WAS JESUS REALLY RESURRECTED? If not, then Christianity is not true. What does Mark’s Gospel say?

If we were going to identify the central foundational event in Judaism, it would be the revelation of the Torah at Mount Sinai. You could say that the exodus from Egypt was critical, but without the Torah, there would be no Judaism. In reality, the exodus from Egypt was a necessary step toward the revelation of the Torah at Mount Sinai. Now, does Christianity have a central foundational event? So, non-Christians might have a hard time with this question. But for Christians, the key event was the resurrection of Jesus, their belief that Jesus was resurrected three days after Rome crucified him. And the Apostle Paul declares in 1 Corinthians 15, verse 14, that if Jesus was not raised from the dead, then your faith is in vain. Basically, without the resurrection of Jesus, there is no Christianity. Everything falls apart. So, the question now is quite obvious. What is the evidence that establishes the resurrection of Jesus as a historical fact? The answer is that there is no evidence, except for the testimony of the writers of the Christian Bible. But there is zero outside corroboration. Now, we have to recognize a few things about these writings of the Christian Bible. Number one, they're not written contemporaneously with the events that they're describing. The various authors write decades after the alleged events. Number two, the writers are not historians or journalists. They are evangelists trying to promote their beliefs. And the author of the Gospel of John expresses this in chapter 20, verse 31. He says, these accounts have been written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah. He's basically admitting that they've compiled these stories in order to convince people to believe in Jesus. John is admitting that they are not objective. They have an agenda. They're trying to convince people to believe. So, you have to be cautious before simply accepting their claims uncritically. And number three, the various writers of the Christian scriptures contradict each other in their description of the same events, which is another red flag. So, again, the only source of this idea that Jesus rose from the dead is in the Christian scriptures. But we have to ask ourselves, how reliable are these stories? Can you bank on them uncritically? So, the Christian Bible begins with four different biographies of Jesus. They're referred to as the four Gospels. The word Gospel means good story or good news. And the four biographies are written anonymously. We don't know who wrote them. But church tradition attributes them to people named Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. While Matthew appears first, if you open up a Christian Bible, the first book you're going to find is the Gospel of Matthew, the Gospel according to Matthew. Virtually all scholars believe that Mark is actually the oldest Gospel, composed around the year 70, which is 40 or so years after the crucifixion of Jesus. So, the earliest account is 40 years after the alleged events take place. Matthew is believed to have composed his account around the year 80 or possibly later. Luke, it's believed, composed his Gospel around the year 90 or a little bit later than that. And the Gospel of John is understood to have been written about the year 100 of the Common Era or even a little bit later than that, which would be 70 years after the alleged events. Now, although the Gospel of Mark should be important because it was written closest to the events, the nascent Christian religion had some difficulties with the Gospel of Mark. There were big problems as far as the church was concerned with Mark. For example, Mark says absolutely nothing about Jesus being born to a virgin, which became an important belief in the first century. This became an axiom of the church, that Jesus had to have been born to a virgin, otherwise he would have inherited original sin from his father, and that's why he couldn't have a human father. So, this became an axiomatic doctrine of the church, and yet Mark speaks nothing about it. So, the other Gospel writers included this detail in their biographies of Jesus. You'll find it in Matthew and you'll find it in Luke. Now, when you compare the accounts of the Gospel writers, you will see there's a process where Mark's version, seen as problematic, is tweaked in the later Gospels to be more in line with emerging Christian theology. So again, don't forget that the Gospel stories are written at different periods. Let's say, just for now, the earliest is the year 70, then the year 80, then the year 90, then the year 100. And if you compare the Gospel accounts, you can see how the stories are massaged and tweaked to make the stories fit more in line with what the church believes to be important. So, let's look at a very interesting example. According to the Jewish historian Josephus, Yochanan HaMatbil was a popular apocalyptic preacher in the early 1st century. His main message was that the kingdom of God was at hand and that people should prepare for this by repenting of their sins and immersing in the Jordan River. The Christian scriptures refer to him as John the Immerser or John the Baptizer. Actually, they usually call him John the Baptist, but that's not really a great term. It's like he wasn't a Baptist as opposed to a Presbyterian. It really should be John the Baptizer. In any event, he was a historical figure. We know about him from Josephus. When Jesus was about 30 years old, he joined the crowds. Listen carefully. Jesus joined the crowds of people streaming to hear the preaching of John the Baptizer and to be immersed by him. But decades later, this subordination of Jesus to John became highly problematic for the church. And the gospel accounts progressively begin to downplay and marginalize the role of John the Baptizer and to magnify the role and the status of Jesus. So, what happens in Mark's gospel, which is the earliest? Jesus comes to the Jordan River, we're told, to be baptized by John. That's exactly what Mark tells us. But in Matthew's account, written later, Jesus comes to the Jordan River to be immersed by John. But John is reluctant to do this. And John is