Historical Evidence of Jesus' Resurrection: 1 Corinthians 15 Creed

Greetings and welcome to the Faith Chapel podcast. My name is Jason and I am

the pastor of Faith Chapel.

This is the sixth episode in the series where we are exploring the historical

evidence for the resurrection of Jesus.

Today's evidence will discuss the earliest known Christian creed about Jesus

dying and rising from the dead.

This creed is significant, historically speaking, because of how close some

trace this creed back to the very early moments after the death and resurrection of Jesus.

This creed is used to combat the theory that the claims of Jesus rising from

the dead were not spoken of until much later.

Thanks for joining us today.

So we are continuing on our discussion of the historical evidences for the resurrection of Jesus.

And we're going to focus in on one point tonight.

That is a section of scripture in 1 Corinthians 15 that we're going to look

at what scholarship says about that and how that is historical evidence for Jesus.

1 Corinthians is written by Paul, and chapter 15 is about.

Starting with the resurrection of Jesus and moving on from there to help us

know that it is not just for Jesus, but it is for all of us.

It is something we have hope in, that when life on this world ends,

it is not our end, that God is going to resurrect us just as he did with Jesus.

So I'm going to start today with a quote from a New Testament scholar,

a guy by the name of Gary Habermas, who has written multiple books on the resurrection of Jesus.

And this is what he says. When Paul said yes to Jesus on the way to Damascus,

there was already a body of data called the early creeds that are later written in the New Testament,

but they were already being noised abroad.

When Paul said yes, there were these heavy creeds, about 80% of which are on

the deity, death, resurrection of Jesus, because that's the major message.

They were already in existence.

So when we have arguments against the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus,

one of the combatants that they use against this is the idea that the story

of Jesus just grew in stature over time,

that it was based on historical reality, but over time it got bigger and bigger.

And so lots of people would say that the resurrection of Jesus is like a fairy

tale that we need to detach from the actual person of Jesus.

But according to Gary here, this isn't likely because of how early these creeds were.

He said when Paul was on the way to Damascus,

and we can kind of have a time frame to know when that was based upon the events

that were happening around it and tracing when Paul's missionary journeys began and when they ended.

We can kind of have an idea of when Paul, when this happened.

And in study Bible that I have, the ESV study Bible.

It says Paul's conversion is about three to four years after the death and resurrection.

And if Gary is correct here in saying that these early creeds that were talking

about the death and resurrection of Jesus,

that would be evidence for the historical reliability of these stories because

it didn't have time to grow.

The people who were still around in Jerusalem would have been able to say,

yeah, this is where his tomb was.

This is where his body is. They could have rolled the stone away.

They could have looked at it in that way. But because that didn't happen,

it does lead us to believe in the historicalness of Jesus's resurrection.

And we're going to take a look at one particular passage of scripture that is

what scholarship believes is an early creed.

And it's not just what we would call conservative Christian scholarship who

believes that this passage is a creed of the early church, but a wide variety of scholarships,

not necessarily even Christian, who take these words to be a creed that was

in existence before Paul went to Damascus and had that encounter with the risen.

So we're going to take a look at that right now. It's 1 Corinthians 15.

We're going to start and we're going to read verses 3 to 8.

And I have a few words here highlighted that we're going to come back to in

a moment that lend to the idea that this is a creed, that this isn't just Paul's own words.

So, Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15 verses 3 to 8.

1 Corinthians 15:3–8

For I delivered to you, as of first importance, what I also received,

that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures,

that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the

Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.

Then he appeared to more than 500 brothers at one time, most of whom are still

alive, though some have fallen asleep.

Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles.

Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.

And so this is the section of scripture that the early creed is found in.

But before we dive into what makes them believe that this is an early creed,

I think we need to take a look at another portion of Scripture where Paul talks

about what happened immediately after his conversion to Christianity on the road to Damascus.

This is going to help us to weave together the story that is going to unfold

before us as we go throughout the rest of this time.

So, put 1 Corinthians 15 in your

back pocket, and we're going to go now to Galatians 1, verses 15 to 19.

Galatians 1:15–19

Paul writes these words, helping him, showing him having authority over the

people in Galatia as someone who can teach them about who Jesus is.

And so, in verses 15 to 19 of Galatians 1, we read, But when he who had set

me apart before I was born, that is God,

and who called me by his grace was pleased to reveal his son to me in order

that I might preach him among the Gentiles, I did not immediately consider.

Nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me,

but I went away into Arabia and returned again to Damascus.

Then after three years, I went up to Jerusalem to visit Cephas and remained

with him 15 days. But I saw none of the other apostles except James, the Lord's brother.

So what happened after his Damascus Road experience, Paul goes off into the

wilderness, into Arabia, and we don't know what he's doing here,

but what I think he's doing here is he's contemplating the scriptures.

He's trying to decipher whether or not from what he has memorized and from his

writings and his parchments that he's taking with him, he's trying to determine

if the Messiah, if the Old Testament predicts that the Messiah should suffer,

should die, and then be raised again.

That was a huge stumbling block for the people of Israel.

They thought it was a military leader who was going to come and conquer and

then set up an earthly kingdom.

But what happened was that God sent his son.

He was the one who took the sins upon himself. Therefore, he had to die.

And his kingdom is not on this earth, but it is an eternal kingdom in eternity.

And so Paul had to really wrestle with these because all from his youth,

he had been taught about who the Messiah was, and it didn't connect with who Jesus was.

And so he went off by himself. And then three years after that, he went up to Jerusalem.

He met with Cephas, who is Peter, and he remained with him 15 days.

And he also encountered James.

Now, if you'll notice, Cephas and James are mentioned in the 1 Corinthians 15

passage, and that's what connects these two pieces that as we get further into it,

we will see how they flow together.

But for us as 21st century English-speaking Americans,

we need to really dive into the question of why this section of scripture is believed to be a creed.

And so we return to Gary Habermas to help us to dissect what these things are.

So he says, first, Paul introduces it with the words received and delivered or passed on in the NIV,

which are technical rabbinic terms indicating he's passing along holy tradition.

So I'm going to pause there and go back up to the passage, which in this first

sentence here, we have those two words that are highlighted.

For I delivered to you as of first and.

What I also received. And so according to Habermas and other people,

other scholars who have studied this,

these two words are indicative of the idea that this is something that is a

teaching that didn't originate with Paul, but that Paul believes and is passing on. He received it.

He understood it. He's following through with it.

And then he passed it on to his disciples, the pupils that were coming after him.

And so this in the first century,

which was a largely illiterate population who had really good memories and who

had come up with devices to remember large swaths of the scripture,

they were putting these ideas into creeds so that people could easily recognize and remember.

I don't know about you, but for me, one of the ones that I've memorized is the Apostles' Creed.

That's something that I can recite for you.

Like, I believe in God the Father, the creator of heaven and earth.

I believe in Jesus Christ, his only son, our Lord.

And it goes on from there. And so it's something that even today,

followers of Jesus still have these creeds, still have these ideas of who Jesus

is, who God is, who the Holy Spirit is.

That we can recite to ourselves using these terms.

And this was delivered to us, like it's not something that we came up with on

our own, and we can pass it on to those that we are following.

And so using this formula of delivered and received, Habermas is saying that

this is indicating what follows is more than likely a creed that the early church had.

Going back down to his reasons to believe this is a creed, he says, Second.

The text's parallelism and stylized content indicate it's a creed. Now, when we take,

ideas and concepts from other languages, and we translate them into our own

language, it does eliminate some of these stylizations.

It does eliminate some of these parallelisms because there's not always a true

corresponding word in one language to another.

And so I don't study the Greek language. I'm not quite prevalent in it,

and so I have to take their words for it.

But in the original languages, according to Habermas, it is the parallelism

and the stylized content indicate that it's a creed.

So we can see that in the Apostles' Creed, that when we memorize that,

when we understand that, it does flow.

I believe in Jesus Christ, his only son, our Lord, who was conceived by the

Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate,

was crucified, died, and buried.

He descended to the dead. There's a style that we say that. There's a style in which it is written.

And when you look at this.

These words in the Greek language, you will see that style as well.

The third reason, according to Habermas, is the original text uses Cephas for

Peter, which is his Aramaic name.

In fact, the Aramaic itself could indicate a very early origin.

So that's a fascinating one to me. So when Paul is writing, he is writing to

the people in Corinth who do not speak Aramaic, who are in the Greek culture,

and he uses the Aramaic word instead of the Greek word here for Peter.

And so this to Habermas and to others is showcasing, all right,

this is like original to the Aramaic language.

There was something written in the Aramaic that was translated it into the Greek.

And so they kept this word in it to help people to connect it back to the Aramaic.

