Proving The Resurrection By the Minimal Facts Approach

[Randy Carson]

Post 65 - Fact 1: Jesus died by crucifixion

You have yet to prove that jesus died and not just gone comatose so, not a fact.

I covered this in post #388 - repeated (and expanded) here for your convenience:

In 1835, David Strauss definitively refuted the Swoon Theory, and it has never been taken seriously since. Strauss argued that if a half-dead Jesus, beaten and bloody from head to toe, managed to stagger back to where the apostles were in hiding, he would not have inspired his disciples to proclaim that He was GOD - the Lord of Life - who had triumphed over the grave. After suffering all of the abuse, with all the catastrophic blood loss and trauma, he would have looked so pitiful that the disciples would never have hailed him as the victorious conqueror of death; they would have felt sorry for him and tried to nurse him back to health.

Do you honestly think that upon seeing him in this horrible condition the Apostles would have called Him, "Lord"? Or would they have called him a doctor?

So, it's preposterous to think that if Jesus had appeared to them in that condition, his disciples would have been prompted to start a world-wide movement based on the hope that someday they, too, would have a resurrection body just like his.

Here are nine pieces of evidence that refute the swoon theory:

1. Jesus could not have survived crucifixion. Roman procedures were very careful to eliminate that possibility. Roman law even laid the death penalty on any soldier who let a capital prisoner escape in any way, including bungling a crucifixion. It was never done.
   
2. The fact that the Roman soldier did not break Jesus' legs, as he did to the other two crucified criminals (Jn 19:31-33), means that the soldier was sure Jesus was dead. Breaking the legs hastened the death so that the corpse could be taken down before the sabbath (v. 31).
   John, an eyewitness, certified that he saw blood and water come from Jesus' pierced heart (Jn 19:34-35). This shows that Jesus' lungs had collapsed and he had died of asphyxiation. Any medical expert can vouch for this.
   
3. The body was totally encased in winding sheets and entombed (Jn 19:38-42).
   
4. The post-resurrection appearances convinced the disciples, even "doubting Thomas," that Jesus was gloriously alive (Jn 20:19-29). It is psychologically impossible for the disciples to have been so transformed and confident if Jesus had merely struggled out of a swoon, badly in need of a doctor. A half-dead, staggering sick man who has just had a narrow escape is not worshiped fearlessly as divine lord and conquerer of death.
   
5. How were the Roman guards at the tomb overpowered by a swooning corpse? Or by unarmed disciples? And if the disciples did it, they knowingly lied when they wrote the Gospels, and we are into the conspiracy theory, which we will refute shortly.
   
6. How could a swooning half-dead man have moved the great stone at the door of the tomb? Who moved the stone if not an angel? No one has ever answered that question. Neither the Jews nor the Romans would move it, for it was in both their interests to keep the tomb sealed: the Jews had the stone put there in the first place, and the Roman guards would be killed if they let the body "escape." The story the Jewish authorities spread, that the guards fell asleep and the disciples stole the body (Mt 28:11-15), is unbelievable. Roman guards would not fall asleep on a job like that; if they did, they would lose their lives. And even if they did fall asleep, the crowd and the effort and the noise it would have taken to move an enormous boulder would have wakened them. Furthermore, we are again into the conspiracy theory, with all its unanswerable difficulties (we'll deal with this theory in a couple days.)
   
7. If Jesus awoke from a swoon, where did he go? Think this through: you have a living body to deal with now, not a dead one. Why did it disappear? There is absolutely no data, not even any false, fantastic, imagined data, about Jesus' life after his crucifixion, in any sources, friend or foe, at any time, early or late. A man like that, with a past like that, would have left traces.
   
8. Most simply, the swoon theory necessarily turns into the conspiracy theory or the hallucination theory, for the disciples testified that Jesus did not swoon but really died and really rose.
   

Hope this helps.