From the March 18, 2014 eNews issue
visit Koinonia House for a FREE subscription
A total lunar eclipse will mark the first day of Passover in North America this year, starting shortly before midnight on the West Coast and continuing through the early morning hours of April 15th. This eclipse will be nice and loud, a great big red moon completely blocked from the sun’s direct light by the earth’s umbral shadow. The eclipse will hit its max at 3:45 am in Washington D.C. and a quarter to midnight in Anchorage, Alaska.
Passover is primed for lunar eclipses because it always takes place on a full moon, but this year another total lunar eclipse also marks the beginning of Sukkot on October 8th in a rare bit of excitement. What’s more, the same astronomical pattern will take place next year as well, with full blood moons on both Passover and Sukkot in 2015.
It may be nothing to take to heart. Lunar eclipses come along a regular basis, usually between 2 and 4 times per year, and quite often they have fallen together on the first days of Passover and Sukkot (so conveniently spaced six months apart on full moons).
Much of the time, however, these are penumbral lunar eclipses in which the moon only passes through outer part of the Earth’s shadow. A penumbral lunar eclipse is not particularly noticeable because it merely dims the moon. During a partial lunar eclipse, the moon breaks into the inner, umbral shadow of the earth – a clearly visible event. A total lunar eclipse offers the best show, as the moon passes completely into the earth’s inner shadow and turns a dark “blood” red color. 2014 and 2015 are a bit special, however, because the lunar eclipses these years form a “tetrad” in which four lunar eclipses in a row are total eclipses. Tetrads are fairly rare, though they still take place several times per century. The last tetrad was in 2003. Tetrads that offer blood moons on both Passover and Sukkot have also taken place in the past, but not often. In fact, according to NASA’s catalog of lunar eclipses, this particular set of coincidences took place just twice in the 20th century, in 1949–1950 and in 1967–1968. The next will take place in 2032–2033.
The rabbis say that coincidence is not a kosher word, and perhaps there’s something significant about astronomical patterns. After all, the Magi did see the Messiah’s star in the east and came to worship the baby Jesus because of it. It’s noteworthy that David Ben-Gurion formed the first government of the new State of Israel on March 8, 1949 and Israel was admitted into the United Nations on May 11, 1949, marking international recognition of Israel as a state. During the Six-Day War in 1967, Israel gained control of the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights and Sinai Peninsula. Israel has since relinquished control of the Sinai, Golan Heights and Gaza, but one wonders what lies in store for the little Jewish nation this year. Or in 2032… approximately 2000 years after Jesus’ resurrection.
Young Galaxies That Look Old
In other astronomical news, scientists are surprised to find relatively “young” galaxies deep in space looking much more mature than expected.
Because the speed of light is finite (though very very fast), the deeper into space we look, the older the light we see coming our way. This means that directing our telescopes deep into space can be considered equivalent to gazing back in time.
In harsher humor, a meme on the Internet declares, “When you wish upon a star… you’re actually a few million years late according to astronomy. The star is dead. Just like your dreams.”
Astronomers hope that by studying distant galaxies, they can watch the formation of the young Universe, looking at the light from galaxies that may or may not even still exist.
Astronomers from Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne Australia expressed surprise recently, because they discovered “young” galaxies from the early Universe already wearing their big boy pants. Working within an international team of scientists, the researchers found galaxies 12 billion light years away that contained up to 100 billion stars, much larger and more mature than expected. At that point, the Universe was expected to have developed only 1.6 billion years after the Big Bang, and the astronomers would have expected to see young, newly forming galaxies. The mature galaxies were found at a record-breaking distance of 12 billion light years, seen when the Universe was just 1.6 billion years old.
Their existence at such an early time raises new questions about what forced them to grow up so quickly. The galaxies were detected using near-infrared wavelengths, and the researchers found a lot of red, which indicates older and not newly-forming stars.
“Fifteen years ago they were predicted not to even exist within the cosmological model favoured at the time,” said Professor Karl Glazebrook, Director of the Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing at Swinburne University of Technology. “In 2004 I wrote a paper on the discovery of such galaxies existing only three billion years after the Big Bang. Now, with improved technology we are pushing back to only 1.6 billion years, which is truly exciting.”
There are a variety of possible explanations for the unexpected results of the study. The red shift data may have been misinterpreted. The speed of light may have slowed down, and the ages of the galaxies may not be what the astronomers believe them to be. The explanation chosen by Macquarie University’s Dr Lee Spitler is a less volatile, however.