So it's a very fascinating concept. And in his opinion, because this is in there,

it seems to him to be before the church expands out of Jerusalem and Judea.

It's in Acts, when Stephen is stoned, he is the one that that persecution that

comes about is the catalyst to take the message outside of that area.

And so to Habermas and others, it seems like this creed was in existence even

before that persecution came about,

because it goes back to Cephas, which is the Aramaic term for Peter.

Then he says, fourth, the creed uses several other primitive phrases that Paul

would not customarily use, like the 12, the third day he was raised, and others.

So it's a very fascinating study in this.

I've never gotten into it, but if you read through a New Testament book about studying,

you're going to find out that people do scrutinize every phrase and every word

of these letters to see if they are probably authentic to the author that they're attributed to.

And as they go through this, there are phrases that are used multiple times

that they can say, all right, so 1 Corinthians connects with 2 Corinthians,

and they connect with Galatians and Romans and so on and so forth.

You can see these patterns that emerge throughout all the letters that Paul

writes, all the letters that John writes, et cetera.

And so when they do this, they don't see the term the 12 in Paul's writings

or the third day in Paul's writings and others.

And so this helps them to see, all right, so this is not normal for him.

And so this again is evidence for this being an early creed.

It's not Paul's own work.

Lastly, he says, the use of certain words similar is similar to Aramaic and

Mishniak Hebrew means of narration.

So the idea here is that as you're telling a creed, you're telling the story.

You're telling the story of Jesus's crucifixion, his death, his burial,

his resurrection, and his being seen by witnesses.

And according to Habermas here, that is very similar to what you would expect

from an Aramaic culture.

And that's where the Jesus movement started, it began, and that's where this is originating from.

And so that's, again, evidence that it is a creed that is not original with

Paul and that it's been in use before Paul writes it here.

So those are kind of the main reasons that Habermas uses to defend and showcase

that this is something that was attested to early and it was attested to outside

of Paul. It wasn't original with Paul.

This is something that was being taught in Christian circles from a very early

stage of the Christian development.

So, a couple of other comments from other people.

The ESV study Bible says this, Paul is using commonly recognized language for

handing on intact a body of information that one has received from others.

So, the study Bible here says that it is commonly recognized language going

back to what I have received, I have delivered.

That is, again, the stylization of the rabbinic culture in handing down what they believe.

Then we have in the NIV Cultural Background Study Bible, this comment,

those who carefully passed on to others orally what they learned from their

teachers often used the terms received and passed on.

They expected those who heard to continue to pass on the information.

People in antiquity cultivated skilled memories. The information passed on in

verses four to seven goes back to the earliest experiences of Jesus's followers.

So again, it's saying that this is early, that this is not to Paul and his disciples.

In his writings, this is the earliest experiences of Jesus's followers,

which we know Paul was not.

So before his Damascus Road experience, this is what they believe is what the

early church was teaching.

And then Habermas quotes a guy by the name of Hans von Kampenhausen,

who said, this account of 1 Corinthians 15 meets all the demands of historical

reliability that could possibly made of such a text.

So according to Hans von Kampenhausen, he is saying that everything that we

have as evidence that this is a creed, we could possibly want.

Like it meets every one of those criteria.

And this is as reliable as we can get for a historical document.

Now, this isn't a videotape of the brilliant light that comes when Jesus is

resurrected or seeing the guards shaking in their boots as the stone rolls away

and Jesus walks out of the tomb. It's not that.

But for what we have in terms of human history, this is as close to,

this is as reliable as it gets.

Because of the evidences of this being that early creed.

So outside of that videotape that does not exist, we have this as very strong

historical evidence of what the early, early church,

like right after Pentecost, when the Spirit came upon the people,

this is what they taught, this is what they believed, this is what they were sharing with the world.

So we're going to look in depth at what exactly this creed says.

So again, it goes through verses four through seven. I'm going to go back up

and read it, and then we're going to go through what other people say about it.

So this is what he received that he is delivering to others,

that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures,

that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures,

and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.

Then he appeared to more than 500 brothers at one time, most of whom are still

alive, though some have fallen asleep.

Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles.

So that's the creed. That's what the early church taught.

Jesus died. He was buried. He was resurrected, and he was seen by hundreds of eyewitnesses.

So let's look at this a little bit more in depth. What does the creed say?

So according to William Lane Craig, he says, this creed is incredibly early

and therefore trustworthy material.

