Sublime

The third line of evidence for the empty tomb is that Mark’s story is simple and lacks legendary development.

Jesus is presented as the liberator of the poor, the sick, sinners, the socially and religiously marginalized.

They investigate the past and relate the struggles of the apostles and the Fathers to our present struggles. Thus they become defenders of the faith, showing its reasonableness, its “fittingness” for the oppressed community now.

And third, even if they had so believed, the Jewish authorities would have exposed the whole affair simply by pointing to Jesus’ tomb or perhaps even exhuming the body as decisive proof that Jesus had not been raised.

There are historical facts surrounding Jesus’ crucifixion that virtually all historians agree upon, and by far the best explanation of those facts is that Jesus rose from the dead.

There’s no avoiding the conclusion that Luke-Acts was written by a traveling companion of Paul who had the opportunity to interview eyewitnesses to Jesus’ life while in Jerusalem.

The point of having Jesus at the centre of a religion or a faith is that one has Jesus: not a cypher, a strange silhouetted Christfigure, nor yet an icon, but the one Jesus the New Testament writers know, the one born in Palestine in the reign of Augustus Caesar, and crucified outside Jerusalem in the reign of his successor Tiberius. Christianity