The parts of the New Testament that really prove the resurrection
are not Matthew 28, Mark 16, Luke 24, and John 20.21. These are the stories of the
first Easter. Of course I am not depreciating them; they are of great value. But taken in
themselves and on their own, they could be wrong, they could be mistaken, they could
be deliberate fiction, invented to bolster up a case. The parts of the New Testament
that prove the resurrection are Matthew 1–27, Mark 1–15, Luke 1–23, and John 1–19
for these were raised up with Jesus. If nothing had happened at the first Easter, if Jesus
had simply stayed dead in the grave, he should never have had these stories of his life
and teachings. There might have been a few scattered references in the Talmud (as
in fact there are) but (as David Flusser says in the article in the Encyclopedia Judaica
summarized in this morning’s Times), the events of the Gospel were not really very
close to the major events of the day. It is because Jesus rose from the dead that we have
the Gospel records. In other words, the risen Christ is the historical Jesus and there
is no other.
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