Grace Extending

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Interested in an in-depth (but very readable) historical defense of the resurrection of Jesus? Have a friend, co-worker, or family member who is skeptical and wanting to learn more? Dr. William Lane Craig has done some fantastic work thinking about the resurrection. You can find out more about "the historical grounds for belief in Jesus' resurrection" in his article The Resurrection of Jesus.

Here is an excerpt from the end of that article. After laying out his argument, Dr. Craig writes:

Now this puts the sceptical critic in a rather desperate situation. A few years ago I participated in a debate on the resurrection of Jesus with a professor at the University of California, Irvine. He had written his doctoral dissertation on the resurrection, and he was thoroughly familiar with the evidence. He could not deny the facts of Jesus’ honorable burial, empty tomb, post-mortem appearances, and the origin of the disciples’ belief in the resurrection. So his only recourse was to come up with some alternate explanation of those facts. And so he argued that Jesus of Nazareth had an unknown, identical twin brother, who was separated from him as an infant and grew up independently, but who came back to Jerusalem at the time of the crucifixion, stole Jesus’ body out of the tomb, and presented himself to the disciples, who mistakenly inferred that Jesus was risen from the dead! Now I won’t bother to go into how I went about refuting this theory. But I think the example is illustrative of the desperate lengths to which scepticism must go in order to refute the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. Indeed, the evidence is so powerful that one of the world’s leading Jewish theologians, the late Pinchas Lapide, who taught at Hebrew University in Israel, declared himself convinced on the basis of the evidence that the God of Israel raised Jesus of Nazareth from the dead!

1 Comment

If it were not so sad, it would be laughable to see what lengths one will go to to refute the TRUTH of the resurrection. Twin brother indeed!!!

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