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The Resurrection of Jesus is the great rock of history. There are all kinds of things gathered around it: art, history, myth, legend, imagery, symbols. The winds of change blow around the rock, very capable minds have been given over to explaining that the Rock is not there, never was, but the explanations have been washed away by the facts of history. The Rock remains as the remnants of futile explanations wash around it. 

There are early accounts of the Resurrection in the Gospels, but they are irrelevant for our present purposes. If the Gospels did not exist, history would be the same, for it is not the Gospels that verify the Resurrection; it is the Resurrection that verifies the Gospels. If there had been no Resurrection, no one would have taken the trouble to write the Gospels. Scrolls cost money; take time. There would have been no Gospels. No Sunday school names like Matthew, Mark, and Luke. There would have been no fuss over nothing.

But there was something. There was a Resurrection, and the last two thousand years still swing around that great Rock. The many efforts to show that the Rock is not there would still wash against the Rock like the wreckage of countless vessels wash against the rocky coasts of the world. 

Efforts to argue for the Resurrection almost always bring up the counter argument that the followers don’t behave very well, that people who claim to be Christians don’t act like Christians. Therefore, sceptics argue, there was no resurrection. The argument is irrelevant. I am one of those who claim to be Christian, but days go by when I don’t behave very well. No one who is with me for a few days would be moved to look up the Sermon On The Mount.

If one argues today that the whole thing is a legend, a view established over centuries, that argument could not have meant anything after the first day or two. Legends are established over centuries; not in the daily news.

So think about the daily news of 2000 years ago. Suppose for some reason the early followers of Jesus decided to claim that there had been a resurrection. Who would have believed them? And why? What could they have said to get people to pay attention? The next day another headline would have replaced the earlier one!

About one hundred years after the birth of Jesus, a Jewish historian named Josephus mentioned Jesus. Josephus was not a Follower of the Way. He rather was an ally of the Romans and the Jewish hierarchy, and he gave strong support to the non-Christian Jews. And there was a strong Jewish community, then and now. While the Followers of the Way increased in number and spread over the Mediterranean.