Challenging the Skeptics: A Miracle Story

SPEAKER A 00:00:01 - 00:10:40 It's all too often said that there are no miracles performed these days. Well, I'd like to challenge this idea by reviewing the evidence we have for Jesus' resurrection. Welcome to Miracles in the 21st Century. I'm Dr. John Ashton. Of course, Jesus' resurrection happened in the 1st century, and today we have large numbers of people who essentially believe that the Bible account is fiction. It is stories that have been made up to justify religion and justify perhaps the background of Israel, the Jewish people, and so forth. But in actual fact, Christianity is based on evidence. It's faith that is based on evidence. It's faith that is based on eyewitness accounts. And so when we look at the New Testament, which a lot of people write off as just fiction, we actually have a lot of evidence that it is historically accurate. In particular, we have a number of eyewitnesses that contributed and wrote down what they saw. And those were the authors of the 4 Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And of course, Peter and James and Paul, who all wrote of their experiences. Now, Luke in particular, he was a doctor, and he gathered evidence. He was writing from some other people, and he gathered evidence, and he put it down and wrote it down so that it could be recorded. And it's very interesting that the way Luke writes, he writes as a historian, as a historical researcher, in that when he introduces different topics, he identifies the timeline. He will talk about during the reign of a particular king. He will talk about particular public figures that were in place at that particular time. And for a lot of— and for some time, some of the critics of Luke said, well, hang on, he talks about Lysimachus, for example, being in Abilene, I think, and there's no record of a governor Lysimachus in Abilene. Well, then of course later, more recent archaeological findings have found, yes, the inscriptions and verified in detail the historicity of Luke, to the point now that Roman historians and specialists in Roman history now agree that Luke's Gospel and the Book of Acts, which was written by Luke, are extremely accurate historically. Now the other thing is that we need to realize, and not many people realize this, that we have records of these eyewitness accounts that go back to within 100 and 200 years of when those eyewitness accounts were written. And this is very important because if we say, look at Tacitus' Annals of the History of Rome, for example, which we get a lot of our Roman history from and we don't question any of it, he wrote about, I think, about 1,000 114 AD, so in the beginning of the 2nd century. But the oldest manuscript that we actually have dates to about 850 AD. And that's not a complete set of all his books either. Some of his books, the oldest manuscripts, I think, were copied about 1000 AD. So in other words, we're basing our data on manuscripts that were written 700 years after the original one. When we look at the Bible, we have manuscripts that were written within 100 or 200 years, and we have over 6,000 manuscripts, whereas we only have one copy of Tacitus' manuscript that was written at 850. And this goes for a lot of copies of other books like Josephus' History of the Jewish Wars and so forth like this. We have single copies that were written hundreds of years later. When we look at the Bible account, however, we have thousands of copies. Matter of fact, there's about 9,000 translations that were written in the first few centuries. This is a lot of translations of the Bible that were written and copied at that time. The other thing too is we find inscriptions and quotes in other documents, and we find inscriptions on buildings and so forth, to the point that there are about 33,000, from memory, something like that, in that order of magnitude, of these inscriptions that are read that are so complete that if we put them all together, we could completely rewrite the New Testament except for a dozen or so verses. And this is powerful evidence collaborating these particular stories. Now, the other important thing is that these stories, well, these accounts record eyewitness events. And one of those eyewitness events is that of the resurrection. Pardon me. Now, one of the things is we know that there were eyewitness accounts of how Jesus resurrected Lazarus. And when he was resurrected, the people had to go and unwrap the grave clothes off him. And so he was resurrected as a healed, human person. But when Jesus was resurrected, when John and Peter raced into the grave, they saw the grave clothes. And remember, Jesus had been wrapped up. They were still there in place. And it was as if Jesus' body came through the grave cloths. And I'll talk about this in a little bit more detail, but this is a very important point. Now, some people say, well, Jesus didn't really die, he just swooned and this sort of thing and was revived later. Well, We need to understand that Jesus was professionally killed by the Romans. He was crucified, had nails driven through his wrists and feet, nailed to the cross. He had been whipped extensively beforehand. To verify that he was dead, he was speared through the side. And John records that water and blood came out, which showed he'd been dead for a while. His blood was starting to congeal. There. And also when his body was asked for to be taken to the grave, before Pilate released it, he sent a centurion to check that Jesus was really dead. And so remember, they were professional killers. They knew exactly that was their job in war, to make sure that the enemy was dead. And he verified that Jesus was definitely dead. And so we had this person that was definitely dead, came through the graveclothes. Now, this is very important because there are eyewitness accounts again of how the disciples were meeting in a locked room for fear of the Jews, and Jesus appeared to them. So Jesus was able in his resurrected body to come through the walls there. Now, the other important thing is that Jesus not only appeared to these people, people like Peter, Who then wrote about it, declared it publicly in speeches, and gave his life as a testimony. And the many witnesses, they gave their lives that that was true. They had actually seen Jesus after the— after he had been killed. He was alive. And they gave that testimony. And that's why Christianity spread. That's why people gave their lives, because it was a true story. It was unbelievable. It was a miracle. It was evidence that Jesus was God. But there's more to that too. Jesus publicly appeared to the disciples at his translation. So if we read the book of Acts there, again recorded by Luke, which he records the detail, that Jesus was preaching a sermon to a group of people. And as he spoke, he gave 2 last messages. He said, I will give you the power. The Holy Spirit will descend upon you, will give you power. and I will come again. And then at that time, in front of all those people, Jesus was taken up by angels and disappeared out of sight. And angels spoke to them. Luke records that the angels spoke to them afterwards and said, why do you continue looking up into the sky? As you saw Jesus go, he's going to come again. Now, this was a public event that was performed in front of many witnesses. And those were the people that went off and told the story of Christianity, the account of Christianity, which is why Christianity spread so powerfully in the world. Because these were public miracles that occurred, that were witnessed by many people, that there is a non-material aspect to our existence. There is a Creator God. That Creator God came to earth. and taught, taught us to love one another and to love God, and that one day he will be— he will return. And that's the wonderful message of Christianity. It's based on eyewitness accounts that were preserved by and written down by many people: Paul, Peter, James, Mark, John, Luke, and Matthew. And so we have these eyewitness accounts that were preserved too and were so important. So many copies were made of them because That was an amazing event that had never been witnessed before. That was the true miracles that we can base our faith on. I'm Dr. John Ashton. Have a great day.