“While the Milky Way still forms new stars at a slow rate today, the galaxies we discovered must have formed very rapidly in a relatively ‘short’ time — roughly one billion years — with explosive rates of star-formation. These must have been several hundred times higher than in the Milky Way today,” Spitler said, according to Science Daily.
“This is the best evidence to date that these galaxies grew up in a hurry. People have reported ‘old’ galaxies before, but it was never clear until our data that they were actually ‘old.’ The excellent imaging products from the Magellan telescope allowed us to prove they are indeed ‘old.’”
We may be able to predict lunar eclipses and send men to the moon. Modern technology does an amazing job of allowing us to look through space and even back in time. But, the Universe still holds a wide variety of mysteries, and the future is a massive adventure waiting to be discovered.
Notes
Galaxies In The Early Universe Mature Beyond Their Years
— Science Daily
Total Lunar Eclipse On April 15 2014 (United States)
— Vercalendario
April Kicks Off Trifecta of Lunar and Solar Eclipses
— PRWeb
Catalog of Lunar Eclipses: 1901 to 2000
— NASA
Catalog Of Lunar Eclipses: 2001 To 2100
— NASA
Calendar For Year 1967 (Israel)
— Time And Date
Sunday, May 4, 2014
Alternatives To Elusive Dark Matter
From the January 14, 2014 eNews issue
Visit Koinonia House for a FREE subscription
The Universe is made up primarily of a mysterious substance called dark matter, a mesh, a spider web of space. That’s what popular science says, at least. Astrophysicists insist that dark matter is there; the indirect evidence is substantial. Yet, after multiple millions of dollars have been spent on trying to track down the actual physical particles that make up dark matter, science continues to come up empty. Maybe the astrophysicists need to try another approach in order to finally detect the elusive substance, or maybe they just need to adjust their current models about the nature of light, time, and the Universe itself.
It all started with the spinning of distant galaxies. A Swiss astrophysicist named Fritz Zwicky postulated in the 1930s that invisible stuff he called “dunkle Materie” hid inside the galaxies he was studying, because they spun too fast to contain only the visible stars and gas he could account for. Scientists observe the same puzzling phenomenon today. Based on spectral line data, it appears that the outer rims of spiral galaxies are moving at the same rate as the insides of the galaxies – and that doesn’t make any sense. The galaxies should fly apart from spinning that fast.
This problem caused Zwicky to hypothesize the existence of dunkle Materie—large amounts of invisible material that provide the gravitational pull to hold the galaxies together. It’s what physicists think dark matter is – neutral, uncharged particles that interact with visible material by massive gravitational force.
There is also the matter of gravitational lensing. Starlight through space if often seen to bend and warp around unseen massive objects. The Hubble space telescope can often produce two or three images of the same galaxy in one single picture. The individual images may be different sizes but contain the same features, as though space were a hall of mirrors. As beams of light from the same galaxy bend around objects in space, they reach the earth from slightly different angles, giving the appearance of coming from different locations. Clumps ofinvisible dark matter between us and these galaxies are blamed for causing the distortions.
Cosmologists have a variety of reasons for embracing the idea of dark matter. The problem is that its existence is inferred from physicists’ current interpretations of data; nobody has been able to directly detect the stuff yet. The physicists are confident that dark matter comes in the form of a particle, a weakly interactive massive particle (WIMP) that creates gravitational effects but otherwise ignores normal visible particles.
The trick is to get it to get some WIMPs to show themselves by hitting visible matter into them and making them say, “Ow!”
Rick Gaitskell of Brown University has been hunting for dark matter for 24 odd years and heads the team that turned on the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) experiment in South Dakota. A mile underground in the Homestake Gold Mine, the LUX particle accelerator shoots xenon particles past ultra-sensitive detectors. If the xenon particles smack into one of these WIMPs, it should give off a little flash of electricity that the detectors can catch and record.
So far, though, the LUX hasn’t found anything. Gaitskell told Popular Science this past autumn, “Every experiment has reported essentially negative results. No one even knows for sure if the d-stuff really exists.” If dark matter really does make up five-sixths of the matter in the Universe, it certainly does an excellent job of hiding itself.
