18 - Jesus - His Life, Death and Resurrection
Jesus Fulfills Prophecy
Another important evidence supporting Jesus' Divinity was the prophecies that He fulfilled. It is absolutely astounding when you begin to track down each one, written sometimes hundreds of years before Jesus' earthly ministry.
From what town He would be born to how He would die, from what family He would come from to the type of ministry that He would carry out, the prophecies are dynamic and many are very detailed.
We talk about some of them in the video below.
Jesus' Life, Death and Resurrection
So how do we know Jesus isn't some fairy tale? How do we know He even existed? What if people just made Him up to try and control others?
Well, from a scholarly perspective, these views are absolutely ridiculous.
I would like to say at the outset that liberal scholars don't even use alternatives to the resurrection anymore in formal debate, because they have all been debunked long ago.
But we will go through them anyways so that you will be able to know how to counter the arguments.
Jesus is an historical figure, and not just from the Bible. There is what's called extrabiblical evidence for Jesus (evidence outside of the Bible) from 1st century non-Christian writers like Tacitus, the letter from Pliny the Younger to Emperor Trajan, Jospehus, and others.
99% of scholars, if not more, would say that there actually was a person named Jesus of Nazareth, who lived in the 1st century AD.
And probably 95% of all scholars (liberal and conservative) would agree that He was crucified on the cross under Pontius Pilate. Again, not just because the Bible says it, but because there are extrabiblical references (references outside the Bible) to this by non-Christian sources.
So if we know He lived and walked the earth, and we know He was crucified on a cross, then that leaves the all-important question, "What happened to His body?"
The video below explains a bit further:
So as the video above discusses, within weeks of Jesus rising from the dead, there are literally thousands of Jews who have now become followers of Jesus, and all the Jewish leaders, or Roman leaders, had to do to silence this rebellion was to produce the body of Jesus.
But they couldn't, of course, because He rose from the dead bodily.
Well, someone may say, maybe He didn't rise up. Let's talk about some of the alternatives.
