(11) The resurrection of Christ Part I

I'm going to back up here just because I want to give a little introduction here. Before I resigned my engineering job, I was doing work. I was a member of the Investigative Engineers Association. It's kind of like a private eye for engineering projects of different kinds.

And real interesting, but my goal was to drop a report where the results were so conclusive that I never had to testify in court and that I never even had to give a deposition. And that's what happened. Fortunately, I never did have to give a deposition because what I would want to do is lay a report down. When the opposing attorneys read it, they say, let's make a settlement. And that's what happened in every case, fortunately. So we would do investigative work for attorneys and for insurance companies and things of that sort.

And the intent was let's just tie this thing down. One of the other rules we had aside from the goal, you know, never have to testify in court, the other rule we had was never testify for the guilty. You just don't want to do that. So we also never did that. found is, you know, you can pull together evidence and that way not get involved in the legal shenanigans, but just here's the evidence and make the evidence so weighty that the conclusion is already a done deal.

And as I look at the evidence in Scripture for the resurrection of Christ, I see it as being the same way. It's a done deal. You don't even have to go to court on this. It's a settle out of court deal. It's a let's get this thing done because the evidence is so weighty, so substantial for the resurrection of Christ that it's a button down, nailed down deal. And no quibbling, no excuses.

One of the things we'll want to take a look at as we look at the first half of the subject of the resurrection of Christ is we got this air photo that we started off with, with a few exceptions. all the evidence within the time of the apostles and their early testimony, all the evidence for the resurrection of Christ was found inside the circle. So when they stood at the middle of it in the temple, Peter could say, all these things we are witnesses. And you know how many challengers he got? Zip. None. Nada. Because why?

All they had to do was take a Sabbath day's journey, a relatively short walk. You need a hand out here? Of course. Glad you could join us. All of the evidence was a Sabbath day's journey, a short walk away from the temple. So do you contest anything that we've said? Let's go take a look at the grave. Anybody there? Let's go talk to the guys who laid Him there and the women who saw Him laid there.

You have any question about where He was crucified? Let me take you to the place. You want to see where He ascended? It's just right across the valley here from the temple. Let's just take a little stroll out to the front gate and I'll show you. I can point it out from here. Or, you want to know where it was we had the Last Supper? It's just a short little walk.

As a matter of fact, let's go to those places. Here at the temple, Peter and the other apostles would make a public appeal and repeatedly say, of which we are witnesses. And then he would use the pronoun, you, because he would point to them. You know about this stuff. And you know how much squawk he got? None. Zip. None recorded. By anybody else, none in scripture, absolutely zip. Nobody contested it. And we'll be taking a look at that more. The evidence is overwhelming. Let's go over here.

This is the area where he had the Last Supper. The very place where the Last Supper was held is fairly well identified. And we've showed pictures of it some other Sunday mornings here. Over here is the area where he was crucified, and likely nearby also the area where he was buried, right nearby.

Buried in a rich man's grave, the tomb provided by Joseph of Arimathea. And we'll talk later about why Joseph could offer his tomb and yet still keep it for himself. Over here was the Mount of Olives. This is where Jesus gave what's known as the Olivet Discourse.

The week before he was crucified in that very week. This is the on the left hand side of that red circle is the path. You see that sort of a circular arc coming towards the temple. That's the path that he came down on the day that's called the Triumphal Entry.

It's all right there. All the events, all the evidence. You want to look at the locations. You want to check and make sure that that grave is empty. You want to talk to the witnesses. Any dispute about the witnesses? We'll take a look at more of this next time we talk.

But when you add up the total number of witnesses of those who saw Him resurrected, those who were involved with His arrest and fell backwards, saw Him heal the servants here, over a thousand people. Plenty of witnesses. I mean, you know, in a lot of court cases they have trouble finding a witness. Hey, how about over a thousand? How much time you got?

No trouble seeing the places, finding the evidence. Here in the temple, do you doubt that Jesus descended from David? Up until 70 AD destruction, Jesus' genealogy was kept right there in the temple. Let's just walk right across the court here and check it out if you don't believe he's descended from David. We'll show you the evidence right here. Dispute any of it? Not a word. Not a word. Nancy?

And a court only requires three witnesses. Well, the Jewish court said two or three was the standard. A thousand was way over the top, and there were more than that. Okay? Plenty of witnesses. Yeah, I saw a hand up. You see that circle there? the location of Golgotha and the tomb are right all within that circle, right nearby. Yeah, so the bottom line is, and it's a Sabbath day's journey from that temple to what you see to the top there, which is Mount of Olives. All the other circles are that distance or less. Let's just take a little stroll and you can see all the evidence. And that's why when it came time, here's Peter repeatedly, We'll see how he repeatedly said, of which we are witnesses, and he even said, plural, you.

In the midst of all that, absolutely zero, zero, in the way of response, objecting. Nobody said, yeah, but. None of that, none of that took place. Yeah, Marilyn. Yes, the walls, let's take a look at it. Right in here, this wall, you can see part of it right there. That was a part of it. And matter of fact, right here is the gate that the Muslims in the 1400s bricked up because they heard that the Jewish Messiah was going to come through there. And so they figured if they bricked it up, that that'd keep them from coming. Okay. So they bricked it up, but that's one of the walls.