A Dark Herring
Of course, dark matter may not exist after all. In his own PowerPoint slides on dark matter posted on the Brown University website, Gaitskell tells his students, “It has been a Problem in Cosmology that astrophysical assumptions often need to be made to interpret data/extra parameters.” It’s true. Scientists create models they use to interpret the information that space gives them. The models are based on certain assumptions, and if those assumptions are incorrect, the data gets interpreted wrongly.
Possible Alternatives
If dark matter is just an illusion, though, what is causing the observed phenomena? What does hold spinning spiral galaxies together and cause the bending of light through allegedly empty space?
First of all, it is odd that so many spiral galaxies appear to have the same issue – the matter across their diameters all appear to be rotating at the same rate – all without flying apart. It may be that that the light information coming from them is interpreted incorrectly. The redshifts that are treated as a sort of Doppler effect – light appearing to lengthen as its source moves away from us – may have another explanation.
In the 1970s, William Tifft at the University of Arizona noted that his redshift measurements didn’t show gradual, smooth shifting to the red. Instead, they were quantized – the measurements made small jumps as though going up a flight of stairs. Two astronomers from Scotland, Guthrie and Napier, tried to disprove Tiffts quantized redshift ideas in the 1990s, but they finally confirmed his results.
Professor José Senovilla, Marc Mars and Raül Vera of the University of the Basque Country, Bilbao, and University of Salamanca, Spain proposed in 2011 that the redshift isn’t caused by a Doppler shift but by the slowing of Time itself. Dark energy supposedly permeates the Universe, causing the outer edges of space to expand at an accelerating rate. That’s the wrong way to interpret the light wave data, suggest these scientists. Senovilla and Vera argue that the better explanation is the opposite, that Time has been slowing down and we see its effect in the apparent stretching of light waves. The light reaching the Hubble telescope from distant galaxies might not tell us as much about the rate the galaxies are spinning as about the nature of Time itself.
The speed of light itself may be slowing. Physicists insist that light speed is a constant, but they may have made that determination prematurely. The speed of light may not be dropping very quickly, but a variety of papers have been written in the past several decades that suggest light speed is not a constant after all. Paul Davies, currently of Arizona State, argued in 2002 that the speed of light may be slowing down, and physicist Barry Setterfield has written extensively on the subject.
Yves-Henri Sanejouand from the University of Nantes in France in 2010 showed a possible slowing of the speed of light by about 0.02–0.03 m/s per year. That’s not much, but it demonstrates the real possibility of a much faster speed of light in the past. “The constancy of the speed of light is one of the fundamental pillars of contemporary physics,” explains Sanejouand, “so the possibility that it may instead vary (even at a slow rate) has far reaching consequences (although mostly on the theoretical side).”
It may also be that spiral galaxies haven’t had time to fly apart. If the speed of light has been slowing, methods for dating the age of the Universe might be way off. The age of the Universe itself may have been overestimated.
While dark matter is credited with causing gravitational lensing, Anirudh Pradhan of Hindu P. G. College in India suggests that the observed bending of light might be caused by the refraction of light as it hits the gasses around various astronomical bodies. We see the refraction of light all the time in everyday life. The fisherman who goes to stab a fish in the water cannot aim directly at the image of the fish, because the light changes direction as it leaves the denser water and hits the less dense air. The refraction of light makes the fish look like it’s in a spot that it isn’t. The same thing can happen in space. As light shoots through the vacuum of space, it hits clouds of gasses that cause it to change direction so that when it reaches us, multiple images of various sizes are produced – and we can’t be certain of where they actually originated.
The nature of the Universe is an involved mystery, a deep subject that requires a great deal more study. Yet, the hunt for dark matter highlights the importance of examining one’s assumptions in the pursuit of scientific truth. Assumptions are required to interpret data, but a great deal of time and money can be spent to prove incorrect interpretations when the underlying assumptions are faulty.
Further Reading
Dark Matter Search Leaves Scientists Questioning Basic Theories
— Scientific American
Dark Matter Still Hiding: Latest Experimental Sweep Comes Up Empty
— Scientific American
Evidence For Dark Matter
— Brown.edu
Refraction-Based Alternative Explanation for:Bending of Light Near a Star, Gravitational Red/Blue Shift, Gravitational Lensing and
Black-Hole
— UPM.edu.my
What is Gravitational Lensing?
— CFHT LenS
Einstein’s Relativity Theory Hits A Speed Bump
— The Age
Is Light Slowing Down?
