“The compelling evidence for me is the unanimous testimony of all the apostles and even a former persecutor like St. Paul,” said Brant Pitre, assistant professor of theology at Our Lady of Holy Cross College in New Orleans. “There was no debate in the first century over whether Jesus was resurrected or not.”
Scholars say that the witnesses to Christ’s resurrection are compelling for a variety of reasons.
“People will seldom die even for what they know to be true. Twelve men don’t give up their lives for a lie,” said Ray, who recently returned from France, where he was filming his “Footprints of God” series at the amphitheater in Lyon, the site of a persecution in A.D. 177. “The martyrs of Lyon underwent two days of torture and all they would say is, ”˜I am a Christian.’ They knew the resurrection was true and didn’t question it.”
Barber also highlighted the diversity of sources and how they include different details as well as passages that do not paint the disciples in the best light.
“In the Road to Emmaus story, they write that they didn’t recognize him,” said Barber. “Our Biblical accounts are our best evidence.”
Several of the scholars pointed to 1 Corinthians, where Paul states that Christ appeared to 500 people.
“Some want to shy away from the Gospels because they say they were written later,” explained Barber. “If you want to believe that they were written later, then why wouldn’t the Gospels have made use of this piece of evidence from 1 Corinthians?” asked Barber.
What gets me about the people (especially clergy) who want to cast doubt on the resurrection because many early manuscripts of the Gospel of Mark left out the end of the last chapter which contains the resurrection narrative, is that they ignore the preexisting epistles of Paul that unequivocally attest to the resurrection and the divinity of Christ.
Not to mention that noone makes the claim that any of the earliest manuscripts of Mark are the [b]original[/b] manuscript that Mark set down. By way of example- none of the earliest manuscripts of the Epic of Gilgamesh from the Sumerian and Akkadian empires contain the full epic. It is only by including the later manuscripts from the Babylonian empire that the epic as a whole comes together and makes sense. Yet none discount the later Babylonian chapters as not really being part of Gilgamesh.
Also, there are many Gospel manuscripts from the same dating as the earliest Mark without the last several verses, that do contain fully formed resurrection narratives of the other Evangelists.
This sort of intellectual sleight of hand reveals a conscious or unconscious agenda to ignore and actively try to “disprove” the miraculous as being a possibility despite the many witnesses from different sources that this is in fact what happened.