Jesus died, Jesus was buried, so how could people claim to see Him alive three days later?

- Now the question is, Friday He’s in the tomb. He’s dead, okay? His body is there. He’s wrapped with over 80 pounds of spices and cloth, alright? And his head cloth is wrapped, and that’s separate from the body, but there He is in the tomb. Now the question is, did Jesus rise from the dead? And historical fact number four that we want to talk about today is, the critical scholars say the tomb of Jesus, surprisingly, was discovered empty on the third day by women followers of Jesus after His

crucifixion, okay? And here we have, the majority of critical scholars on this subject regard it as a historical fact that it wasn’t the men, but it was the women followers of Jesus that actually saw Him first. They saw the tomb was empty, and then they actually saw the risen Jesus, and they went and told the disciples. And the disciples didn’t even believe them. They had to go to the tomb themselves. But the tomb was empty. And, Sunder, tell us about why the scholars believe that the tomb was

empty and that these women had seen Jesus first. - Well, first and foremost, I think they call it the Jerusalem factor. Christianity began in Jerusalem. Now that’s where Jesus was buried. And they didn’t preach a new religion; they didn’t preach some new way of living as a new code of ethics and said, “We need to follow the teachings of this great man Jesus who lived among us.” Their preaching was “This Jesus, whom you crucified, God has raised up from the dead.” And so, the simplest way to have

totally disproved this whole preaching and shut down the Christian faith as soon as it began was to go to the tomb of Jesus—and remember, everybody knew where the tomb of Jesus was; and remember, He was buried—and take out the body of Jesus, parade it up and down the streets of Jerusalem and say, “ Look, here He is dead,” and Christianity would have been. It would have never got off the ground. So, the tomb must have been empty, otherwise they wouldn’t have had to resort to persecution, threat

enings and all of those ways to try to stop. They just had to produce the body. They couldn’t, because the tomb was empty.