— Optics and Photonics Focus
Dark Energy Is A Fiction: The Appearance of Acceleration Is Caused By Time Itself Slowing Down
— Daily Galaxy
Too Much Dark Matter in Galaxy Cluster? ‘Dark Core’ May Not Be So Dark After All
— Science Daily
Visit Koinonia House for a FREE subscription
The Universe is made up primarily of a mysterious substance called dark matter, a mesh, a spider web of space. That’s what popular science says, at least. Astrophysicists insist that dark matter is there; the indirect evidence is substantial. Yet, after multiple millions of dollars have been spent on trying to track down the actual physical particles that make up dark matter, science continues to come up empty. Maybe the astrophysicists need to try another approach in order to finally detect the elusive substance, or maybe they just need to adjust their current models about the nature of light, time, and the Universe itself.
It all started with the spinning of distant galaxies. A Swiss astrophysicist named Fritz Zwicky postulated in the 1930s that invisible stuff he called “dunkle Materie” hid inside the galaxies he was studying, because they spun too fast to contain only the visible stars and gas he could account for. Scientists observe the same puzzling phenomenon today. Based on spectral line data, it appears that the outer rims of spiral galaxies are moving at the same rate as the insides of the galaxies – and that doesn’t make any sense. The galaxies should fly apart from spinning that fast.
This problem caused Zwicky to hypothesize the existence of dunkle Materie—large amounts of invisible material that provide the gravitational pull to hold the galaxies together. It’s what physicists think dark matter is – neutral, uncharged particles that interact with visible material by massive gravitational force.
There is also the matter of gravitational lensing. Starlight through space if often seen to bend and warp around unseen massive objects. The Hubble space telescope can often produce two or three images of the same galaxy in one single picture. The individual images may be different sizes but contain the same features, as though space were a hall of mirrors. As beams of light from the same galaxy bend around objects in space, they reach the earth from slightly different angles, giving the appearance of coming from different locations. Clumps ofinvisible dark matter between us and these galaxies are blamed for causing the distortions.
Cosmologists have a variety of reasons for embracing the idea of dark matter. The problem is that its existence is inferred from physicists’ current interpretations of data; nobody has been able to directly detect the stuff yet. The physicists are confident that dark matter comes in the form of a particle, a weakly interactive massive particle (WIMP) that creates gravitational effects but otherwise ignores normal visible particles.
The trick is to get it to get some WIMPs to show themselves by hitting visible matter into them and making them say, “Ow!”
Rick Gaitskell of Brown University has been hunting for dark matter for 24 odd years and heads the team that turned on the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) experiment in South Dakota. A mile underground in the Homestake Gold Mine, the LUX particle accelerator shoots xenon particles past ultra-sensitive detectors. If the xenon particles smack into one of these WIMPs, it should give off a little flash of electricity that the detectors can catch and record.
So far, though, the LUX hasn’t found anything. Gaitskell told Popular Science this past autumn, “Every experiment has reported essentially negative results. No one even knows for sure if the d-stuff really exists.” If dark matter really does make up five-sixths of the matter in the Universe, it certainly does an excellent job of hiding itself.
A Dark Herring
Of course, dark matter may not exist after all. In his own PowerPoint slides on dark matter posted on the Brown University website, Gaitskell tells his students, “It has been a Problem in Cosmology that astrophysical assumptions often need to be made to interpret data/extra parameters.” It’s true. Scientists create models they use to interpret the information that space gives them. The models are based on certain assumptions, and if those assumptions are incorrect, the data gets interpreted wrongly.
Possible Alternatives
If dark matter is just an illusion, though, what is causing the observed phenomena? What does hold spinning spiral galaxies together and cause the bending of light through allegedly empty space?
First of all, it is odd that so many spiral galaxies appear to have the same issue – the matter across their diameters all appear to be rotating at the same rate – all without flying apart. It may be that that the light information coming from them is interpreted incorrectly. The redshifts that are treated as a sort of Doppler effect – light appearing to lengthen as its source moves away from us – may have another explanation.
In the 1970s, William Tifft at the University of Arizona noted that his redshift measurements didn’t show gradual, smooth shifting to the red. Instead, they were quantized – the measurements made small jumps as though going up a flight of stairs. Two astronomers from Scotland, Guthrie and Napier, tried to disprove Tiffts quantized redshift ideas in the 1990s, but they finally confirmed his results.
