"WHAT CAN WE BELIEVE?"
“Resurrection – Myth or Reality”? Part II
In his book, Jesus The Jew, Geza Vermes says regarding the resurrection that “the closest approach to firs hand evidence is the testimony of several trustworthy men who assert that Jesus appeared to them – to the Twelve, to all the apostles, and to over five hundred brethren in addition to the leaders of the Church, Peter and James. It is their collective conviction of having seen the dead teacher alive, combined with the initial discover of the empty tomb, that provides the substance for faith In Jesus’ rising from the dead.”
What do you think? Is this evidence essential for believing in the resurrection? Does the belief in the resurrection need objective testimony? Could the resurrection be believed without their testimony? What brings conviction of the resurrection?
Marcus Borg, Jesus scholar and founder of the “Jesus Seminar”, says in his book, Jesus At 2000, that “the foundational experience that initiated the transformation from Jesus as a Galilean Jew to Jesus as the face of God and the second person of the Trinity was Easter…By Easter, I mean most centrally and simply that the followers of Jesus continued to experience him as a living reality after his death, but in a radically new way. Namely, they experienced him as being a spiritual, nonmaterial reality and increasingly in the years and decades after his death, as having the qualities of God.” Borg adds, “The truth of Easter is grounded not in whether the tomb was empty, but in the ongoing experience of Jesus as a living reality, as a figure of the present.”
What do you think of Borg’s view? Would the first disciples have believed in the resurrected Jesus without an empty tomb? Without his resurrection appearances to them? What caused them to believe? What causes people today to believe or disbelieve?
P.T. Forsyth, a renowned British scholar of a previous generation says in his book, The Person and Place of Christ, that “my contact with Christ is not merely visionary, it is moral, personal and mutual….what I have in Christ is not an impression, but a life change; not an impression of personal influence, which might evaporate, but a faith of central personal change. I do not merely feel change; I am changed. He has given me a new life, a new moral self, a new consciousness of moral reality.”
Some people would say experiences of this kind are the real and only proof of the resurrection of Jesus. What do you think? Do people today have those kinds of experiences? Do these experiences make them believers? What would produce faith in the resurrection today?
