Six Minimal Facts of the Resurrection

Wise Disciple

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So, you mentioned, because this is what I was tracking, your arguments in the book,

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The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus with Dr. Mike Licona, you mentioned four facts.

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Would you mind walking us through those four minimal facts and what they are?

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You know what? I have published lists so many times, with three to seven, that I don't remember which number

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I used each time. Lately I've been using six. So is it okay if I give you six?

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Oh, sure. Absolutely. Absolutely. Okay. It'll include those. And I don't include the empty tomb. The empty tomb has never been a minimal fact.

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So if I did it today as six, it would be called six plus one, six plus the empty tomb. Here would be my six.

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Okay. Number one, Jesus died by crucifixion. Now someone's going to say, that doesn't prove the resurrection.

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Of course it doesn't. But it has to be up there as a minimal fact, because it is extremely well attested.

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And if you don't have a crucifixion, you can't have a resurrection. So I listed there at the beginning.

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All right. Secondly, after the crucifixion, the disciples had experiences, and I word this very carefully, the disciples had experiences that they believed were appearances of the risen

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Jesus. They had experiences that they thought were appearances of the risen Jesus.

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They were real experiences, and they thought they were appearances. I would say those first two facts, crucifixion and the disciples were transformed, well, the disciples thought they saw appearances.

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Those two are probably as widely acknowledged as anything in the New Testament by critics.

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In fact, Bart Ehrman says, of course they thought they saw, some or all of them thought they saw the risen

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Jesus. He said, of course they did. He said, why wouldn't I be willing to say that?

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He said, history proves it. And that's Bart Ehrman. Okay. Number three, their lives were turned upside down.

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And I want to specify, they were turned upside down, not just because they came to believe in Christianity generally, but their lives were turned upside down because they came to believe in the resurrection.

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You say, well, how do you know that? Well, because virtually everyone,

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I could easily, I have made this one of the minimal facts, so to make my list longer if I used it, because I won't use it today, but the fact that the resurrection of Jesus was the center of the earliest belief, it was the kingpin.

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It was the, you know, the thing that made the case or lost the case for Christianity.

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So if, my point is, they were transformed by the resurrection message, and if they didn't believe the resurrection,

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I mean, take Paul, 1 Corinthians 15, your faith is vain, you're still in your sins, all your loved ones who died in Christ have died in vain, and we are of most, if Christ hasn't been raised, we are of most men, we are of all men most miserable.

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Yeah. It was center of faith. And when you go through the New Testament, it was the message they were preaching. So they were willing to die for the resurrection precisely because if you subtract the resurrection, you subtract their faith.

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So, my third point would be, they died for, let me say, they thought they were dying.

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I don't like to prove, for example, that all 12 disciples died for the faith, so I didn't use my own wording.

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I would say the disciples were willing to die for the resurrection message.

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And, by the way, the four big names, two apostles, two of the twelve,

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John and Peter, and two that were later added to the Apostolic group,

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James the brother of Jesus and Paul, they were easily the four most influential

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Christians in the early church. And we have first century sources for the martyrdoms of three out of those four, and a lot of Christians don't believe

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John was martyred, that's a very popular belief. But we have a second century source for the martyrdom of John.

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So we have pretty early sources for the big four, three in particular. And those three, again, are

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James the brother of Jesus, Paul, and Peter. So they died for the resurrection. Now someone always is going to miss the point and jump up if I do this at a university.

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Yeah, but how about everybody who dies today for their faith? Okay. A lot of people die for a lot of things, and the two categories that people usually die for are religious causes and political causes.

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I don't doubt that atheist communists died for their faith.

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I remember the very brave Buddhist priests who set themselves on fire to protest the war in Vietnam.

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People die for their faith. But they're missing the point, if they think that's what I'm saying about the apostles.

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I'm saying, whenever a Christian missionary dies, whenever a Muslim missionary dies, whenever someone dies, they die for somebody else's testimony that they believe makes their faith true.

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The disciples are the only ones who are willing to die for their testimony that they saw the risen

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Jesus, and they are the only ones in the universe, besides other witnesses, who knew what they saw when they saw

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Jesus. And they were so sure that they saw him, that as far as we know, none of them ever recanted.

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So the fact that they were transformed to the point of being willing to die for their faith is very important, because that's a testimony directly to their belief in the resurrection.

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Number four, the resurrection was taught very early. How early?

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Well, today, even skeptics, Bart Ehrman, Garrett Ludeman, both agnostics to atheists, and we'll write in that area right there, and a number of others, they are willing to say the consensus

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New Testament view today is that this material that Paul preached in 1

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Corinthians 15, when he said, I gave you what I was given, it's a consensus New Testament view that this went all the way back to the 30s, and a good many scholars say,

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Bart Ehrman is one of them, a good many scholars say that this message was clearly preached and formalized into an early creed just one to two years after the cross.

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I don't mean they began preaching it one to two years later. It was already formalized in a message that was spreading around the

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Mediterranean, so that's early. And then the last two, five and six, I separate them because they're two separate cases.

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You have the famous religious zealot and persecutor of the Church, Saul of Tarsus, and then you have the skeptical, who knows if he had any religion,

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James, and they believed that Jesus predicted the resurrection, that he was raised from the dead, and so on and so on, and that was after the fact, but they came to Christ because they thought they saw a risen

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Jesus. So those six are what I would use, and I would throw the empty tomb in there only because the evidences are so many, but not because they fulfill our second criterion, which they don't.

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So now I would call it, instead of the four plus one in that book, I'd call it six plus one. So there is maybe a second where something had happened, and I think you cut off, but the last, the two there before the tomb, are the enemies, quote -unquote, of the faith, and it's

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Paul and James? Is that what you were saying? Yeah, yeah, James, the persecutor of the

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Church, and, you know, very religious Jewish leader,

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I think you'd have to say. He was chosen by the leaders to represent them. And James, a private skeptic, a family skeptic, when

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Jesus, and there's multiple attestations for this, but when Jesus comes back to his hometown and preaches, we're told in Mark 3 that his family didn't believe him.

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Right. That's pretty rough. We thought James didn't believe him, but what about the rest of his family? That's a pretty rough indictment, that they didn't believe him.

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And the Greek there basically says they thought Jesus was nuts, because the

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Greek says they thought he was beside himself, that there were, like, split personalities, two of them.

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Yeah. So they thought he was mentally ill, and they were being embarrassed by him, and hence, they wanted to kind of push it out of the way, and, you know, like, you know, move him out.

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They were basically, in Mark 3, saying, why don't you come on over here?

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What? Come on, come on. Let's go get a bite to eat, okay? You're embarrassing us. That kind of thing.

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That seems to be what's going on in Mark 3. So James came out of that background, and then we're told just one time in the early

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Creed, in 1 Corinthians 15, we're told that Jesus appeared to James. I often wonder how sacred that moment was for James, the brother of Jesus.