The Case For Christ

McDowell, Josh. The Resurrection Factor. San Bernardino, Calif.:
Here's Life, 1981.
12: THE EVIDENCE OF THE MISSING BODY
Was jesus' Body Really Absent from His Tomb?
Candy heiress Helen Vorhees Brach flew into the world's busiest
airport on a crisp autumn afternoon, stepped into a crowd, and
promptly disappeared without a trace. For more than twenty years
the mystery of what happened to this red-haired, animal-loving
philanthropist has baffled police and journalists alike.
While investigators are convinced she was murdered, they
haven't been able to determine the specific circumstances,
largely because they've never found her body. Police have floated
some speculation, leaked tantalizing possibilities to the press,
and even got a judge to declare that a con man was responsible
for her disappearance. But absent a corpse, her murder
officially remains unsolved. Nobody has ever been charged with
her slaying.
The Brach case is one of those frustrating enigmas that keep me
awake from time to time as I mentally sift through the sparse
evidence and try to piece together what happened. Ultimately it's
an unsatisfying exercise; I want to know what happened, and
there just aren't enough facts to chase away the conjecture.
Occasionally bodies turn up missing in pulp fiction and real
life, but rarely do you encounter an empty tomb. Unlike the case
of Helen Brach, the issue with Jesus isn't that he was nowhere to
be seen. It's that he was seen, alive; he was seen, dead; and he
was seen, alive once more. If we believe the gospel accounts,
this isn't a matter of a missing body. No, it's a matter of Jesus
still being alive, even to this day, even after publicly
succumbing to the horrors of crucifixion so graphically depicted
in the preceding chapter.
The empty tomb, as an enduring symbol of the Resurrection, is the
ultimate representation of Jesus' claim to being God. The apostle
Paul said in I Corinthians 15:17 that the Resurrection is the
very linchpin of the Christian faith: "If Christ has not been
raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins."
Theologian Gerald O'Collins put it this way: "In a profound
sense, Christianity without the resurrection is not simply
Christianity without its final chapter. It is not Christianity
at all." The Resurrection is the supreme vindication of Jesus'