Lee Strobel

No, because they were there.

Of all human beings who've ever lived, they were in a position to know for a fact whether he returned from the dead or not.

They touched him, they talked with him, they ate with him.

And knowing the truth, they were even willing to die for it.

Then finally, the fourth E stands for the word eyewitnesses.

Remember I said earlier, we're lucky in ancient history.

If we have a fact we believe to be true, we dig down, we find one source, maybe two sources.

There are nine ancient sources inside and outside the New Testament confirming and corroborating the conviction of the disciples that they encountered the risen Jesus.

That is an avalanche of historical data.

And so it was based on that kind of evidence that I sat as an atheist and said, wait a minute.

If I'm going to be honest, if I'm going to follow the evidence wherever it points, which is what I was always taught to do, then I have to conclude that Jesus didn't just claim to be God.

He backed up that claim by returning from the dead.

That's what you're talking about with the nine witnesses.

I'm talking about nine sources.

Nine sources, right.

So the first one is the creed that I mentioned.

By the way, the historical credentials of that creed are so strong that one of the few Jewish New Testament scholars, Pinchas Lapid, said it may be taken as a statement of eyewitnesses.

So you've got the creed, you've got Paul.

Paul, of course, said personally that he encountered the risen Christ.

And that's how he became, he was Saul of Tarsus, a persecutor of Christians.