Jesus died for healing people in church; he died for saying he was the Son of God…for making himself equal with God. He died because people were rallying around him and attracting the Romans’ attention, and he was no kind of viable military leader to stand up to them. So he died literally, crucified by the Romans after being turned over to them by an angry mob headed by religious leaders.

Here not even a month before this he raised a man (Lazarus) from the dead in front of a crowd of people, a fact never doubted or disputed - even among the same religious leaders that plotted against him. They were faced with a choice: to support a man whom they acknowledged to have raised a man from the dead, or to cynically plot his murder in hopes of staying out of trouble with the Romans (and staying in control of their little unraveling kingdom of religion).

Jesus came with a word that was much too big for man’s religion and man’s politics. Everywhere man tried to hold him back, pin him down, hem him in; Jesus eluded them, exposed them, and overwhelmed them with the sheer power of his miracles. Literal miracles - uncontested even by those who chose to be his enemies. No one ever attacked the validity of his miracles; instead they forbade him to do them in church, and told people he got his power from the devil.

Before Jesus’ dead body was put in the tomb, he had spoken repeatedly about his power over death. He had on more than one occasion proven his power over death by raising men from the dead, witnessed in every case firsthand by crowds of people. He spoke clearly that he had authority to lay his life down, and authority to take it up again.

So we have the literal resurrection of Jesus. The historicity of Jesus’ resurrection has gone uncontested for thousands of years. This single event witnessed by so many people (500 people saw the resurrected Jesus in the same place at the same time) stands firmly in the history books next to events that we take for verified truth that were witnessed by far fewer people and have far less powerful cultural impact.

Two explanations existed for the empty tomb. The first was the rumor circulated by the same religious leaders who had Jesus put to death, and by the Roman tomb guards who they paid to circulate it. This explanation had all the machiavellian momentum it needed to become documented history; it was propagated by the very people who had the political and religious and financial muscle to make sure it stuck. This was the explanation that the disciples had stolen Jesus’ body; thereby invalidating any account of a resurrection.

The other explanation was that Jesus truly and literally rose from death to life, that the thoroughly consistent accounts we now read now in the four gospels actually took place in exact detail. This explanation had every chance of being discounted. It was propagated by the same people implicated in the first explanation; people on the run from the authorities, constantly in and out of jail - claiming something that flew in the face of human experience, philosophical prejudice, and scientific understanding!

So why was the underdog explanation of the literal resurrection of Jesus historically verified and resoundingly accepted in the face of such overwhelming odds?