1 Corinthians 15:1-26 1Now, brothers and sisters, I want to remind you

of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your

stand. 2By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise,

you have believed in vain.

1 Corinthians 15:1-26 3For what I received I passed on to you as of first

importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, 4that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, 5and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. 6After that, he appeared

to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still

living, though some have fallen asleep. 7Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, 8and

last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.

1 Corinthians 15:1-26 9For I am the least of the apostles and do not

even deserve to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. 10But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was

not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them—yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me. 11Whether, then, it is I or they, this is what we preach, and this is what you believed.

1 Corinthians 15:1-26 12But if it is preached that Christ has been raised

from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? 13If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ

has been raised. 14And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your

faith. 15More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead.

1 Corinthians 15:1-26 But he did not raise him if in fact the dead are not

raised. 16For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either. 17And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are

still in your sins. 18 Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. 19If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people

most to be pitied.

1 Corinthians 15:1-26 20But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen

asleep. 21For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. 22For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will

be made alive. 23But each in turn: Christ, the firstfruits; then, when he comes,

those who belong to him.

1 Corinthians 15:1-26 24Then the end will come, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father after he has destroyed all dominion, authority and power. 25For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his

feet. 26The last enemy to be destroyed is death.

1 Corinthians 15:17-1917And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is

futile; you are still in your sins. 18 Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. 19If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all

peoplemost to be pitied.

1. “There were too many witnesses. Hallucinations are private, individual, subjective. Christ appeared to Mary Magdalene, to the disciples minus Thomas, to the disciples including Thomas, to the two disciples at Emmaus, to the fishermen on the shore, to James (his “brother” or cousin), and even to five hundred people at once (1 Cor 15:3–8). Even three different witnesses are enough for a kind of psychological trigonometry; over five hundred is about as public as you can wish. And Paul says in this passage (v. 6) that most of the five hundred are still alive, inviting any reader to check the truth of the story by questioning the eyewitnesses—he could never have done this and gotten away with it, given the power, resources and numbers of his enemies, if it were not true.”

The Hallucination Theory – Response

2. “The five hundred saw Christ together, at the same time and place. This is even more remarkable than five hundred private “hallucinations” at different times and places of the same Jesus. Five hundred separate Elvis sightings may be dismissed, but if five hundred simple fishermen in Maine saw, touched and talked with him at once, in the same town, that would be a different matter.”

~ Peter Kreeft and Ronald K. Tacelli, Handbook of Christian Apologetics: Hundreds of Answers to Crucial Questions, (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1994), 187.

The Hallucination Theory – Response

“The style of the Gospels is radically and clearly different from the style of all the myths. Any literary scholar who knows and appreciates myths can verify this. There are no overblown, spectacular, childishly exaggerated events. Nothing is arbitrary. Everything fits in. Everything is meaningful. The hand of a master is at work here.”

The Myth Theory - Response

“Psychological depth is at a maximum. In myth it is at a minimum. In myth, such spectacular external events happen that it would be distracting to add much internal depth of character. That is why it is ordinary people like Alice who are the protagonists of extraordinary adventures like Wonderland. The character depth and development of everyone in the Gospels—especially, of course, Jesus himself—is remarkable. It is also done with an incredible economy of words. Myths are verbose; the Gospels are laconic.”

The Myth Theory - Response

“There are also telltale marks of eyewitness description, like the little detail of Jesus writing in the sand when asked whether to stone the adulteress or not (Jn 8:6). No one knows why this is put in; nothing comes of it. The only explanation is that the writer saw it. If this detail and others like it throughout all four Gospels were invented, then a first-century tax collector (Matthew), a “young man” (Mark), a doctor (Luke), and a fisherman (John) all independently invented the new genre of realistic fantasy nineteen centuries before it was reinvented in the twentieth.”

~ Peter Kreeft and Ronald K. Tacelli, Handbook of Christian Apologetics: Hundreds of Answers to Crucial Questions, (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1994), 189-190.

The Myth Theory - Response

The Disciples were wrong:

Theory #1

The Disciples went to the wrong tomb

(Oops Theory)

The Disciples were wrong:

Theory #2

They stole the body of Jesus and covered it

up

“[This] theory only saddles you withtwelve inexplicable lunatics

instead of one.”

~ C. S. Lewis

The Conspiracy Theory – Response

1. “Pascal gives a simple, psychologically sound proof for why this is unthinkable:

The apostles were either deceived or deceivers. Either supposition is difficult, for it is not possible to imagine that a man has risen from the dead. While Jesus was with them, he could sustain them; but afterwards, if he did not appear to them, who did make them act? The hypothesis that the Apostles were knaves is quite absurd. Follow it out to the end, and imagine these twelve men meeting after Jesus’ death and conspiring to say that he had risen from the dead.

The Conspiracy Theory – Response

This means attacking all the powers that be. The human heart is singularly susceptible to fickleness, to change, to promises, to bribery. One of them had only to deny his story under these inducements, or still more because of possible imprisonment, tortures and death, and they would all have been lost. Follow that out. (Pascal, Pensées 322, 310)

The Conspiracy Theory – Response

2. “The disciples’ character argues strongly against such a conspiracy on the part of all of them, with no dissenters. They were simple, honest, common peasants, not cunning, conniving liars. They weren’t even lawyers! Their sincerity is proved by their words and deeds. They preached a resurrected Christ and they lived a resurrected Christ. They willingly died for their “conspiracy.” Nothing proves sincerity like martyrdom.”

