What is Historical/Theological Proof for the Resurrection? | Vince Armfield, Lakeside Christian Church

Mark Holland:

“When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have set in place, what is mankind that you are mindful of them? Human beings, that you care for them?” This excerpt from Psalm 8 helps put into perspective how wonderful and mighty God is. There are so many mysteries to uncover about Jesus and how His attributes affect our daily life. On this episode, we will unpack the question, what is the historical theological proof for the Resurrection with Pastor Vince Armfield of Lakeside Christian Church in Kirkland. Once again, coming to the microphones to talk in this purposefully-equipped series with another local area pastor about some themes, some questions having to do with the Easter season, and we have with us once again, Pastor Vince Armfield of Lakeside Christian Church. Hi, there, Pastor Vince.

Vince Armfield:

Hey, it’s good to be with you, Mark. Glad to be back.

Mark Holland:

Got to see you, I don’t know which series it was. Was it the Christmas series? I think it was.

Vince Armfield:

It was the Christmas series.

Mark Holland:

Okay.

Vince Armfield:

We were talking about the birth of Jesus.

Mark Holland:

We’re definitely hitting the two big holidays of the year, the Christmas and Easter. Which one’s more your favorite, do you think?

Vince Armfield:

I have turned to like Easter more.

Mark Holland:

Okay.

Vince Armfield:

To me, it seems like all the emphasis is on Christmas, the shiny bows, the gifts, all the hype. Yet, it’s actually Easter that is the capstone of Christianity. If you remove what we’re talking about today, the Resurrection, you really don’t have Christianity. You’ve got good teaching, you’ve got moral principles of life, but you don’t have life, funny enough.

Mark Holland:

Well, the New Testament definitely lays out the Resurrection and the truth of it as the cornerstone, like you say, of the faith. If Jesus isn’t raised, we’re still in our sins and we might as well all just go home-

Vince Armfield:

Right. Right.

Mark Holland:

… so it’s very central in the truth of the Resurrection. You have the question assigned to you, what is the historical theological proof for the Resurrection? There is some historical proof other than the New Testament, or is it just things we draw from the scenario that shows that something happened with Jesus other than just being a good teacher?

Vince Armfield:

Right, and I think your phrase something happened is key. Scripture tells us that there was a Resurrection, the empty tomb and things like that. But so much more is going on behind the scenes that gives us clues that the actual narrative isn’t just an echo chamber. People are saying, “Well, Jesus was going to be raised from the dead,” so He raised from the dead, and there you go, and it’s circular within the Bible. There’s warrant for us to say this is a legitimate testimony. This is a legitimate amount of evidence that’s in the Bible, but also outside of the Bible, beginning first with was Jesus a historical person? I’ve heard people say He’s just in the Bible, He’s nowhere else, but that’s not true. Historians today, being honest, would say yes, there’s actually quite a bit of evidence for the historical Jesus as a person, and there’s actually some evidence for His Crucifixion and trace evidence for the Resurrection and the impact that that had. I think like a good historian, you have to sift through multiple testimonies to find the nuggets of truth where things corroborate one another.

Mark Holland:

What’s the extra biblical text that so often people turn to? Was it Josephus? Isn’t that a Jewish historian?

Vince Armfield:

Yes. Josephus is the one that really nails it in his, what is it? In his Jewish histories, and a lot of pastors have a volume of Josephus in their office. I know I have one from the ’50s. In Josephus Book 18 in the histories, it talks about Jesus of Nazareth being crucified, even talks about three days later being raised from the dead and the impact it has on His followers, and it also names Pontius Pilate. The interesting thing is for years that was looked at skeptically because Pontius Pilate wasn’t approved archeologically verified person. But in the last 30, 40 years, there’s archaeological evidence that-

Mark Holland:

That there was a Pontius Pilate.

Vince Armfield:

In Jerusalem.

Mark Holland:

At that time.