Essentially, it's a four-line formula. The first line refers to the crucifixion,

the second to the burial, the third to the resurrection, and the fourth to Jesus' appearances.

Then we have Dr. Kenneth Chafin, who says this, what Paul is saying through this creed.

Then Paul reminded them, the readers in Corinth, that when the gospel is reduced

to its essence, it is an event in history.

It was not something which was enacted in another place, like the activities of the Greek gods,

but a happening that can be given date and place and person.

But his reminding them of what the gospel was and what it meant in their lives

was really leading up to the main point of the chapter,

that the resurrection of Jesus was an event that really took place and whose

implications were enormous.

So Paul uses this creed to showcase to the Corinthian believers that this actually

happened, that there are multiple

eyewitnesses of it, and that you can go and ask them if you want to.

Most of them, he says later on, are still alive.

Go and research it for yourself. Go and investigate it for yourself.

And so he is using this to help them to see the reliability of this story.

We also have from the Zondervan Study Bible, Paul teaches what he received, i.e.

The message of Jesus' death and resurrection that the other apostles also teach.

What follows in verses 3-5 is the fundamental Christian confession that Paul

passes on to the churches he establishes.

So Paul here will later say, like, this is, I'm not teaching you anything new.

This is what Cephas teaches.

This is what James teaches. This is what all of the other apostles teach.

I'm not making things up here. And this is not my own wishful thinking.

This is rooted and grounded in history.

And this is what he emphasizes in 1 Corinthians 15,

which the Gary Habermas says of that verse, Paul emphasizes that the other apostles

agreed in preaching the same gospel, the same message about the resurrection.

This means that what the eyewitness Paul is saying is the exact same thing as

what the eyewitness Peter and James are saying.

And so it's again, a unified story.

It's not one person making things up and other people gravitating towards that

and then adopting that as their story, what James is saying,

Peter is saying, and that's what Paul is saying as well.

Jesus was dead. He did rise from the dead.

That's the historical evidence we have.

Lastly, we have Andreas Kostenberger in The Cradle, The Cross,

and The Crown writing this.

Against attacks on the historicity and reality of Jesus' resurrection,

Paul affirmed that the gospel he received testified to Christ's death,

burial, and resurrection according to the scriptures, that is,

in fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy.

He also cited numerous appearances of the resurrected Jesus to various audiences,

including many who were still living at the time of writing,

and last but not least, to Paul himself on the road to Damascus.

So, this is really what the creed is announcing, that Jesus',

death and resurrection are, There's a date, there's a place There are witnesses

of it It is something that we can see in history And so that's what the.

What the story of this creed is, telling the history of Jesus's death and resurrection

in a way that people could memorize it and then pass it along to other people.

So one of the things we also need to look at is where did this creed come from?

We've already seen evidence that it didn't originate with Paul.

When Paul goes to Jerusalem to meet with Peter, to meet with James,

we learn that in that phrase, there's a very specific word in Greek that Paul

uses about what he was doing in Jerusalem.

And that word is investigate.

Like he had that experience with Jesus. He went out into the wilderness and

he could understand how the Messiah was supposed to suffer according to the Old Testament.

He came back to Damascus and preached that the Messiah must suffer according to the Old Testament.

And when he goes to Jerusalem, when he meets with James and when he meets with

Peter, like Is that creed something that's already been established?

And so in the Archaeological Study Bible, this is what it says about where this creed comes from.

So Paul linked himself with early Christian tradition.

He was not its originator, nor did he receive it directly from the Lord.

His source was other Christians.

So if you can remember his Damascus Road experience, he went into the town,

he was fasting from food and water for three days.

And then a guy by the name of Ananias came on, laid his hands on Paul,

prayed over him, and something like scales fell off of Paul's eyes. He regained his sight.

So there were other Christians around him at that time.

God specifically told Ananias to go and lay his hands on him.

And so this is what he did.

And Paul, by using this creed, is showcasing that it is not his own words.

It is not his own belief.

There are certainly some people out there who have over the years argued that

Paul is the one who brought the resurrection to Christianity because Paul's

the first writings of the New Testament.

When you look at the gospels, while they took place before Paul and his missionary

journey, Paul is the one who first started writing these letters to the churches

that he had already visited.

And so chronologically, they came first compared to the gospels.

And so when people have argued that Paul is the one who really started the idea

of the resurrection of Jesus, but Paul here is saying,

I've passed on what I have learned.

I've delivered what I have received.