The Conspiracy Theory – Response

“The change in their lives from fear to faith, despair to confidence, confusion to certitude, runaway cowardice to steadfast boldness under threat and persecution, not only proves their sincerity but testifies to some powerful cause of it. Can a lie cause such a transformation? Are truth and goodness such enemies that the greatest good in history—sanctity—has come from the greatest lie? Use your imagination and sense of perspective here. Imagine twelve poor, fearful, stupid (read the Gospels!) peasants changing the hard-nosed Roman worldwith a lie.”

The Conspiracy Theory – Response

3. “There could be no possible motive for such a lie. Lies are always told for some selfish advantage. What advantage did the “conspirators” derive from their “lie”? They were hated, scorned, persecuted, excommunicated, imprisoned, tortured, exiled, crucified, boiled alive, roasted, beheaded, disemboweled and fed to lions—hardly a catalog of perks!”

The Conspiracy Theory – Response

4. “If the resurrection was a lie, the Jews would have produced the corpse and nipped this feared superstition in the bud. All they had to do was go to the tomb and get it. The Roman soldiers and their leaders were on their side, not the Christians’. And if the Jews couldn’t get the body because the disciples stole it, how did they do that? The arguments against the swoon theory hold here too: unarmed peasants could not have overpowered Roman soldiers or rolled away a great stone while they slept on duty.”

~ Peter Kreeft and Ronald K. Tacelli, Handbook of Christian Apologetics: Hundreds of Answers to Crucial Questions (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1994), 184–186.

The Conspiracy Theory – Response

1. “Jesus could not have survived crucifixion. Roman procedures were

very careful to eliminate that possibility. Roman law even laid the death penalty on any soldier who let a capital prisoner escape in any way,

including bungling a crucifixion. It was never done.”

The Swoon Theory - Response

2. “The fact that the Roman soldier did not break Jesus’ legs, as he did to the other two crucified criminals (Jn 19:31–33), means that the soldier was sure Jesus was dead. Breaking the legs hastened the death so that

the corpse could be taken down before the sabbath (v. 31).”

The Swoon Theory - Response

3. “How were the Roman guards at the tomb overpowered by a swooning corpse? Or by unarmed

disciples? And if the disciples did it, they knowingly lied when they wrote the Gospels, and we are into the

conspiracy theory.”

The Swoon Theory - Response

4. “How could a swooning half-dead man have moved the great stone at the door of the tomb? Who moved

the stone if not an angel? No one has ever answered that question. Neither the Jews nor the Romans would move it, for it was in both their interests to keep the tomb sealed; the Jews had the stone put there in the first place,

and the Roman guards would be killed if they let the body “escape.” “

The Swoon Theory - Response

“The story the Jewish authorities spread, that the guards fell asleep and the disciples stole the body (Mt 28:11–15), is

unbelievable. Roman guards would not fall asleep on a job like that; if they did,

The Swoon Theory - Response

they would lose their lives. And even if they did fall

asleep, the crowd and the effort and the noise it would

have taken to move an enormous boulder would have

wakened them. Furthermore, we are again into the

conspiracy theory, with all its unanswerable difficulties.”

5. “If Jesus awoke from a swoon, where did he go? Think this through: you have

a living body to deal with now, not a dead one. Why did it disappear? There

is absolutely no data, not even any false, fantastic, imagined data, about Jesus’ life after his crucifixion, in any sources, friend or foe, at any time,

early or late. A man like that, with a past like that, would have left traces.”~ Peter Kreeft and Ronald K. Tacelli, Handbook of Christian Apologetics:

Hundreds of Answers to Crucial Questions (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1994), 183–184.

The Swoon Theory - Response

The best possible Theory:

Jesus actually rose from the

dead!

“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral

teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg

— or else he would be the Devil of Hell.

“You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or

something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and

God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us.

He did not intend to.

~ Lewis, C.S., Mere Christianity, revised edition, New York, Macmillan/Collier, 1952, p. 55 ff.

Easter B. Q. #2

What difference

does it make if Jesus really rose from the

dead?

1. The resurrection of Jesus proves the ultimate truth that Christianity is

true!1 Corinthians 15:20 

20But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen

asleep.

2. The resurrection of Jesus provesGood Friday worked!

1 Corinthians 15:17 17And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is

futile; you are still in your sins.

2. The resurrection of Jesus provesGood Friday worked!

1 Corinthians 15:3-43For what I received I passed on to you as of first

importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, 4that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to

the Scriptures…

3. The resurrection of Jesus proclaims Christ is Victor over Death

1 Corinthians 15:2525For he must reign until he has put all his

enemies under his feet. 26The last enemy to bedestroyed is death.

4. The resurrection of Jesus is aGuarantee of our life to come

1 Corinthians 15:20-2320But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. 21For since

death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. 22For as in Adam all die, so in

Christ all will be made alive. 23But each in turn: Christ, the firstfruits; then, when he comes,

those who belong to him.

5. The resurrection of Jesus declaresthat he is alive today!

1 Corinthians 15:7-8 7Then he appeared to James, then to all the

apostles, 8and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.

6. The resurrection of Jesus is the very source you have for your life now in

Jesus1 Corinthians 15:20 

20But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen

asleep.

6. The resurrection of Jesus is the very source you have for your life now in

JesusColossians 3:1-3

1Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is seated at the

right hand of God. 2Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. 3For you died, and your life is now

hidden with Christ in God. 4When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear

with him in glory.

BELLINI, Giovanni Resurrection of Christ 1475-79 Oil on panel,Staatliche Museen, Berlin

The Lord is Risen!

Are you living in the reality of

Jesus’ Resurrection?