Vince Armfield:

At that time, which is again, corroborating-

Mark Holland:

Yeah, you have a number of-

Vince Armfield:

… factors.

Mark Holland:

… extra biblical sources on one of your note pages here. Galen?

Vince Armfield:

Galen is a first-century Greek Roman physician, and he makes comments about the first century Christians, how they conducted themselves. They were conducting themselves with great reverence toward a Christ figure that impacted the way that they live. Galen was not a Christian. He was just talking about them and that there’s certain things about the way they carried their lives, which was also picked up by Pliny the Younger and Tacitus. Those are other-

Mark Holland:

Extra biblical people in history.

Vince Armfield:

Right. Tacitus was a Roman historian and you had Pliny the Younger in his correspondence to Trajan. So they talk about what are the Christians operating like? What are they acting like? I thought it was curious, and I share this often when I’m talking about these subjects, especially in sermons and things like that, that a guy like Pliny the Younger, had pegged Christians as being a depraved cult that practiced cannibalism and incest. Well, the cannibalism was drawn from the Lord’s Supper who Jesus said, “Eat My body, drink My blood.”

Mark Holland:

Right.

Vince Armfield:

Then he’s looking in from the outside of these ceremonies where these things are being proclaimed and he comes to that conclusion, incest. That’s a pretty big one. That’s got to do with the fact that we refer to each other as brothers and sisters with the Heavenly Father. Funny enough, I remind people of this in marriage counseling or pre-marriage counseling that you are married to your brother, your sister. As gross as that might sound on the surface. You must treat each other as fellow Christians, just not merely husband and wife. Sometimes we forget that.

Mark Holland:

Well, it’s interesting in some of your notes, I was just handed these notes, so I’m not sure-

Vince Armfield:

Yes, they’re fresh of the printers.

Mark Holland:

… everything or where you want to go with this. But I think getting back to more of the biblical record and how this was obviously different, set up a little bit, the Old Testament or the Jewish tradition surrounding the whole idea of resurrection and life after death. We were talking about the difference. Even we hear about these characters called the Sadducees and the Pharisees-

Vince Armfield:

Right.

Mark Holland:

… who Jesus mixed it up with quite a bit. The Sadducees didn’t believe in the Resurrection.

Vince Armfield:

That’s correct.

Mark Holland:

That’s why they were Sadducees. That’s how I always remember that.

Vince Armfield:

That’s right. Yep.

Mark Holland:

The Pharisees, though, did.

Vince Armfield:

Yes.

Mark Holland:

They did believe in the supernatural.

Vince Armfield:

Paul often played them against each other. When he needed a moment to get a breather in his examinations by them, he would often talk about the Resurrection as the dividing point, and those two factions would start turning on each other. But I’m just picking a couple here. There’s probably a lot. If anybody’s versed in this, they’re probably saying, “Well, mention this, mention that,” but I’m thinking about Ezekiel, their expectation. A big part of what I find fascinating is how do the apostles react or the followers of Jesus, male and female, react to the Resurrection. You would say if this was a religion we were making up, these guys would be expecting it, right?

Mark Holland:

Mm-hmm.

Vince Armfield:

They would know what’s coming, or at least they would act like they knew what was coming. So the milieu that they’re in, the background is Ezekiel 37, valley of dry bones. We have this Resurrection picture, and of course, it’s very metaphorical to the nation of Israel, but there’s something about this coming back to life, God bringing things back to life. Daniel 12 is probably one of those places that for a long time I thought as a great drop in the bucket of talking about the Resurrection where he clearly states some will be resurrected to everlasting life and some to disgrace.

Mark Holland:

Daniel talks about that. I missed that.

Vince Armfield:

Daniel 12, it’s just a little nugget in there. Then he says that they will raise like shining ones, and shining ones have often been associated with angels. So I don’t know, but maybe this is where people get that theology of that when we go to heaven, we’re going to be like angels. We’re going to be flying around on wings with harps. But his understanding, Daniel’s vision there is that there’ll be a Resurrection, it’ll be a bodily Resurrection and some to life and some to disgrace or not life.

