In my previous blog, I briefly introduced you to five ‘minimal facts’ of evidence for the resurrection. In this issue, I will focus more in depth on the first minimal fact accepted by virtually all scholars as being historically true: Jesus died by crucifixion.
You may be wondering why this fact is considered to be an important piece of evidence for the resurrection. Without an actual death, there could be no true resurrection. At best, there could be a resuscitation or recovery of some sort. This is exactly what critics tried to prove by claiming Jesus wasn’t really dead when the soldiers removed his body from the cross. Critics couldn’t deny the crucifixion, but if they could convince people that Jesus was only in a coma and the soldiers mistakenly thought he was dead, or perhaps some of Jesus’s followers bribed the soldiers to take Jesus off the cross before he died, this would discredit the resurrection and show Jesus to be a fraud.
This naturalistic explanation has been called the “Apparent Death Theory” or the “Swoon Theory.” (Or, as I like to refer to it, the “Only Mostly Dead” theory. If you’re familiar with The Princess Bride, you’ll get the reference!) The crucifixion is attested to by several non-Christian historical sources, as is the account that Jesus was, in fact, killed.
More recently, the findings of a medical study on the procedures of scourging and crucifixion and their effects on a victim were published in The Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA) in 1986. According to modern scientific knowledge, their conclusion was that Jesus was dead when he was taken down from the cross. A combination of being flogged to a weakened state just short of collapse or death, the excruciating pain of being nailed to a cross (one doctor compares it to using pliers to crush the “funny bone” nerve in your elbow), severe muscle cramps and spasms, the rupturing of the pericardium (the sac that surrounds the heart) resulting from the spear wound, and eventual asphyxiation left no question as to the final state of the victim. [https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/403315 - This is a link to an abstract of the JAMA article. If you would like the full article and can’t access it, send me a request via email: hello@grassrootstruth.com ]
There are other problems with this particular fraud theory: After being scourged, crucified, and stabbed with a sword, how could Jesus have pushed the heavy stone away from the tomb, had the strength to walk on wounded feet to find his disciples, and then have appeared to them in a “glorious” state? Even if Jesus had remained alive on the cross and managed to perform these herculean feats, a pale, limping, bleeding man would fall far short of convincing anyone he had been raised from the dead in a glorified body.
Still another problem is that this Apparent Death Theory doesn’t account for Paul’s dramatic conversion upon encountering a glorious appearance of Jesus on the road to Damascus (Minimal Fact #3). Even if Jesus had recovered from his injury-induced ‘swoon,’ his appearance would not have been glorious by any stretch of the imagination. To quote from The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus, “Therefore, it looks as if the swoon theory is ‘dead’ with no hopes of a resurrection” (p. 103).
As we investigate the remaining minimal facts, you will see how fraud theories that have been formulated in an attempt to discredit the historical resurrection account fail to meet the criteria for being a more reasonable explanation when considering the combined evidence. Next, we’ll look at the evidence for Minimal Fact #2: The disciples believed Jesus rose from the dead and appeared to them.
Recommended resources:
The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus, Gary R. Habermas and Michael R. Licona
Cold-Case Christianity, J. Warner Wallace
I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist, Norman L. Geisler and Frank Turek
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