said to say to Jesus, I would prefer that you baptize me. But Jesus persists and John complies and John baptizes Jesus. So, we begin to see already the dynamics between Jesus and John switching a little bit. In Luke's gospel, written later, Jesus, we're told, is immersed in the Jordan River. But there's no mention of John doing it. Jesus probably does it by himself. And finally, in the gospel of John, which is the latest account, there's no mention of Jesus being baptized at all. And all that we find is John the Baptizer falling all over himself, praising Jesus. So, we see that there was an original story, probably the real story. But it becomes reworked and obscured over time as the church sought to tell the story as it saw things, as it wanted to be told. We see similar reverse engineering when it comes to the critical story of Jesus' alleged resurrection. So, the gospel of Mark ends by relating that Mary Magdalene, one of Jesus' followers, and her companions came to the tomb where Jesus was placed after his crucifixion. And they arrive early Sunday morning and they see that the large stone that had been blocking the entrance to the tomb has been moved. And they find a young man sitting there who tells them that Jesus is no longer in the tomb and that he has risen. And he instructs the women to tell Jesus' disciples to go north to the Galilee where they will meet Jesus. The women, Mark tells us, flee and they don't say anything to the disciples. And that's the end of the story. The disciples hear nothing about the tomb being empty and Jesus never appears to them. There's no post-resurrection appearances by Jesus. Now, we know that there were three million people who heard God speak at Mount Sinai. In Mark's telling of the story, no one, not one, no one saw Jesus rise from the dead and Jesus never appears to anyone later on to confirm that he was resurrected. There are no witnesses. All you have is a young man sitting at the tomb, we don't even know who this person is, claiming that Jesus rose from the grave. That's all that happens. You have a young man telling the women that Jesus rose from the grave. We're not told that this young man saw Jesus rising from the grave. He just came to the tomb and he found the tomb empty and he assumed that Jesus rose from the grave. But there could possibly be many other explanations for what might have happened to Jesus. There could have been some of the followers of Jesus that removed Jesus from the grave and buried him somewhere else. There could be dozens of possible explanations for what happened to the body of Jesus. For some reason, this young man, we're told, came to the conclusion that Jesus rose from the dead. Now, the other three gospel writers could not accept the story as told by Mark, simply could not accept it. And they each composed accounts where Jesus later appears to his followers. When you read Matthew and Luke and John, you'll see that they all talk about Jesus appearing to his followers. Yet these alternate accounts, these alternate accounts to Mark, also fail to impress. Because in some of these stories, the people don't recognize Jesus. So he appears to them and they don't recognize him. In other accounts of the story, they seem to think it is Jesus, but they doubt it. They weren't sure. These are not really compelling stories. In Matthew, he is seen in Jerusalem, but in Luke, he is only cited in the Galilee. So what happens? What was the real story? And you get the sense that the writers here are just making things up. They want to have a story where Jesus is found, but the stories that are told don't agree with each other. But it was clear that the church found Mark's account deficient. And because the church found Mark's account deficient, a number of different endings were composed later on and added to Mark that speak about Jesus appearing to his disciples. The ending that became the most popular, because again, there were a number of different endings that were composed. The ending that became the most popular was an account from the Middle Ages which found its way into the original King James Version of the Bible put out in 1611. And because of that, this became this sort of longer ending. An additional 11 verses in Mark's Gospel became the account that most people are familiar with. But this ending was not written by Mark. It was added by a later scribe, a fabricated story, falsifying the original text. Bart Ehrman writes about this as a forgery. It's basically what it is. Someone forging an alternative ending to one of the Gospels. Now, aside from raising questions about the veracity of the resurrection story, this also calls into question the reliability of the text of the Christian Bible altogether. Scholars have identified over 150,000 textual variants in the Christian Bible. When you think about it, it's absolutely unbelievable. The Christian Bible is much smaller than the Jewish Bible and much younger, meaning the Jewish Bible has been around much longer, it's much larger, and yet we've managed to have quality control where there are virtually no textual variants in the Jewish Bible and the only ones that are there basically are minor spelling mistakes, not mistakes, minor spelling variations which never affect the meaning of a word. But here we're told that the Christian Bible has over 150,000 textual variants. Now, Josh McDowell, a Christian apologist, writes in his books that defend Christianity. He says, but only, he doesn't have the word only underlined. I have the word only underlined and yellow highlighting. He says that only 400 of these variants cause doubts about the meaning of the text. Unbelievable. Only 400 places where there's doubt about the meaning of the text and even worse, and only 50 of these are of great significance. Only 50 of great significance. I would say that textual ambiguity regarding possible eyewitnesses to Jesus appearing after his death would be of great significance. And yet, we pretty much know this is not a textual variant. We know that this is a textual forgery. And so, this is a question mark that we have to place over the accounts of the resurrection of Jesus. And again, we're not going to solve this problem tonight, but just some food for thought.