The Resurrection - Was Jesus really dead?
The apostle Paul says that our faith is rubbish if Jesus did not rise from the dead. We are nothing if the resurrection was a hoax. The New Testament was written down within a few years of Jesus’ death. Many people who read it would have remembered what happened. They would have argued if what they read was not what they knew had happened.
The Romans were skilled in the art of crucifixion and they knew what it meant to check if a person was dead. Victims who were hanging from the nails through their wrists could only breathe by pulling their entire body weight up. This would be excruciating agony. They could take some of their weight on their nailed feet. Death finally came through suffocation when the victim had no strength left to push their body up. Some victims took days to die. In the case of Jesus, the next day was a holy day so the bodies had to be taken down before nightfall. When the soldiers found that the two criminals were still alive, they broke their legs. This meant they could no longer brace their weight to breathe. When they came to Jesus it looked as if he was already dead. One of the soldiers stabbed Jesus with a spear to make certain. Blood and water gushed out. This is medical evidence that the muscles of his heart had ruptured. He was definitely dead.
Three days later the disciples claimed that he had risen from the dead. If the disciples had simply gone to the wrong grave the Romans would have produced the body to prove that Jesus was dead. No body was ever found.
If the disciples had stolen the body they would have known it was a hoax. Every one of the early disciples was executed for claiming that Jesus rose from the dead. Would anyone die for what they knew to be a lie? Not one saved his life by saying "it's not true".
Scientists can prove certain things by repeating experiments. This cannot be done with events in the past. These can only be examined using documentary evidence. One journalist got so irritated by Christians that he decided to use his training to show that Jesus did not rise from the dead. The result is the book “Who Moved the Stone”. As a result of his examination, Frank Morrison became a believer.