Mark Holland:

Well, so there was some tradition of life after death that was established even within the Jewish culture. Let’s get back to some of the beginnings, though, of the narrative and of the witness of the Resurrection. You started your notes and your understanding of this in the way that the Bible honors the testimony of women-

Vince Armfield:

Yes.

Mark Holland:

… to start the Gospels. That was very unusual-

Vince Armfield:

Right.

Mark Holland:

… ’cause women’s opinion wasn’t really counted for much, but the-

Vince Armfield:

No, they were more or less chattel or part of their husband’s positions.

Mark Holland:

Mary Magdalene, the first person to see Jesus resurrected according to the New Testament, she had quite quite a sordid past-

Vince Armfield:

Right.

Mark Holland:

… not just being a woman, but she had a number of husbands, said Jesus drove a number of demons out of her.

Vince Armfield:

Right.

Mark Holland:

So he let her be the first person to talk about it. Tell us what does that mean to you? Why is that so significant?

Vince Armfield:

To me, I ask the question, “If I was going to create this new religion or I was going to take this in a new direction, how would I line up my witnesses?” I would probably have people of great authority, moral authority-

Mark Holland:

Pharisees.

Vince Armfield:

… Pharisees, Sadducees, religious leaders of that type. But we don’t see that. We see the women going to the tomb first. In each of the Gospels it’s consistent, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, the first women that were there. John gives us a little more information about post-Resurrection, the appearance of Jesus in the garden. She thinks He’s a gardener and all that, but yeah, these women run to the disciples and then tell the disciples He’s risen, and their reaction is, “No.” They think they’re talking nonsense is some of the language. So again, why do they think it’s nonsense? I think it’s because when we’re talking to people about the Resurrection, they’re like, “Dead people don’t rise from the dead.” We all know that, and they knew that.

So this was something they were not sure how to wrap their heads around. It’s clear from the witness of the ladies here. Now, what’s fascinating to me is later in 1 Corinthians 15, Paul is going to give… 15:1-8 or so, he gives a synopsis of the gospel. He says Jesus lived, died, rose again on the third day and was seen by many witnesses including Peter, and he mentions a few that would… Okay, that’s great, and that would link in people who were alive during the reading of Paul’s letters. So he’s calling on witnesses that were alive. What’s also interesting is that no mention of the ladies.

Mark Holland:

Interesting.

Vince Armfield:

Right. So already, by the time Paul is writing, there’s some kind of control of the Resurrection narrative that is, if you will, omitting the ladies being the first ones at the tomb.

Mark Holland:

Interesting.

Vince Armfield:

I think that points to the fact that when Paul is writing to the communities that he’s writing to, he knows that women are going to be a stumbling block. Perhaps, this is speculative, but you have to ask why are the women not mentioned in Paul’s writing? So that helps us see that these are real people wrestling with real issues trying to figure out-

Mark Holland:

In a real culture that didn’t think much of women’s opinion.

Vince Armfield:

Yes, but the fascinating thing, Mark, is that the Gospels leave it in.

Mark Holland:

The Gospels leave it in. Yeah.

Vince Armfield:

The Gospels leave in that the women were the first. If you want to talk about missionaries or evangelists, the women were the first missionaries and evangelists. It’s a fascinating thought. To me, that goes back to when you’re thinking historically looking at these documents and try to set aside your faith, if you will, let’s not talk like heretics, but you set aside your faith and you just want to ask yourself, “Could I believe this?” There are things here that say this is a real testimony. This is not manufactured, not massaged, not given its best foot forward. It’s giving us this hairy foot forward that the women were the first to see this, the first to experience this. The Resurrection, think about the road to Emmaus, Luke 24, you’ve got the disciples walking back, leaving Jerusalem dejected. Jesus comes to them incognito. They don’t recognize Him, and-

Mark Holland:

It says that a lot in the New Testament. They don’t recognize Him at first.

