Over on The Burial of Jesus blog, I’ve shared the debate between William Lane Craig and James Crossley about the resurrection of Jesus, which apparently took place back in 2007. A major reason for writing my book on the burial of Jesus is the relevance of that subject to how we view the traditions about the empty tomb, resurrection appearances and so on. So obviously this debate interests me. I’ve embedded a YouTube version of the debate over on the other blog. I’m leaving the other form embedded here, although for me it seems not to work (although the link does).
If there is something that is a crucial underlying question (one that I address in the book), it is whether historians will ever be able to say that the most likely explanation for the written stories we now have, and for the beliefs of the early Christians, is that Jesus entered the life of the age to come in a bodily sense. And as a person with a personal Christian faith, one of the major struggles I’ve faced is to acknowledge the ways in which evidence about the burial of Jesus makes other explanations plausible, even if ultimately we acknowledge that the best (and perhaps only honest) answer a historian can give about what happened to the body of Jesus is “we don’t know”.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In