So you want to become a Christian...

Atheists insists Christianity says:
"Just put your blind faith in Christianity"

but Christianity has always maintained "here's how you can you know it's true"

In the book of Acts, Paul says to the people of Athens:

"For he has set a day when we will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to everyone by raising him from the dead." (Acts 17:31)

So if Christians proclaim "here's the proof" why do atheists hear "just believe without any evidence whatsoever." it's as if "hearing they do not hear and seeing they do not see."

But for those with ears to hear, knowing that Jesus rose from the dead is actually much simpler than people realize. To know that Jesus rose from the dead, we need to know two things:
1: That he was dead.
2: That he was alive again later.

If Jesus was dead, then alive again later, I'd say that our atheists friends have a big Son-of-God shaped hole in their worldview.


Jesus died by crucifixion, this is one of the best established facts in ancient history.

The new generation of atheists who learn about Christianity primarily through websites or social media, may be surprised that there are historical facts about Jesus. They think of Jesus as some mythical figure, like Hercules, except they are much angrier about Jesus for some reason.

It's a tragedy for the internet age that positions that would be laughed out of the room at the scholarly level can become quite popular at the internet level by circulating them among people who don't know much about a topic. At the scholarly level, "Jesus-mythers" are thought of along the same lines as Holocaust deniers. But at the internet level, it seems like everyone I run into says "Jesus never even existed."

"Really? Well, what books have you read on this?"
"None, but I've watched like three youtube videos! So obviouly i'm more knowledgeable than every respected scholar on the planet."

Meanwhile, even the most critical historical Jesus scholars will acknowlegdge certain facts about Jesus:
1: He was baptised by John the Baptist
2: That he had disciples
3: That he was known as a miracle worker and an exorcist
4: That he believed he played a crucial role in the coming kingdom of God
5: And of course, that he died by Crucifixion

The scholarly consensus on Jesus' death arises from having a variety of ancient sources. There are Christian, Jewish, and Roman pagan sources reporting Jesus' death, and knowing how crucifixion works.

Today, we tend to think of crucifixion as just nailing someone to a cross. But Roman crucifixion was a three step process:

The first step is the scourging.
Which was sometimes called the "half-death." because victims would be half-dead by the time it was finished. The Romans used a flagrum, which was made of thongs with chunk of bone and metal woven into the strands, designed for removing human flesh. We have records of people being beaten until their veins and arteries were exposed, until their bones were showing, or until their intestines spilled out. Julius Caesar remarks that "it is more grievous to be scourged than to be put to death." and that was just the beginning.

Step two was nailing the victim to a cross, and letting him hang there until the blood drained out of him.
Once he stopped gasping for breath, the Romans knew their work was done, almost.

The Romans didn't take crucifixion lightly, so their was a third step: a deathblow. Just to make sure their victim was dead. They need to pry someone off a cross, so they would smash their head in or stab them through the heart with a sword or spear, or set them on fire, or let wild animals rip them apart.Not the sort of process anyone is going to walk away from.

So Jesus' death isn't just a point of Christian doctrine, it's a fact of history, as even non-Christian scholars are happy to admit.

Atheist New-Testament Scholar Gerd Ludermann declared "Jesus' death as a consequence of crucifixion is indisputable."

John Dominic Crossan, of the infamous Jesus-Seminar says: There is not even the "slightest doubt about the fact of Jesus' crucifixion under Pontius Pilate."

Marcus Borg, another member of the Jesus-Seminar states: Jesus' execution is the "most certain fact about the historical Jesus"

Jewish Scholar Pinchas Lapide: Jesus' death by crucifixion is "historically certain."

Paula Fredriksen: "The single most solid fact about Jesus' life is his death: he was executed by the Roman prefect Pilate, on or around Passover, in the manner Rome reserved particularly for political insurrectionists, namely, crucifixion."

Bart Ehrman: "one of the most certain facts of history is that Jesus was crucified on orders of the roman prefect of Judea, Pontius Pilate."

So the real question is whether or not Jesus was alive again.
How would we know if Jesus was alive again following his execution by the Romans?

The same way we know many other things from history.
We need witnesses and we need to know we can trust these witnesses.
Do we have witnesses of the risen Jesus? Yes, lots.

Fortunately they began preaching almost immediately and we have summaries of their early sermons.
They issued official credal statements that could be easily memorized and passed onto others.
They sent out representatives with authoritative traditions, traditions that would eventually be incorporated into the Gospels and other writings.
We also have writings and quotations outside the New Testament from the next generation of Christian leaders, which included people like: Clement of Rome, and Polycarp, who knew one or more of the apostles and continued preaching the message of the apostles, especially the resurrection of Jesus.

