By India McCarty
Can the resurrection be confirmed through additional historical sources? These experts say yes.
“There are actually 110 facts about the life, teachings, miracles, death and resurrection of Jesus in ancient sources outside the Bible,” Lee Strobel said during an appearance on Kirk Cameron’s TAKEAWAYS (via YouTube).
Strobel, a former atheist, previously said that he initially set out to disprove the resurrection occurred but, when faced with the overwhelming number of sources, found it “impossible.”
“My research caused me to realize: The case for the resurrection of Jesus is powerful and persuasive,” he continued. “That evidence led me to my own faith in Christ, and in the years since that investigation, I’ve been helping other Christians understand how we can have confidence in the biblical accounts of the Resurrection.”
While on TAKEAWAYS, Pastor Sean McDowell agreed, naming historians like Josephus, who gave “basic facts” about the life of Jesus in his writings.
“He doesn’t give all the details, but he tells details that help support and corroborate the accounts within the Gospels,” McDowell continued. “There’s not a ton of extra biblical sources on anything in that time period at that time, so the fact they would even talk about Jesus, who’s a religious leader in a small corner of the empire that didn’t have any political power anyways, is significant.”
Homicide detective J. Warner Wallace even applied the practice of forensic statement analysis to the Gospels and writings from that time, looking “for those words that would give away a perspective.”
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Wallace analyzed these pieces of writing to test the strength of the “credibility of the eyewitness” and admitted that he was initially a non-believer. However, his research changed that.
In an interview with CBN, he pointed out, “We don’t have a single, ancient record of any of the disciples ever recanting [their accounts of the resurrection] when that was often the goal of the people who were persecuting Christians.”
“So is it possible that they conspired for 60 years, at 500 plus people, under immense pressure with not enough family relationships to hold it together?” Wallace asked. “Yeah, it’s possible. It’s just not reasonable.”
McDowell added, “There’s reasons why some of the greatest journalists, greatest historians, greatest lawyers and thinkers of all time, have stopped and been like, ‘Wow, there’s a powerful case that Jesus lived, died and appeared to people on the third day.’”
The staggering number of outside historical sources that corroborate the Gospels, as well as forensic analysis of the Gospels themselves, more than prove the resurrection occurred.
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