Any old resurrection will not do

3. What are the facts about the resurrected Jesus?

His body had real flesh and blood. People touched him, ate food with him, saw the crucifixion wounds in his body, and he could be seen and heard.

There's a key aspect that clinches the bodily resurrection of Jesus and that is the Greek, soma, to refer to his body.

Whenever the Greek speaks of an individual human being as having a soma, it always means a physical body in the New Testament (NT). When the Apostle Paul wrote of Christ's resurrected body and the future resurrected bodies of people, he used soma in 1 Corinthians 15:42-44). This confirms that the early Christians understood Jesus' being raised from the dead as a bodily resurrection.

Robert Gundry's research concluded 'the soma denotes the physical body, roughly synonymous with "flesh" in the neutral sense. It forms that part of man in and through which he lives, acts in the world' (1976:50)

There is another fact to demonstrate this point that could be a bit technical: Aprepositional phrase is used in the NT to describe resurrection "from (ek) the dead" (see. Mark 9:9; Luke 24:46; John 2:22; Acts 3:15; Rom. 4:24; I Cor. 15:12). This was not a ho-hum view for the Greeks.

In addition, they used a preposition, ek, concerning Jesus who was resurrected 'out from among' the dead bodies. Similar words were used to describe Lazarus being raised 'from the dead' (John 12:1). There was no doubt that he came out of the grave in the same body in which he was buried.

The same happened with Jesus! Australian ancient historian and evangelical Anglican minister, Dr Paul Barnett, made this assessment of the start of Christianity:

"It was this twin conviction, that Jesus was the Christ and that God had raised him alive from the dead, that drove and energized the first disciples and that alone accounts for the rise of Christianity as we encounter it in the historical records" (2005:186).

From those few disciples and belief in the bodily resurrected Christ, the church worldwide today has grown to approx 2.3 billion who identify as Christians.

3.1 Reliable documents or fiction?

It is a view expressed by both laity and scholars that 'it is no longer possible in retrospect to think of that passion fiction as relatively benign propaganda' (Crossan 1995:XII). A lay antagonistic version was, 'Many things in our modern bible are clearly invention, created to conform to a particular narrative. Rather than the plain unvarnished truth.'

Is that the truth? How does anyone determine if an historical writing, like the Bible, is a compilation (66 books) of reliable information? We use the same criteria that ancient historians use to determine the legitimacy of any document from history, whether that be the life of Aristotle, the first fleet's coming to Australia, the Nazi Holocaust, or the Port Arthur massacre in 1996.

These tests do not attempt to demonstrate that Scripture is the Word of God or that the Bible is infallible. The criteria discern if the Bible's narrative of the major events in the life of Jesus and the young church were accurate.