But the most interesting source on the eyewitnesses of the risen Jesus is an early Christian creed recorded in 1 Corinthians 15:3-7

1 Corinthians was written around AD 55, and Paul says in the letter that he had already delivered the creed to the church in Corinth, which would have been several years earlier, but Paul received the creed long before that. Either when he visited the apostles in Jerusalem or perhaps even at his conversion, and scholars date his formulation within a few years of Jesus' crucifixion.

James D. G. Dunn writes: "This tradition, we can be entirely confident, was formulated as tradition within months of Jesus' death."

Michael Goulder: "Paul 'received' the tradition -- that is, he was taught it at his conversion -- perhaps two years after Jesus' death."

Ulrich Wilckens: "indubitably goes back to the oldest phase of all in the history of primitive Christianity"

Gerd Ludermann: "the elements in the tradition are to be dated to the first two years after the crucifixion of Jesus."

Paul Barnett: "within two or three years of the First easter."

Richard Burridge and Graham Gould: "from only a few years after Jesus' death."

Robert Funk and the Jesus Seminar: within "two or three years at most."

Richard Hays: "within about three years after Jesus was crucified in Jerusalem."

Alexander Wedderburn: "first half of the 30s."

So, there is widespread agreement among scholars from across the theological spectrum that 1 Corinthians 15 contains very early material that goes right back to the original apostles of Jesus shortly after his death.

3 For I passed on to you as of first importance what I also received—that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures,
4 and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day according to the scriptures,
5 and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.
6 Then he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep.
7 Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles.
8 Last of all, as though to one born at the wrong time, he appeared to me also.

Notice what we have here. We have Jesus' death for sins, His burial, His resurrection on the third day, and numerous appearances, and we have all of it as authoritative tradition within a few years, if not within months of the crucifixion.

As for the appearances, there are appearances to individuals: Peter, James the brother of Jesus and eventually Paul, the small groups, the twelve and all the apostles, and to a large group, he appeared to more than 500. The list also reports appearances to both friends and foes. Peter and the apostles were friends to Jesus during His three year ministry, but James and Paul weren't. James didn't believe that his brother was the messiah when Jesus was preaching in Galilee and Judea and Paul persecuted the Church and tried to destroy it. Yet they're all listed as witnesses who saw Jesus alive again sometime after his death.

This passage eliminates two skeptical responses to Jesus' resurrection:
The legend hypothesis and the hallucination hypothesis.

At the internet level, there are still people who claim that Christian belief in Jesus' resurrection arose through a process of legendary development over a period of many decades. But this is factually false.
We know as a fact of history that the resurrection was the heart of Christian preaching from the beginning.

You also may have heard people argue that Jesus' disciples simply hallucinated the resurrection appearances. But a hallucination by definition is something that occurs in the mind of the person experiencing it. If someone were to take a bunch of acid and a leprachaun appears to him, the rest of us are not going to ask for his pot of gold, because we're not going to see them, it's only in the mind of the person experiencing the hallucination. The leprechaun does not exist outside of his mind. So we can't attribute the resurrection appearances to legend or hallucinations, Jesus appeared to multiple people on multiple occasions.

Can we attribute them to deception? were the disciples lying about the appearances? There is a fatal flaw in the deception hypothesis, liars make poor martyrs. Some human beings are willing to die for what they believe in. I've never met anyone who's willing to die for something he made up. In the book of Acts, chapter 4, Peter and John are arrested and threatened in Acts 5, the apostles are put in jail and flogged. In Acts 12, James the brother of John is put to death by Herod and Peter is again put in jail.

The apostle Paul describes his life as a Christian in 2 Corinthians 11:24-27:

24 Five times I received from the Jews forty lashes less one.
25 Three times I was beaten with a rod. Once I received a stoning. Three times I suffered shipwreck. A night and a day I spent adrift in the open sea.
26 I have been on journeys many times, in dangers from rivers, in dangers from robbers, in dangers from my own countrymen, in dangers from Gentiles, in dangers in the city, in dangers in the wilderness, in dangers at sea, in dangers from false brothers,
27 in hard work and toil, through many sleepless nights, in hunger and thirst, many times without food, in cold and without enough clothing.

The jewish historian Josephus writes that James the brother of Jesus was stoned to death as a lawbreaker. Clement of Rome invites his readers to keep in mind the sufferings and martyrdom of Peter and Paul. So the apostles didn't just preach they had seen Jesus alive again. They were willing to endure prison, floggings and death as they preached, and that they really believed what they were saying.