Professor José Senovilla, Marc Mars and Raül Vera of the University of the Basque Country, Bilbao, and University of Salamanca, Spain proposed in 2011 that the redshift isn’t caused by a Doppler shift but by the slowing of Time itself. Dark energy supposedly permeates the Universe, causing the outer edges of space to expand at an accelerating rate. That’s the wrong way to interpret the light wave data, suggest these scientists. Senovilla and Vera argue that the better explanation is the opposite, that Time has been slowing down and we see its effect in the apparent stretching of light waves. The light reaching the Hubble telescope from distant galaxies might not tell us as much about the rate the galaxies are spinning as about the nature of Time itself.
The speed of light itself may be slowing. Physicists insist that light speed is a constant, but they may have made that determination prematurely. The speed of light may not be dropping very quickly, but a variety of papers have been written in the past several decades that suggest light speed is not a constant after all. Paul Davies, currently of Arizona State, argued in 2002 that the speed of light may be slowing down, and physicist Barry Setterfield has written extensively on the subject.
Yves-Henri Sanejouand from the University of Nantes in France in 2010 showed a possible slowing of the speed of light by about 0.02–0.03 m/s per year. That’s not much, but it demonstrates the real possibility of a much faster speed of light in the past. “The constancy of the speed of light is one of the fundamental pillars of contemporary physics,” explains Sanejouand, “so the possibility that it may instead vary (even at a slow rate) has far reaching consequences (although mostly on the theoretical side).”
It may also be that spiral galaxies haven’t had time to fly apart. If the speed of light has been slowing, methods for dating the age of the Universe might be way off. The age of the Universe itself may have been overestimated.
While dark matter is credited with causing gravitational lensing, Anirudh Pradhan of Hindu P. G. College in India suggests that the observed bending of light might be caused by the refraction of light as it hits the gasses around various astronomical bodies. We see the refraction of light all the time in everyday life. The fisherman who goes to stab a fish in the water cannot aim directly at the image of the fish, because the light changes direction as it leaves the denser water and hits the less dense air. The refraction of light makes the fish look like it’s in a spot that it isn’t. The same thing can happen in space. As light shoots through the vacuum of space, it hits clouds of gasses that cause it to change direction so that when it reaches us, multiple images of various sizes are produced – and we can’t be certain of where they actually originated.
The nature of the Universe is an involved mystery, a deep subject that requires a great deal more study. Yet, the hunt for dark matter highlights the importance of examining one’s assumptions in the pursuit of scientific truth. Assumptions are required to interpret data, but a great deal of time and money can be spent to prove incorrect interpretations when the underlying assumptions are faulty.
Further Reading
Dark Matter Search Leaves Scientists Questioning Basic Theories
— Scientific American
Dark Matter Still Hiding: Latest Experimental Sweep Comes Up Empty
— Scientific American
Evidence For Dark Matter
— Brown.edu
Refraction-Based Alternative Explanation for:Bending of Light Near a Star, Gravitational Red/Blue Shift, Gravitational Lensing and
Black-Hole
— UPM.edu.my
What is Gravitational Lensing?
— CFHT LenS
Einstein’s Relativity Theory Hits A Speed Bump
— The Age
Is Light Slowing Down?
— Optics and Photonics Focus
Dark Energy Is A Fiction: The Appearance of Acceleration Is Caused By Time Itself Slowing Down
— Daily Galaxy
Too Much Dark Matter in Galaxy Cluster? ‘Dark Core’ May Not Be So Dark After All
— Science Daily
The Jesus’ Wife Papyrus and the Resurrection
From the April 15, 2014 eNews issue
Visit Koinonia House for a FREE subscription
Just in time for the celebration of Christ’s Resurrection, the world is excited about a fragment of papyrus that talks about Jesus’ wife. In September of 2012, Harvard Divinity School Professor Karen L. King announced at the International Coptic Congress in Rome that there existed a fragment of papyrus in which Jesus is quoted as saying, “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife…she will be able to be my disciple.” Chemists and biologists and other scientists at Harvard, Columbia, and M.I.T. have analyzed the fragment and have declared it authentic. That is, it’s actually an ancient bit of papyrus from the fourth to eighth centuries and not a forgery.
