Alive - by Dave Smith

of the day, women’s testimonies were not considered valid in a court
of law!
The second suggestion is also highly implausible, given the variety
of times and circumstances of the encounters, not least the
unlikelihood of 500 people having the same hallucination at one.
Moreover, what seems clear is that one of the first reactions of the
early disciples when Jesus did appear was one of surprise. This was
totally predictable. As NT Wright has extensively pointed out, firstcentury
Jews either didn’t believe in resurrection, or were hoping for a
general resurrection of the righteous at the end of time. What they
were not expecting was the resurrection of a single individual in the
middle of history. 12
Furthermore, as we have seen through exploring the Gospel stories
themselves, there is what has been described as ‘the strangeness of
the risen Jesus’. Had the disciples invented these appearances, they
would most likely have chosen either ‘a dazzling heavenly figure or a
resuscitated corpse’. 13 Yet the resurrected Jesus was neither. On the
one hand he was clearly the same real ‘physical’ Jesus that had been
crucified: he had the marks on his body; he could be seen, touched
and could do ordinary things like cook and eat. Yet at the same time
he was somehow different: he often wasn’ t recognised at first and
had a body that could suddenly appear in a locked room and then
disappear.
Our final consideration concerns the sudden and remarkable spread
of the Christian faith, starting in Jerusalem and then eventually to the
whole Roman world. So convinced were many of these first apostolic
witnesses, that many of them were willing to die as martyrs for their
belief in the resurrection. This is different to contemporary examples:
‘Modern martyrs act solely out of their trust in beliefs passed along to