Week 15: Chapter 13 — The Reality of the Resurrection

1.Keller quotes Paul's statement in 1 Corinthians 15 that "if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile." Paul stakes everything on the historical resurrection. How does this differ from a religious worldview that says "it doesn't matter whether it literally happened — the spiritual meaning is what counts"?

2.He works through the main alternative explanations for the empty tomb and the resurrection appearances — the "wrong tomb" theory, the "hallucination" theory, the "legend" theory — and argues that each fails on historical grounds. Which of these alternative explanations have you encountered? Which did you find most initially plausible, and how does Keller respond to it?

3.Keller notes that the early Christian accounts of the resurrection describe the witnesses as primarily women — a detail that would have undermined the credibility of the story in the first-century world, since women's testimony was not accepted in Roman courts. Why does this "criterion of embarrassment" give historians more reason, not less, to take the accounts seriously?