And so he is not the originator of this. He received it from other Christians.

Again, in the NIV Zondervan Study Bible, it says,

the resurrection of Jesus belongs to the teaching tradition of the gospel that

Paul has received and passed on to the Corinthian believers.

So because Peter went after that three-year stint in Damascus preaching about

Jesus or the Messiah suffering from persecution and death and then rising from

the dead and showing how that is shown in the Old Testament,

he then goes up to Jerusalem and receives this creed from Peter.

And that's what we look at next.

Like, when was this creed started?

And then to start to answer that question, we're going to go with another Gary

Habermas quote, where it says, we know that.

Paul wrote 1 Corinthians between AD 55 and 57.

He indicates in 1 Corinthians 15, 1 through 4, that he has already passed this

creed to the church at Corinth, which would mean it must predate his visit there in AD 51.

Therefore, the creed was being used within 20 years of the resurrection, which is quite early.

So this is where we start. We're going to move backward a couple of steps,

but this is where we start because this is what is factual.

Based upon just other things that are happening in the Bible and outside of

the Bible, they have narrowed down the window to when Paul wrote 1 Corinthians 2.55-57.

And he says in there, I have already given you this creed.

I've already given it to you. And that must have been when Paul was there in AD 51.

So prior to that, it had to have been in existence.

And whether you believe that Jesus, Jesus' death and resurrection was in AD

30 or AD 33. Those are the two possible dates that it could have been.

It's within 18 to 21 years of the death and resurrection of Jesus.

And again, that's super early, historically speaking.

But people believe that we can go back even further in this.

So this is from Michael Lycona. He says, many scholars believe Paul received

this creed from Peter and James while visiting with them in Jerusalem three

years after his conversion.

That would be within five years of the crucifixion. Think about that.

It's really amazing. Not only is it extremely early,

but it was apparently given to Paul by eyewitnesses or others he deemed reliable,

which heightens its credibility even more.

So Michael Lycona uses a different scale than I do.

When you look at what we said earlier about Paul's Damascus road trip,

it was three to four years after the death and resurrection of Jesus.

And then you add that three-year period.

To me, it's six to seven years from the death and resurrection of Jesus.

But that is still really early for having this creed be in existence and be known pretty widely.

And then the last one we have here traces it back to the word Cephas and why

that Aramaic word is in this Greek creed.

This is what James Dunn says.

This tradition, we can be entirely confident, was formulated as tradition within

months of Jesus's death.

And again, this traces it back to before Stephen's death, his martyrdom,

and the persecution of the church that followed that spread Christianity outward.

He believes that this was traced to that time between Jesus' ascension into

heaven and Stephen's stoning death, which takes it within months of those events.

And so, again, this is, there is no way, not even if it was six or seven years

that where there were still eyewitnesses.

And I don't even believe it could happen in the first 20 years.

If you go with the first Corinthians, Paul's first arrival in Corinth in 51

AD, like there's no way for it to grow into that massive story when these first

eyewitnesses are there.

And some people take it back even further than that.

Which is like literally taking a snapshot of what the world was like within

months of Jesus's resurrection.

They believed that he died, was

buried and raised from the dead and had appeared to hundreds of people.

And so that's the historical evidence of this creed that is in 1 Corinthians 15.

So this is what I wanted to end with, a quote from Gary Habermas,

where he just says, it's not just conservative Christians who are convinced of this being a creed.

This is an assessment that's shared by a wide range of scholars from across

a broad theological spectrum.

The eminent scholar Joachim Jeremias refers to this creed as the earliest tradition of all.

And Ulrich Wilkins says it indubitably goes back to the oldest phrase of all

the history of primitive Christianity.

And so it is not something that Paul came up with.

It is something the earliest Christians held, what they believed based on their experiences.

And again, it says that Jesus died, he was buried, he was resurrected,

and hundreds of people saw him after he rose from the dead.

And this, to me, is one of the strongest pieces of evidence on its own for believing

in the resurrection of Jesus,

that this creed is what the early church taught, what they experienced,

and how they worshiped Jesus.

Thank you again for joining us in our discussion on the creed from 1 Corinthians 15.

This is just one more layer of discovery to find out if, historically speaking,

we can say the evidence leads us to conclude that Jesus rose from the grave.

In the next episode, we will look at two individuals, Saul of Tarsus and James,

Jesus' half-brother, who changed their beliefs on Jesus being the Messiah after

having encounters with him after his death. Have a great week.