Vince Armfield:

Right.

Mark Holland:

So what’s going on there do you think?

Vince Armfield:

I’m thinking that part of Jesus’ resurrected figure is a couple of things. Either it’s such a dissonance that the last time they saw Him, He was barely recognizable from His beatings, goes to the tomb, everything is lost. Now you have this resurrected Jesus who is recognized by Him when He enters the upper room, but Mary doesn’t recognize Him in the garden. She thinks He’s a gardener. But there’s a lot that goes on there because the metaphor of new creation takes us back to the Garden of Eden, Jesus in the garden. That’s a podcast for another time.

Mark Holland:

Right.

Vince Armfield:

There’s a lot going on here. But on the road to Emmaus, he just simply says that they do not recognize Him until at the end of their exchange with Him, when they force Him and say, “Hey, please, eat with us.” He breaks the bread and they see the nail scars in His hands. Then they said, “Didn’t it burn within us?” So I’m thinking there’s something about this that the dissonance is so great, they want to ask him, “Who are You? Are You Jesus?” But they can’t bring themselves to because dead people don’t rise from the dead.

Mark Holland:

Right.

Vince Armfield:

These are the followers of Jesus, and they’re just broken at this point. Jesus finds them all in the upper room and then later commissions them to spread the gospel. Doubting Thomas is another one. If these guys were expecting this to happen even in some remote way, why all the doubt? Why all the second guessing?

Mark Holland:

They weren’t expecting it, obviously.

Vince Armfield:

No, they were-

Mark Holland:

If He was going to come back, or at least initially, hike we say, they didn’t recognize that it was Him-

Vince Armfield:

Right.

Mark Holland:

… for whatever reason. Maybe they thought He would be more like a ghost or a spook or something or fading in and out of reality, but He was very real.

Vince Armfield:

Speaking about the ghost context, you think about Peter’s situation in Acts where he’s in jail, gets released miraculously. He shows up at Rhoda’s house, they open the door when he knocks, and they expected him to be a ghost. There’s something there in their culture that seems so removed from our 21st century technological culture that we don’t think ghosts are real. We don’t think apparitions, we don’t think spirits, we don’t think in the metaphysical realm. Everything in us is super rationalized, but this is part of their lives. Understanding of what we call heavenly life or the spiritual realm, to them, those things were hand-in-hand. They were not as separate as we make them today. We can thank the Enlightenment for that that said you need to separate church and state or church and life. Your faith is over here and your real life is over here in different corners and the two should not come together.

So have your private faith, don’t share it with anybody, but get along with life over here. This is your rational life. This is real life, and everything becomes an allegory metaphor from there. I think again, going back to looking at this historically and looking for something to give us encouragement as Christians is to note not only the romantic artists, the sentimental thing that they struggled with recognizing Jesus, but the fact that they left it in the testimony, the fact that that remains in the Gospels and in Paul’s letter and other places where they struggle to reconcile the Resurrection, where Paul will struggle to find language to describe it, it tells me that they were figuring this thing out as they go, which is very realistic. That’s what we would do today probably. Somebody’s put it like they ransacked the Old Testament trying to find answers as to why this is happening. Even just this morning with you and I, we did a little ransacking. We pop up with Daniel, which gives us an intimation that there is a Resurrection and a bodily Resurrection.

Mark Holland:

Yeah, and it’s interesting, He said things like, “Handle me. Feel me.”

Vince Armfield:

Yes. Think of first-

Mark Holland:

“Put your fingers in my wounds. I’m here.”

Vince Armfield:

Yes, he says that’s a doubting Thomas, right?

Mark Holland:

Yeah.

