because the written accounts of the resurrection are based on the testimony of women—and we all know women are hysterical. Many of Celsus’ readers agreed; for them, the fact that the witnesses were women was a major problem. In ancient societies women were marginalized, and the testimony of women was never given legal credence.

Do you see what that means? If Mark and the Christians were making up these stories to get their movement off the ground, they would never have written women into the story as the first eyewitnesses to Jesus’ empty tomb. The only possible reason for the presence of women in these accounts is that they really were present and reported what they saw. The stone has been rolled away, the tomb is empty and an angel declares that Jesus is risen. ----- Adapted from: King's Cross by Timothy Keller © 2011. To be continued next week.