Here again, it's not just Christians who draw this conclusion, even non-Christians maintain that the disciples sincerely believed that they had seen Jesus.

Gerd Ludermann: "It may be taken has historically certain that Peter and the disciples had experiences after Jesus' death in which Jesus appeared to them as the risen Christ."

Bart Ehrman: "We can say with complete certainty that some of his disciples at some later time insisted that [...] he soon appeared to them, convincing them that he had been raised from the dead."

Bart Ehrman: "It is a historical fact that some of Jesus' followers came to believe that he had been raised from the dead soon after his execution."

Paula Fredriksen: "I know in their terms what they saw was the raised Jesus [...] I'm not saying that they really did see the raised Jesus. I wasn't there. I don't know what they saw. But I do know [...] as a historian that they must have seen something."

Fredriksen said she 'doesn't know what they saw,' but I do. I think it's obvious what they saw. The disciples saw the sort of thing that would convince individuals and groups, friends and foes, that they had all seen a man that had been dead, alive again, standing infront of them, telling them why he had to die and rise again.

Unfortunately for our atheist friends, the only sort of thing that can do that is Jesus actually appearing to them, which means that Jesus rose from the dead. So there is only one conclusion to draw from the facts that even atheists and agnostic scholars grant as historically certain. and yet, the atheist and agnostic scholars clearly don't believe that Jesus rose from the dead.

Why do they reject the resurrection when they're aware of the historical evidence? Different people will give different reasons for denying Jesus' resurrection but if you do a little digging, two broad issues emerge most frequently.

First, many people have a prior commitment to naturalism. Supernatural explanations are ruled out before the investigation begins. And if supernatural explanations are ruled out prior to investigation, then Jesus' resurrection is never even a candidate for belief. So is a commitment to naturalism a good reason to reject the resurrection?
As Alvin Plantinga and others have shown, Naturalism as a worldview is fundamentally incoherent, because it ends up undermining the cognitive faculties required to affirm it. But a more glaring difficulty given a discussion of miracles is the global abundance of miracle claims.

In 2006 the Pew Forum issued a report titled 'Spirit and Power: a 10-Country survey of Pentecostals" discussing statistics on pentecostal and charismatic protestants within the United States, Brazil, Guatemala, Kenya, South Africa, India, the Philippines, and South Korea. And the researchers found that approximately 200,000,000 claim to have witnessed miraculous healings. That's not counting other kinds of Christians in those countries or Christians in other countries around the world.

Consider miracle reports in China, According to Edmond Tang: "All Christian churches in China practice some form of healing [...] In fact, according to some surveys, 90% of new believers cite healing as a reason for their convesion. This is especially true in the countryside where medical facilities are often inadequate or non-existent."

After reviewing a number of miracle reports from around the world, Craig Keener concludes "It is no longer plausible to tout "uniform human experience" as a basis for denying miracles, as in the traditional modern argument. Hundreds of millions of claims would have to be satisfactorily explained in nonsupernatural terms for this appeal to succeed; while many may be so explained, one cannot adopt the conclusion of uniformity as a premise without investigating all of them."

In other words, those who exclude supernatural explanations prior to investigation, do so by faith, not because the evidence demands it.

Second, it is perhaps even more common to reject the resurrection because of what the resurrection implies. If we believe that Jesus rose from the dead, we might think it is a good idea to listen to what He says. Because Jesus said all kinds of things about sin, and judgment and salvation and if we don't want to take his teachings seriously, or if we don't want to become Christians, or if we despise anything that has to do with Christianity then we need to get rid of that whole 'rising from the dead' thing.

Now this has always seemed like an odd approach to me, deciding what we want to believe ahead of time and then reject evidence that doesn't line up with what we don't want to believe. Atheists normally condemn this approach. Suppose an atheist comes to you with some kind of evidence, say evidence for common descent, that all human beings share an ancestor with all other organisms. If your response is "well, I don't like what that would mean. I don't like what common descent implies, so I'm going to reject any evidence you give me for it." The atheist will accuse you of being anti-science, and anti-evidence and irrational and bigoted and every other thing you can think of.

But then if you turn to that same atheist and present historical facts about the resurrection of Jesus, you'll suddenly find that Heaven and Hell and the Salem Witch Trials and gay wedding cakes and all sorts of other topics are entering into his evaluation of whether Jesus was dead and whether He was alive again afterwards. Feelings become the ultimate trump card.