As soon as King presented the papyrus to the world, it raised controversies. A variety of groups rejected the papyrus as a fake, a sloppy forgery with uncertain provenance, until recently when experts said, “It does appear to be genuinely old.” Does it mean Jesus actually had a wife? Not a bit. New Testament scholars have argued that the phrase should be translated, “The bride of Christ”—as in the Church. It wasn’t written until at least 2–3 centuries after Jesus, anyway, which makes the words highly unlikely to have been Jesus’ own.
The papyrus, lovingly called the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife, gives evidence that Christians several centuries after Jesus were discussing issues about discipleship and celibacy and marriage. Regardless of its age or authenticity, it has stoked arguments in some churches about the kinds of leadership roles women should hold. Should women be allowed to be priests and pastors?
The most important issue that bits of historical writing like this raise are the old arguments that Jesus never died – that he got married and lived on. That’s the real question: Did Jesus die and rise again from the dead? Four books that date to the First Century say he did. The four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John all declare that Jesus died and rose again. Paul’s companion Luke says, “I know thoroughly about this,” (Luk 1:3–4) and Jesus’ disciple John says, “I’m a witness” (Jhn 21:24).
The fact that the Gospels are in the Bible doesn’t make them any less historical writings. The Church father Irenaeus of Lyons wrote in about A.D. 180:
Matthew also issued a written Gospel among the Hebrews in their own dialect, while Peter and Paul were preaching in Rome and laying the foundation of the Church. After their departure, Mark, the disciple and interpreter of Peter, did also hand down to us in writing what had been preached by Peter. Luke also, the companion of Paul, recorded in a book the Gospel preached by him.
Afterwards John, the disciple of the Lord, who also had leaned upon his breast, did himself publish a Gospel during his residence at Ephesus in Asia.
— Against Heresies 3:1:1
Little fragments about Jesus’ wife written centuries later can’t touch on the testimony recorded by eyewitnesses and researchers within decades after the fact.
Evidence For the Resurrection
The Resurrection of Christ is the most powerful event in history. It has affected the last 2000 years of history and politics, from peasants to kings to nations. Christianity has spread across the entire world, into every country and into a vast number of ethnic groups and languages.
Billions of people have experienced the life-giving, healing, forgiveness and freedom offered by God because Jesus Christ conquered death and rose again from the grave.
The apostle Paul wrote in 1 Cor 15:12–22 that without the resurrection of Christ, the Christian faith is useless. “And if Christ be not raised,” Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins. Then they also which are fallen asleep in Christ are perished. If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable.”
There are many skeptics who disregard the resurrection of Jesus Christ of Nazareth as a fable. However, the evidence for Jesus’ resurrection is extremely strong, even to the point of converting some who sought to disprove it:
The Empty Tomb
Though well-trained Roman soldiers guarded the tomb of Jesus Christ, it was empty 3 days after Jesus’ death as Jesus had repeatedly foretold (Matt 12:40, Mark 8:31). The guards had fled (a death penalty offense). The massive stone had been rolled away, and the body was gone - and was never produced by the enemies of the Christians. The linen grave clothes in which the Jews bury their dead were still in the tomb, undisturbed. From the Jewish historian Josephus to a compilation of 5th-century Jewish writings called the “Toledoth Jeshu”, even Jewish sources and traditions admit that the tomb was empty. The body was never found.
Living Witnesses
There were a multitude of witnesses who saw Jesus Christ alive after his death. The disciples, the travelers on the road to Emmaus and a number of women all spoke to Jesus alive. Thomas doubted until he was able to put his fingers into Jesus’ wounds (John 20:26–27). He later spread the Gospel all the way to India. The apostle Paul tells of 500 people to whom Jesus appeared at one time, most of whom were still alive and available for questioning when Paul wrote his letter (1 Cor 15:6). Jesus Christ was seen alive many times by hundreds of different people over the course of forty days after his death (John 20–21, Acts 1:3).
The Disciples
Christ’s followers, who had been fearful and who had run away when Jesus was arrested, were completely changed after the Resurrection and became courageous witnesses. Peter, who had denied knowing Christ when recognized by a simple servant girl, became the powerfully bold leader of those who had seen Christ alive, speaking to the thousands gathered in Jerusalem for the Feast of Shavuot—Pentecost. A person may die for a lie if they do not know it is a lie. But people do not give their lives up and face severe persecution to spread a lie they themselves invented. The fact that the disciples willingly suffered beatings and persecution and death is strong evidence that they had actually witnessed the resurrection they refused to stop telling people about. Their message quickly spread across the Middle East and Europe and even into Asia without any military conquest or political support involved—and in spite of strong opposition.
