ACCOUNTS OF THE RESURRECTION – Part 1

“When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices so they could go and anoint the body of Jesus. Very early on the first day of the week, just after sunrise, they went to the tomb. They were asking one another, ‘Who will roll away the stone from the entrance of the tomb?’ But when they looked up, they saw that the stone had been rolled away, even though it was extremely large. When they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side, and they were alarmed. But he said to them, ‘Do not be alarmed. You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here! See the place where they put Him. But go, tell His disciples and Peter, “He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see Him, just as He told you.”’”  (Mark 16:1-7)

The accounts of the resurrection in the Bible were too problematic to be fabrications. Each gospel states that the first eyewitnesses to the resurrection were women. Women’s low social status [at that time] meant that their testimony was not admissible evidence in court. There was no possible advantage to the church to recount that all the first witnesses were women. It could only have undermined the credibility of the testimony. The only possible explanation for why women were depicted as meeting Jesus first is if they really had. N.T. Wright argues that there must have been enormous pressure on the early proclaimers of the Christian message to remove the women from the accounts. They felt they could not do so – the records were too well known. The accounts of the first eyewitnesses would have been electrifying and life-changing, passed along and retold more than any other stories about the life of Jesus. 

-- Timothy Keller in “The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism”

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