In preparation for Easter this year I have been doing a lot of reading and studying about the incarnation of Christ and specifically about his resurrection. This is such a profound and foundational teaching for the Church, I thought I would post a good article I read on this topic.
Here is an extended quote from an article Tim Keller wrote titled “A Case for the Resurrection” in the magazine Relevant. It was subtitled: “Author and pastor Tim Keller on why Christ’s Resurrection is more than just a story.”
The resurrection was as inconceivable for the first
disciples, 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. For them,
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. And many of Celsus’ readers agreed: For
them, that was a major problem. In ancient societies, as you know,
women were marginalized, and the testimony of women was never given
much 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.
Please check out the Relevant website to read more.
In Him,
Pastor Dennis