Vince Armfield:

But also go back to 1 John. We don’t think of 1 John as a Resurrection passage. 1 John 1, the writer John saying to whoever’s reading in the church and to even this generation, he said that whom we’ve seen, whom we’ve heard and whom we’ve handled. He’s talking about the resurrected Christ, the life of Christ and the resurrected Christ, and it is in Him we have life.

Mark Holland:

Well, there’s no doubt that certainly all of the apostles, they said up to 500 people saw Jesus when he ascended into heaven in the Book of Acts. They all eventually believed He was who He was-

Vince Armfield:

Yeah.

Mark Holland:

… and He was resurrected and He was coming back again and they died for that faith.

Vince Armfield:

Yes.

Mark Holland:

I think that’s again, for me, just looking at the narration and the story, something happened more than just Jesus was a good teacher.

Vince Armfield:

Right.

Mark Holland:

Again, getting back to Jesus loved us and we really enjoyed Him, there was something that put Him even higher after His death on the cross. This Resurrection part of the story was something that they were willing to go to their deaths for.

Vince Armfield:

Josh McDowell’s book, More Than a Carpenter, does a great job of teasing out that question, why would they die for something they knew was not true.

Mark Holland:

Right.

Vince Armfield:

To a man, the 12 are recorded extra bibically as having given their lives for the faith and many others from them. You think about the first century of the persecutions of the Romans, those letters Pliny the Younger, he talks about torturing two deaconesses to get them to tell him the truth. Basically, he said if for no other reason their obstinacy and their stubbornness is worthy of death. I think it’s either Trajan or Tacitus or Pliny say their understanding is that true Christians cannot renounce Christ because it is the truth. Yeah, so it’s fascinating stuff. So there’s that, and then think about this for a second, cultural shifts. Right now, we’re in the middle of huge cultural shifts, right?

Mark Holland:

Mm-hmm.

Vince Armfield:

We know that, but they didn’t just happen. We’re talking about you could say the sexual revolution. You could say the Postmodern movement that was Modernist to the Postmodern to wherever we’re going next, those movements have taken what conservatively, probably centuries, maybe in the Postmodern to Modern? But in the last probably 100 years or our lifetime, we’ve seen a shift. But still we’re talking about 50 years. Even you pick the most important issues of today that are cultural things, cultural wars, whatever you want to call it, it’s taken 20, 30, 40 years to get things through courts, to get things into our schools, to get things approved.

Step back and consider what happened with the Jews, they’re a monotheistic faith. They were ready to stone Jesus when He had said that He saw Abraham. When he said He was the Son of God, they were ready to stone Him because there was no way they were going to have anything to do with Him. Riots were a constant breakout. Claudius exiled the Jews and the Christians out of Rome because of their constant upheaval and their infighting and the riots that broke out to have Rome at peace, Claudius decrees all Jews leave because Christianity was thought to be a Jewish sect.

Mark Holland:

Right.

Vince Armfield:

But here we see in real world the writers, these extra biblical writers, but also in the Bible, we have a shift from the Sabbath to the first day of the week as worshiping a risen Messiah almost overnight. It’s a fascinating question, but you said the words, something happened.

Mark Holland:

Something happened. We believe that it is the Resurrection of Christ. It is not just historical and theological, but I think even as you talk about today and the kinds of things we’re discovering, lots of scientific ideas about multiverses and different dimensions and things like this, it was C.S. Lewis, I think, wasn’t it, who talked about spiritual reality? We think of spiritual reality, again, as less real or spooky or mist floating around. But he made the point that spiritual reality is more real, it’s more solid. The reason Jesus could walk through walls and just appear was because He was more real. There’s even, like I say today, scientific discoveries that if somebody’s more solid, we can use that term. So there’s something about the spiritual realm that is more real and more solid. That’s the realm that where Jesus is right now sitting at the right hand of the Father because He was resurrected. It’s worth a lot more study, a lot more interest. If people are listening to this, this is Easter season and pastor, they want to maybe discover more. They know, like I say, something happened-

Vince Armfield:

Right.

