Scientists are not sure that the resurrection of Jesus actually took place. Writes about this edition of Live Science.
In 1998 Lee Strobel, a Chicago Tribune reporter and Yale Law School graduate, published A Case for Christ: A Journalist's Personal Study of the Evidence of Jesus. Strobel was formerly an atheist and was forced to convert to evangelical Christianity because of his wife in order to refute key Christian claims about Jesus. Among these, the historicity of Jesus' resurrection was paramount, but other claims included faith in Jesus as the literal Son of God and the accuracy of New Testament writings. However, Strobel was unable to refute these claims to his satisfaction, and then he also converted to Christianity.
His book has become one of the best-selling Christian apologetics (that is, the defense of the rationality and accuracy of Christianity) of all time. On April 7, the film adaptation of the film "A Work for Christ" was released. The film tries to make a compelling case for the historicity of Jesus' resurrection. As one of Strobel's characters says at the beginning of the film: "If the resurrection of Jesus did not take place, then this (that is, the Christian faith) is a house of cards." The film argues that the focus is on the evidence for the historicity of Jesus' resurrection. However, some of his arguments are not directly related to this issue. For example, Strobel makes most of the fact that there are over 5,000 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, far more than any other ancient scripture.
He does this to assert that we can be quite sure that the original forms of the New Testament scriptures were accurately transmitted. While this number of manuscripts sounds very impressive, most are relatively recent, in many cases from the 10th century or later. There are less than 10 papyrus manuscripts from the second century, and many are very fragmentary. Certainly these early manuscripts give us a pretty good idea of what the original form of the New Testament scriptures might have looked like. But even if these second-century copies are accurate, all we then have are first-century scriptures that claim Jesus was raised from the dead. This in no way proves the historicity of the resurrection.
Roman Klaviaturovich