Saul of Tarsus
A devoutly religious Pharisee, who persecuted the Church and had Christ’s followers thrown in prison, Paul had his life absolutely changed by his encounter with Christ. He became a devoted follower of Christ himself, spreading the Gospel throughout Turkey and Greece in the face of beatings and shipwrecks and imprisonment and, finally, execution.
“If the New Testament were a collection of secular writings, their authenticity would generally be regarded as beyond all doubt.”
— F. F. Bruce, Manchester University
“I claim to be an historian. My approach to Classics is historical. And I tell you that the evidence for the life, the death, and the resurrection of Christ is better authenticated than most of the facts of ancient history …”
— E. M. Blaiklock, Professor of Classics, Auckland University
His Miracles Today
Perhaps the greatest evidence today of Christ’s resurrection is the work that he is still doing in the lives of everyday people. In the name of Jesus, people are still being healed emotionally and physically and spiritually by the same power that raised Jesus Christ from the dead.
Sinners are being freed from the burden and pain and shame of sin—sometimes immediately, sometimes after long years of steady work by the Holy Spirit in their lives. Hearts are being mended and lives are being turned around. The best evidence today is the faithful follower of Christ who can say, “He saved me, and I am not the person I used to be” just as the apostles testified 2000 years ago.
Further Reading
Evidence for the Resurrection
— Leadership U
Contemporary Scholarship and the Historical Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ
— Leadership U
The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable?
— FF Bruce
Evidence Supporting the Bible
— CARM - Christian Apologetics and Research Ministry
His Unfamiliar Face
— Koinonia House
Against Heresies (Book III, Chapter 1)
— New Advent
Visit Koinonia House for a FREE subscription
Just in time for the celebration of Christ’s Resurrection, the world is excited about a fragment of papyrus that talks about Jesus’ wife. In September of 2012, Harvard Divinity School Professor Karen L. King announced at the International Coptic Congress in Rome that there existed a fragment of papyrus in which Jesus is quoted as saying, “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife…she will be able to be my disciple.” Chemists and biologists and other scientists at Harvard, Columbia, and M.I.T. have analyzed the fragment and have declared it authentic. That is, it’s actually an ancient bit of papyrus from the fourth to eighth centuries and not a forgery.
As soon as King presented the papyrus to the world, it raised controversies. A variety of groups rejected the papyrus as a fake, a sloppy forgery with uncertain provenance, until recently when experts said, “It does appear to be genuinely old.” Does it mean Jesus actually had a wife? Not a bit. New Testament scholars have argued that the phrase should be translated, “The bride of Christ”—as in the Church. It wasn’t written until at least 2–3 centuries after Jesus, anyway, which makes the words highly unlikely to have been Jesus’ own.
The papyrus, lovingly called the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife, gives evidence that Christians several centuries after Jesus were discussing issues about discipleship and celibacy and marriage. Regardless of its age or authenticity, it has stoked arguments in some churches about the kinds of leadership roles women should hold. Should women be allowed to be priests and pastors?
The most important issue that bits of historical writing like this raise are the old arguments that Jesus never died – that he got married and lived on. That’s the real question: Did Jesus die and rise again from the dead? Four books that date to the First Century say he did. The four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John all declare that Jesus died and rose again. Paul’s companion Luke says, “I know thoroughly about this,” (Luk 1:3–4) and Jesus’ disciple John says, “I’m a witness” (Jhn 21:24).
The fact that the Gospels are in the Bible doesn’t make them any less historical writings. The Church father Irenaeus of Lyons wrote in about A.D. 180:
Matthew also issued a written Gospel among the Hebrews in their own dialect, while Peter and Paul were preaching in Rome and laying the foundation of the Church. After their departure, Mark, the disciple and interpreter of Peter, did also hand down to us in writing what had been preached by Peter. Luke also, the companion of Paul, recorded in a book the Gospel preached by him.
Afterwards John, the disciple of the Lord, who also had leaned upon his breast, did himself publish a Gospel during his residence at Ephesus in Asia.
— Against Heresies 3:1:1
Little fragments about Jesus’ wife written centuries later can’t touch on the testimony recorded by eyewitnesses and researchers within decades after the fact.