Mark Holland:

… to these disciples, something different about Christianity.

Vince Armfield:

Quite literally changed the world almost overnight.

Mark Holland:

Yeah. Pray for people. People are listening to this and they want to find out more. They think, “Yeah, something’s different about Jesus, just look at His teachings.” But beyond that even He had a spiritual reality, this idea of a Resurrection, it’s not just an allegory.

Vince Armfield:

Right.

Mark Holland:

The coming of the Holy Spirit was not just an allegory. There’s something that really happened historically. People want to tap into that. They want to know the risen Jesus. Pray for people who are searching right now.

Vince Armfield:

Before I do, I just want to throw out one last thing that people can do research on their own. They can go to something like Google or Bing, obviously not Christian resources, but go in there and query, what is the manuscript evidence of the New Testament against other documents of antiquity? I think you’ll be incredibly surprised that, just real quick, there’s something called the Rylands Fragment, which is of the Gospel of John or 1 John that goes all the way back to they can place it dating into AD 100.

Mark Holland:

Wow.

Vince Armfield:

That’s incredible. Somebody might think, “Well, 100 years, somewhere in there, that’s a big deal.” But when other documents are centuries removed from their source-

Mark Holland:

That happened.

Vince Armfield:

… their source, like Homer’s Iliad and others, yet we still find those as holding water today. So as Christians, we have warrant to believe what we believe, not only because we have the feeling of the Holy Spirit or experience of the Holy Spirit, but there is real things in our world that still leave behind witness to say you have good reason to believe what you believe.

Mark Holland:

Historical anchors, historical landmarks that we can appeal to.

Vince Armfield:

Yeah, so it’s not just wishful thinking-

Mark Holland:

Okay.

Vince Armfield:

… like we… Yeah.

Mark Holland:

Let’s pray. Let’s pray for people listening and maybe somebody who was a Christian told their friend to listen to this podcast-

Vince Armfield:

Sure.

Mark Holland:

… for this Easter season. Why don’t you pray for those people?

Vince Armfield:

Father, we love You, Lord, and we thank You for these little breadcrumbs that You’ve left in life for us that anchor our faith, that come back to us and say that we’re not just wishful thinking. We thank You, Lord, for the testimony of history, of historians, even non-Christians who looked into what our brothers and sisters centuries ago were living like and said, “There’s something that happened here.” We thank You, Lord, for that. We pray for those who are listening who may be questioning, maybe struggling with doubts about these things. Does it make any sense to believe somebody was raised from the dead? That Father, You would use these moments, these snapshots from history to at least to get them to think about this, to open their minds to the world beyond just the rational, just what we see every day, that to acknowledge that there is more to life than what we see.

We know it intuitively, but I pray, Father, that through Your spirit You would draw them to You. Open their eyes and help them to ask good questions, Father. Lord, I believe that you will give them answers. So Father, I pray for them today, and I ask that You would just encourage us as Christians in the knowledge that our faith is more than just a feeling, that it has warrant to it that is historical, the geographical and all those things archeologically verified in so many ways. Father, thank You for that. We just pray now for our brothers and sisters. Just encourage us in the faith, and for those who are seeking, Lord, I pray that You just draw them to Yourself. Help them to see You, Lord, through the doubts. We pray all these things in the precious name of Jesus. Amen.

Mark Holland:

Amen. Thank you so much for listening to Purposely Equipped. We hope that you gain a deeper understanding and discover who Jesus is this Easter season and invite a friend to listen too. We’d love you to leave a review so more people can find this podcast. Special thanks again for our guest pastor, Vince Armfield of Lakeside Christian Church in Kirkland. We’ll see you next time for Pastor Riley Taylor of Mountlake Church in Mountlake Terrace, looking at the question, how does Jesus impact my daily life?