Is the Resurrection a Fabrication?

"What is this stuff all about Jesus not really dying on the cross and just entering a coma like state, only to wake up out of it on the third day. There's all these claims that Christians made it up that he died and rose and went to heaven. Do we have only the Bible to rely on for those facts?"

This is a heresy that is fairly old, and pops up now and again when people are improperly educated. The problem, of course, is that Jesus did actually die on the cross. While conceivable that a man could hold out against all the agonies of normal crucifixion, it's not likely, and any theory that He did neglects one important thing: The Romans were extremely efficient killers. Extremely efficient. They were probably the most ruthless and effective killers in history until the modern day and the Hitlers, Stalins, Maos and Pol Pots came along. They did not allow criminals whom they had crucified to survive, which is why they traditionally broke the legs of victims to make sure they eventually asphyxiated, and why they also stabbed them with spears to make sure they were dead, and not anything else. This also had the effect of bleeding them to death if the holes through their wrists/hands and feet, and the whippings to their backs hadn't done that yet.

And remember in Christ's particular case, He was executed as a rebel against the Roman empire. They would have been particularly scrupulous about making sure He was dead. They would have actively worked to prevent any of His followers rescuing Him or somehow helping Him, to become once again a source of rebellion and discontent. They also would've worked to make sure He died and stayed dead, again out of that same Imperial pragmatism. The Romans were shrewd and skilled administrators. They had no love for local leaders who might challenge their rule. And in strict observance of historical fact as far as we can tell, they did make sure He was dead, and they did post guards around His tomb to prevent His followers from staging anything like what actually happened.

Nope, historically speaking the odds are astronomically high that Jesus Christ died on that Cross. High to the point of utter certainty, in fact. As far as historical evidence goes, we don't have all that much, and by that I mean we have more evidence that Jesus Christ died than we do that Julius Caesar died. The Bible, certainly gives its share of evidence, and frankly, the historical validity of the Gospels is well established in scholarly circles, and while the dating of them is somewhat in doubt, that they provide historical information is not. It is only those who cannot see them as anything aside from faith documents and Scripture that reject their historical validity, and that's a dogmatic stance, not a historical one.

There's no reason to disbelieve the Gospel writers and yet to believe any other historical document. They had human authors, so if you can trust a human in history to write something true and accurate to any degree, you can trust the Gospel writers. If not, then you can't trust anyone, ever, anywhere.

As for Christians making this up, that's ludicrous. Remember that of the original Apostles, ten of them DIED for this belief, one spent his life in exile, and the last committed suicide after betraying Christ. I'm not saying that being a martyr makes you automatically right, now, but what I am saying is that if it was made up by Christians, the Apostles are the likely authors of the lie, or at least were guaranteed to be in on it. In that case, they would know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the religion they were creating would be based on a false principle, and that as a result it wasn't true and they were likely doing it to gain power or money or respect or whatever.

But what they actually DID gain was death at the hands, again, of the worlds most efficient killers. And in each instance, they were offered the opportunity to recant of their beliefs and claims that Christ was Risen, and thus save their lives, and they refused to do so. Likewise, those not of the Apostles who nevertheless claimed to have seen Christ also refused to abandon their beliefs, even in the face of, and after, torture and then execution. For a lie? For something they KNEW was untrue, and the rewards of which would not be available to them after death? That's the silliest and most ridiculous claim ever.

No, the Apostles, right or wrong, really and truly believed that Christ had died, and Risen, and that they had seen Him and talked with Him after His Resurrection and that they saw Him Ascend into Heaven. And we must ask why. What could make these men, from disparate backgrounds and walks of life, some of whom didn't particularly like each other, and all of whom rarely showed why Christ selected them until the end, agree on something so radically impossible? What they believed was nothing no one would have believed at that time without having seen it.

And then look at the evidence of what happened afterward. Those same followers of Christ were out of their minds with fear that the Romans, those brutal killers, would execute them too. And then, as of nowhere, they burst out into the world and set it on fire. There's never been a missionary effort like that of the Apostles, who were utterly manic in their obsession with spreading the Gospel. They preached everywhere, all over the world, and reached every audience they could. They spoke to people whose languages they didn't even know, they converted people everywhere.

Why? For a lie? No. No man has ever been so motivated for a lie. The only truly likely explanation is that the Apostles really believed that Christ had Risen, and this gave them the courage and love to proclaim it to everyone, even in the face of death and torture.

And finally, there's the basic theology of it. There's absolutely no meaning, nor theological importance, in a Crucifixion where Christ doesn't die. If God exists, and He is the God we Christians have always said it was, then the conquest of Death was logically part of the plan, and that meant dying and Rising again. It was part of the conquest of the consequences of Sin, it freed Man from the doom of Hell, and from the final Death, it promised us the Resurrection of the Body for ourselves, not just Christ.

As for our sources, yes, we have the accounts of the Gospels, four separate accounts compiled into the Bible that are both historical, and inspired scriptural literature. We also have the oral tradition of the Church, the spoken teachings of Christ and the Apostles, of which the Gospels only capture part of the message. And we have historical writings of Roman historians who record the spread of Christianity with an alarming speed, and the measures taken by the Romans to stop it which only increased its growth.

There was a Jew in the Sanhedrin in Christ's time named Gamaliel who said something important about the Apostles when they were preaching of the Risen Lord. He said that if they were of Man, then they would fail eventually and fall away or die out. But if their message and purpose were of God, then nothing could quench it and they would never die out, and that is exactly what we've seen. The Church, despite periods of persecution, inept leaders, terrible corruption, low attendance, rank heresies attacking her, etc. has never fallen. She has been reformed, certainly, she has in some senses been resurrected, but she has never been vanquished. If she were of Man, this would not be possible.