Evidence For the Resurrection
The Resurrection of Christ is the most powerful event in history. It has affected the last 2000 years of history and politics, from peasants to kings to nations. Christianity has spread across the entire world, into every country and into a vast number of ethnic groups and languages.
Billions of people have experienced the life-giving, healing, forgiveness and freedom offered by God because Jesus Christ conquered death and rose again from the grave.
The apostle Paul wrote in 1 Cor 15:12–22 that without the resurrection of Christ, the Christian faith is useless. “And if Christ be not raised,” Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins. Then they also which are fallen asleep in Christ are perished. If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable.”
There are many skeptics who disregard the resurrection of Jesus Christ of Nazareth as a fable. However, the evidence for Jesus’ resurrection is extremely strong, even to the point of converting some who sought to disprove it:
The Empty Tomb
Though well-trained Roman soldiers guarded the tomb of Jesus Christ, it was empty 3 days after Jesus’ death as Jesus had repeatedly foretold (Matt 12:40, Mark 8:31). The guards had fled (a death penalty offense). The massive stone had been rolled away, and the body was gone - and was never produced by the enemies of the Christians. The linen grave clothes in which the Jews bury their dead were still in the tomb, undisturbed. From the Jewish historian Josephus to a compilation of 5th-century Jewish writings called the “Toledoth Jeshu”, even Jewish sources and traditions admit that the tomb was empty. The body was never found.
Living Witnesses
There were a multitude of witnesses who saw Jesus Christ alive after his death. The disciples, the travelers on the road to Emmaus and a number of women all spoke to Jesus alive. Thomas doubted until he was able to put his fingers into Jesus’ wounds (John 20:26–27). He later spread the Gospel all the way to India. The apostle Paul tells of 500 people to whom Jesus appeared at one time, most of whom were still alive and available for questioning when Paul wrote his letter (1 Cor 15:6). Jesus Christ was seen alive many times by hundreds of different people over the course of forty days after his death (John 20–21, Acts 1:3).
The Disciples
Christ’s followers, who had been fearful and who had run away when Jesus was arrested, were completely changed after the Resurrection and became courageous witnesses. Peter, who had denied knowing Christ when recognized by a simple servant girl, became the powerfully bold leader of those who had seen Christ alive, speaking to the thousands gathered in Jerusalem for the Feast of Shavuot—Pentecost. A person may die for a lie if they do not know it is a lie. But people do not give their lives up and face severe persecution to spread a lie they themselves invented. The fact that the disciples willingly suffered beatings and persecution and death is strong evidence that they had actually witnessed the resurrection they refused to stop telling people about. Their message quickly spread across the Middle East and Europe and even into Asia without any military conquest or political support involved—and in spite of strong opposition.
Saul of Tarsus
A devoutly religious Pharisee, who persecuted the Church and had Christ’s followers thrown in prison, Paul had his life absolutely changed by his encounter with Christ. He became a devoted follower of Christ himself, spreading the Gospel throughout Turkey and Greece in the face of beatings and shipwrecks and imprisonment and, finally, execution.
“If the New Testament were a collection of secular writings, their authenticity would generally be regarded as beyond all doubt.”
— F. F. Bruce, Manchester University
“I claim to be an historian. My approach to Classics is historical. And I tell you that the evidence for the life, the death, and the resurrection of Christ is better authenticated than most of the facts of ancient history …”
— E. M. Blaiklock, Professor of Classics, Auckland University
His Miracles Today
Perhaps the greatest evidence today of Christ’s resurrection is the work that he is still doing in the lives of everyday people. In the name of Jesus, people are still being healed emotionally and physically and spiritually by the same power that raised Jesus Christ from the dead.
Sinners are being freed from the burden and pain and shame of sin—sometimes immediately, sometimes after long years of steady work by the Holy Spirit in their lives. Hearts are being mended and lives are being turned around. The best evidence today is the faithful follower of Christ who can say, “He saved me, and I am not the person I used to be” just as the apostles testified 2000 years ago.
Further Reading
Evidence for the Resurrection
— Leadership U
Contemporary Scholarship and the Historical Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ
— Leadership U
The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable?
— FF Bruce
Evidence Supporting the Bible
— CARM - Christian Apologetics and Research Ministry
His Unfamiliar Face
— Koinonia House
Against Heresies (Book III, Chapter 1)
— New Advent
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)