J. Warner Wallace is the founder of Cold Case Christianity and author of “Case Closed: A Detective Investigates the Resurrection.” He spoke on American Family Radio’s “The Stand Radio” and shared a contradiction in thought. If the same amount of evidence existed around another person’s life, there would be no debate among historians, he says.
“No one's been written about more than Jesus in antiquity. No evidence has been better preserved in all of antiquity about any historical figure than Jesus of Nazareth. It's not even close. But you have all of that evidence and insert one miracle, and they still abandon,” Wallace told show host Jeff Chamblee.
The issue is not the manuscript evidence, he says, but a presuppositional bias against the supernatural. Even so, there are still many practical explanations that prove the impossible did happen.
Fake resurrection
One popular atheist excuse for the resurrection is that Jesus didn’t die but was a resuscitated instead. Three people were on the cross that day, Jesus and two thieves. To make sure they were dead, the guards broke the legs of the two thieves but not Jesus, allowing some to claim Jesus didn’t die.
“Instead, they stabbed his (Jesus) side with a spear, and they saw a sudden flow of blood and water. They could tell water came out of his body,” says Wallace. “I'm going to tell you that we understand the science of death a lot better in this century than we did in that century.”
As he explains, church fathers in the first 400 years of the church did not understand how water came out of Jesus body, believing it to be symbolic of water baptism or the Holy Spirit.
In the present day, scientists are aware of process called effusion.
“When you have cardiac arrest, your heart stops beating, water collects either around your heart, that's called pericardial effusion, or it gathers in your lungs, that's called pleural effusion. And if you were to stab someone in the chest and hit the lungs because you're in the standing position, you would see a sudden flow of water in addition to blood,” Wallace explains.
Therefore, what was seen with Jesus was the result of pleural effusion. Precursor events to death had already happened.
“When the person wrote this in the gospels, they weren't thinking to themselves, ‘I'm going to include this little tricky detail that no one's going to know about for 400 or 500 years.’ No, in fact, it was not known for much longer than that, and this is something now we can look back at and say, that's a pretty decent sign that Jesus is not faking it,” Wallace says.
Christian Conspiracy
Another excuse that skeptics might give is that it is all a conspiracy theory: the disciples conspired to spread a fake story about the resurrection that continued to grow.
Wallace lists five things needed for a successful conspiracy: smallest number of co-conspirators, shortest possible time span, excellent communication, strong relationships and little to no pressure.
For this reason, Wallace doesn’t believe that a Christian conspiracy would work.
“We're not just talking about the 12. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15 that there's 500 who saw Jesus on the same day. So, this is a large number of people, too many. If you're telling me already there's 500 people involved in a conspiracy, someone's going to break,” Wallace states, also mentioning the 120 people in Acts 1.
The conspiracy would also have been held for six decades before everyone involved died, combined with the fact that the disciples were spread all over the world and couldn’t check their story, he says. And while there were some familial connections among the disciples, there was also Matthew, who was not related to anyone and disliked because he was a tax collector.
The biggest indicator was that the disciples were tortured. The reality, Wallace says, is that many people die for a lie when they didn’t know it was.
“But this is the group who would know if it was a lie, and that's why their death, their unwillingness to change any aspect of their story to avoid the torture, to avoid the death, has high evidential value because they're not like us,” says Wallace. “They're the ones who actually are making the claim themselves. They would know if it's a lie, and if it's a lie, why would you go through all that?”
Late Legend
Some think the resurrection was not believed in the first century but gained traction years later. They deny the value of eyewitnesses, saying as a late legend, the eyewitnesses never actually claimed to have seen Jesus, and the claims were actually written decades later after everyone else had died.
“If you want to lie about Jesus, here's how you do it, you wait till everyone who knows the truth is dead. Then you can say whatever you want,” says Wallace. “The first question in testing an eyewitness, were they written early enough to have been written by people who actually were there?”
In his studies, Wallace believes this to be true by following the chain of custody. For example, if the gospel of John wasn’t written, one could look at what John told his students, Ignatius and Polycarp, which they passed to their student Irenaeus, and him to his student Hippolytus.
“If you do this, you're going to discover all of the miraculous points that are made by the gospel authors, that Jesus is born miraculously, was recognized as God, taught divinely, worked miracles, died on a cross, rose from the dead, ascended into heaven, and reigns with God. You'll be stuck with those from the very beginning. They're on every link of the chain of custody,” Wallace states.
Therefore, he doesn’t think the resurrection of Jesus is a late legend because, as he says, “it's not late, and it's not a legend.”
