Running header: THE RESURRECTION OF JESUS.
The Bible states that Jesus was executed in a particularly brutal fashion, than miraculously came back to life. Eye witness accounts of His activities afterwards are detailed in the Gospels. In order to research the authenticity of this claim, this paper will cite sources to address three questions:.
1. The above claim is based on statements in the Bible. Is the Bible itself a reliable source of information?.
2. Within the context of Hebrew and Roman culture and customs of the time, what is the hard evidence that this event occurred? .
3. Are there alternative explanations for the belief that Jesus walked the earth after his death? .
If the Bible is a main source of information about events two thousand years ago, its validity is a key issue. Let's look at what the Bible actually is: .
The Bible is a series of over sixty books and letters arranged in a more or less chronological order, by over forty authors in three different languages- Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. The written material covers over fourteen hundred years and events in Asia, Africa, and Europe. The authors range from poor people to kings, from Hebrew fishermen to Greek doctors (Poole, 1998). The New Testament books were written before 100 A.D. but were not put together until 367 A.D. by Athanasius and the councils of Hippo (393 A.D.), (Poole, 1998). .
The Bible has manuscript support from twenty four thousand copies made, compared to, for example, the works of Caesar, which had only ten copies (McDowell, 1990). There is concordance between Biblical histories and secular sources such as various Roman writings by Flavius Josephus and Pliny, Governor of Bithynia (Poole, 1990). There is also archaeological evidence from many sources such as the tablets unearthed from Edla/ Northern Syria, Dead Sea Scrolls, etc. that do not contradict the Biblical accounts (McDowell, 1990). .
Lets now look at the actual events alleged to have occurred during the resurrection itself.