The Circumstantial Evidence - Bible Learning Center

Was Jesus Seen Alive After His Death on the Cross?

The disciples faced a life of hardship. They often went without food, slept exposed to the elements, were ridiculed, beaten, imprisoned, and most of them executed in torturous ways. Why? Because they were convinced without a shadow of a doubt that they had seen Jesus Christ alive from the dead.
How is this different than Muslims, Mormans, and followers of Jim Jones who died for their beliefs?
Muslims might be willing to die for their belief that Allah revealed himself to Muhammad, but this revelation was not done in a publicly observable way. So they could be wrong about it. They may sincerely thing it’s true, but they can’t know for a fact, because they didn’t witness it themselves. However, the apostles were willing to die for something they had seen with their own eyes and touched with their own hands.
People will die for their religious beliefs if they sincerely believe they’re true, but people won’t die for their religious beliefs if they know their beliefs are false.

There were hardened skeptics who didn’t believe in Jesus before his crucifixion who turned around and adopted the Christian faith after Jesus’ death. E.g. James and Paul.

The Jewish culture has thousands of years of maintaining social institutions entrusted to them by God.
But five weeks after Jesus is crucified, over 10,000 Jews are following him and claiming that he is the initiator of a new religion. And they’re willing to give up all five of the social institutions that they have been taught since childhood have such importance.
Jewish people no longer offer sacrifices.
Jews began to teach that you don’t become an upstanding member of the community merely by keeping Moses’ laws.
The “sabbath” moves from Saturday to Sunday, because Sunday is when Jesus rose from the dead.
Jews believed in monotheism—only one God. While Christians teach a form of monotheism, they say that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are one God.
Christians pictured the Messiah as someone who suffered and died for the sins of the world, whereas Jews had been trained to believe that the Messiah was going to be a political leader.

Early Christians celebrate by remembering Jesus’s death through communion. Why? Because they realized that Jesus’ slaying was a necessary step to a much greater victory. His murder wasn’t the last word—the last word was that he had conquered death for all of us by rising from the dead.
The early church adopted a form of baptism from their Jewish upbringing, called proselyte baptism. When Gentiles wanted to take upon themselves the laws of Moses, the Jews would baptize those Gentiles in the authority of the God of Israel.
But in the New Testament, people are baptized in the name of the God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Jesus has been elevated to the full status of God.
Baptism is also a celebration of Jesus’ death. By going underwater, you’re celebrating his death, and by being brought out of the water, you’re celebrating the fact that Jesus was raised to newness of life.

When a major cultural shift takes place, historians always look for events that can explain it.
The Christian church was a movement that began shortly after the death of Jesus. It spread rapidly and triumphed over a number of competing ideologies, eventually overwhelming the entire Roman empire.
Who would have predicted in the first century that the early Christian church, whose primary message was that a crucified carpenter from an obscure village triumphed over the grave, would outlast the Roman Empire?

All over the world, in every culture, people from all kinds of backgrounds and personalities—well educated and not, rich and poor, thinkers and feelers, men and women—they all will testify that more than any single thing in their lives, Jesus Christ has changed them.