Easter says you can put truth in a grave, but it won't stay
there. - Clarence W. Hall
In truth, faith needs apologetics. It needs it to answer
both the negative arguments of the resurrection and to construct positive
arguments in favor of it. Apologetics will not create faith, but perhaps, for
some, it will pave the way for it or make it possible. What is destructive of
genuine Christian faith, in my opinion, is not apologetics, but unfounded
beliefs, unjustified commitments. Unsound arguments are irrational leaps of
faith. It is the aim of apologetics to prevent Christian faith from amounting
to anything like that. -
Stephen T. Davis
I know the resurrection is a fact, and Watergate proved it
to me. How? Because 12 men testified they had seen Jesus raised from the dead,
then they proclaimed that truth for 40 years, never once denying it. Every one
was beaten, tortured, stoned and put in prison. They would not have endured
that if it weren't true. Watergate embroiled 12 of the most powerful men in the
world-and they couldn't keep a lie for three weeks. You're telling me 12
apostles could keep a lie for 40 years? Absolutely impossible. – Charles Colson
The Gospels were written in such temporal and geographical
proximity to the events they record that it would have been almost impossible
to fabricate events. Anyone who cared to could have checked out the accuracy of
what they reported. The fact that the disciples were able to proclaim the
resurrection in Jerusalem in the face of their enemies a few weeks after the
crucifixion shows that what they proclaimed was true, for they could never have
proclaimed the resurrection under such circumstances had it not occurred. - William Lane Craig
The truth of the resurrection gives life to every other area
of gospel truth. The resurrection is the pivot on which all of Christianity
turns and without which none of the other truths would much matter. Without the
resurrection, Christianity would be so much wishful thinking, taking its place
alongside all other human philosophy and religious speculation. - John MacArthur
It will not do … to say that Jesus’ disciples were so
stunned and shocked by his death, so unable to come to terms with it, that they
projected their shattered hopes onto the screen of fantasy and invented the
idea of Jesus’ ‘resurrection’ as a way of coping with a cruelly broken dream.
That has an initial apparent psychological plausibility, but it won’t work as
serious first-century history.
We know of lots of other messianic
and similar movements in the Jewish world roughly contemporary with Jesus. In
many cases the leader died a violent death at the hands of the authorities. In
not one single case do we hear the slightest mention of the disappointed
followers claiming that their hero had been raised from the dead. They knew
better. ‘Resurrection’ was not a private event. It involved human bodies. There
would have to be an empty tomb somewhere.
A Jewish revolutionary whose leader
had been executed by the authorities, and who managed to escape arrest himself,
had two options: give up the revolution, or find another leader. We have
evidence of people doing both.
Claiming that the original leader
was alive again was simply not an option. Unless, of course, he was. —N.T. Wright (from Who Was Jesus?)
Any position in which claims about Jesus or the resurrection
are removed from the realm of historical reality and placed in a subjective
realm of personal belief or some realm that is immune to human scrutiny does
Jesus and the resurrection no service and no justice. It is a ploy of
desperation to suggest that the Christian faith would be little affected if
Jesus was not actually raised from the dead in space and time. - Ben Witherington III
Either the men of Galilee were men of superlative wisdom,
and extensive knowledge and experience, and of deeper skill in the arts of
deception than any and all others, before them or after them, or they have
truly stated astonishing things which they saw and heard. - Simon Greenleaf
It is of the very essence of Christianity to face suffering
and death not because they are good, not because they have meaning, but because
the resurrection of Jesus has robbed them of their meaning. ― Thomas Merton
The evidence for our Lord’s life and death and resurrection
may be, and often has been, shown to be satisfactory; it is good according to
the common rules for distinguishing good evidence from bad. Thousands and tens
of thousands of persons have gone through it piece by piece as carefully as
every judge summing upon a most important case. I have myself done it many
times over, not to persuade others but to satisfy myself. I have been used for
many years to study the histories of other times and to examine and weigh the
evidence of those who have written about them, and I know of no one fact in the
history of mankind which is proved by better and fuller evidence of every sort,
to the understanding of a fair inquirer, than the great sign which God hath
given us that Christ died and rose again from the dead. - Thomas Arnold
I went to a psychologist friend and said if 500 people
claimed to see Jesus after he died, it was just a hallucination. He said
hallucinations are an individual event. If 500 people have the same
hallucination, that's a bigger miracle than the resurrection. - Lee Strobel
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