Media Bias and the Resurrection of Jesus

By R. Fowler White
 
The military of ancient Rome really blew it. When it came to the resurrection of Jesus, the troops who guarded his tomb could have saved us all a lot of time and trouble by just giving up his dead body. One problem: they never did. They didn’t because they couldn’t. And they couldn’t because, despite what you may have read, the resurrection of Jesus was and is a well-attested fact, perhaps the best-attested fact of antiquity.
 
Neither the Romans nor the Jews of Jesus’ day denied it. In fact, practically nobody denied it for 1,700 years. But now it’s fashionable to deny it or, at least, to cast doubt on it. Why? Has the evidence changed? No, the testimony of history is still the same. As Thomas Arnold, former chair of Modern History at Oxford University, once wrote, “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 [has] given us that Christ died and rose again from the dead” (see his Sermons on the Christian Life: Its Hopes, Its Fears, and Its Close [6th ed.; London, 1859] 324).
 
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Passion of the Christ Trailer

(HT: COLLIDE)

From In Memoriam, XXXI

By Alfred Lord Tennyson (Courtesy of Rebecca Stark)
 
When Lazarus left his charnel-cave,
And home to Mary’s house return’d,
Was this demanded — if he yearn’d
To hear her weeping by his grave?

“Where wert thou, brother, those four days?”
There lives no record of reply,
Which telling what it is to die
Had surely added praise to praise.

From every house the neighbours met,
The streets were fill’d with joyful sound,
A solemn gladness even crown’d
The purple brows of Olivet.

Behold a man raised up by Christ!
The rest remaineth unreveal’d;
He told it not; or something seal’d
The lips of that Evangelist.
 
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“Resurrection Probably Reported in Same Year It Happened”

As Craig Blomberg posts, a soon-to-be-published book by New Testament scholar Richard Bauckham will detail evidence that suggests that belief in Jesus’s resurrection must have emerged shortly after his death:

“[Gerd] Ludemann, the atheist [historian], says this means within one to two years from Jesus’ death, it was widely agreed on that Christ had been bodily resurrected.  Bauckham, according to [Gary] Habermas, apparently moves that date back to within about one-half year’s time, in order for the necessary time to elapse for this to become widely standardized by the time of Paul’s conversion.”