If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile, and you are still in your sins (I Corinthians 15:17).
Books have been written on the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus Christ. What I present here is not new, but is often over-looked evidence that adds weight to the testimony of the Bible.
1. The bodily resurrection of Christ from the grave is the foundation stone of the Christian faith; if Christ did not rise from the dead, none of it is true. Every time the gospel was preached to the Greeks, the resurrection was spoken of as evidence of the truth of the gospel. Yet, because of the religious and philosophical back-ground of the Greeks, resurrection of a body was not a good thing. To them, the body was not good, it was evil. The tendency of the Greeks would have been to disbelieve it or to change it to something more acceptable; there was no advantage to speak of resurrection to them.
2. It was the women who find the empty tomb and meet the risen Christ first. Given the preference of that culture, this is evidence of the truth of the story. If the story were a made-up one it would have been one of the male apostles, Peter or John, who first met the risen Christ to give more gravitas to the story. But, no, it was the lowly women, perhaps the most lowly one, Mary Magdalene, who had the honor of first seeing the risen Christ. When the resurrection story was told to the males, 'it seemed an idle tale to them.'
These bits of evidence simply add more weight to the already thoroughly documented resurrection event of Jesus Christ. It is because of this event that we have a legitimate hope of entering the eternal country whose builder and maker is God!
Grace&Peace,
Tom
The empty tomb in the garden about 100 meters from the place of crucifixion.
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