And then right in this area is called the City of David. This is the old walls of Jerusalem. And we'll be going across that when we go through the book of Isaiah in the months ahead. And then the walls came down here. This is this is one corner. This is what's called the scene quarter.

And that was where the Last Supper was held. And from from the putting the dots together. Acts 12 12 talks about John Mark, his mother, owned that house that they met in. That was probably the place where they had the Last Supper, where the apostles met for the Day of Pentecost, and where they met again to pray for Peter and his imprisonment, those kinds of things. So this was kind of their meeting place in Jerusalem, a fairly large place.

And So then that would be one corner down here. Down here, the walls came in ancient times and through here, Herod's palace was over in this area. And then out here would be the other end of the city and then up here. Both Roman law and Jewish law required that the crucifixion take place outside the city. And we're told that the Romans like to use crucifixions as a placard for, you better be afraid. So they like to put it in very public places with crossroads and lots of traffic so people could look at it and say, I don't want to be in that position. So this is one place putting a lot of pieces of evidence together.

Right in this circle is where the crucifixion took place. Right down here. This is a highway here. And down here is a valley, the Kidron Valley. And so that valley goes along there. Jesus, when he came across for what's called the triumphal entry, came across here down this loop, and right across this valley during Roman times there was a bridge. The Romans destroyed it when they attacked Jerusalem in 70 AD, but there had previously been a bridge there.

So basically all the evidence was within quick walking distance. You could see it all very quickly, and you could talk to all the people. You could talk to hundreds of people right there, who had seen Jesus, hundreds of people had seen Jesus resurrected, including some who absolutely would not believe it beforehand, about Thomas the doubter.

I'm not going to believe it until I see the wounds. Nah, no way. What happened when he saw it? My Lord and my God. Here's another example, James, James his brother. didn't believe. All during Jesus' ministry on earth did not believe. After the resurrection, he believed. Amazing.

Okay, let's proceed with what you got in your hand out there. And we want to do this. We've got five, that is 05, history, how do we know what we know, through 09, the Bible, just a collection of myths. that we have handed out previously, and if you don't have that, you'll certainly want to catch up with it afterwards. See Nancy, okay? See Nancy, and she can help you get caught up with those earlier ones.

We're going to build on those because basically what those points that we've made in those five prior weeks do for us is they constrain the reasonable conclusions about the New Testament documents down to a period of time, the essential ones testifying, down to a period of time prior to 70 AD with a few exceptions by, for example, the Apostle John. The New Testament documents, by and large, were gathered together by 70 AD. You had within the lifetime of the people who were testifying. These documents were written for the most part, and many of them still alive.

When Paul wrote in about 57 AD, when Paul wrote 1 Corinthians chapter 15, that's where he said 500 people saw him at once. And to that he added specific names. And that's where about you get 500 and then add some more to that. And then if you're looking for the number of people who saw him in the garden when they arrested him, it says a cohort came.

That's the Roman designation for a troop of 600. That's why I come up with easily over a thousand in terms of people who had testimony of some aspect of those last days. Let's put it this way. What if you only had 300 Roman soldiers? And by the way, stationed there at Antonia Fortress, the standard number was 1,000. special Jewish festivals, they added another thousand. So there's plenty of Roman soldiers.

That's one thing. The other thing is there's clear evidence, because remember who got the ear cut off? The high priest's servant's ear. So you had some representatives among the Jews there as well. Even if you were to discount the Roman soldiers number to something less, you still have more Jews there on top of that. And the Jews had a temple guard who were likely also represented. So actually the number 600 may be conservative. The number may be higher. And so the Roman cohort number, if you take it on the low end, by the time you add the Jews with them, you're still back up to 600.

If the Romans actually had 600, which they easily could have done at a time of a Jewish festival, they would have had 2,000 soldiers in Jerusalem. What's 600 compared to them? Especially when the Roman response was typically overboard. Remember they sent how many to take Paul from Jerusalem to Caesarea? How many? Almost 500. So it was typical for the Romans to overreact. The Jews rebelled in 66 AD and they sent 12 legions to suppress the rebellion. And by the way, it worked. Okay, let's take a look here.

The point being that what we see recorded in the New Testament is constrained to the time of the people who were living, many of whom Paul said in 1 Corinthians 15 were still alive, a part of that original group who had witnessed the resurrection, many of whom are still alive. The documents were in the process of being written, recording these events while people were still alive and there were multiple witnesses. It was at a time when you could still walk around and see all this evidence firsthand. There was plenty of evidence.

If I had been in a situation stepping back, you know, if somebody said, you know, do an engineering investigation job, only this time we're wanting you to pull together the evidence on the resurrection of Christ, I would love that. Because after all, you know, I don't like to represent the guilty. I'd love to do it where the evidence is so good you don't even have to testify. Okay? Works great. Okay.

So the other thing is that we pointed out that the New Testament documents do not qualify by any standard measure of culture and anthropology, do not qualify as mythology. Just doesn't. It's way, way too short. We demonstrated in our previous discussions, it took two weeks to address it, that basically it takes centuries for a myth to be developed, typically, and it takes at least 20 years to begin developing elements of mythology if you have the right environment, and we demonstrated that this is not the right environment because you had people testifying to exactly where things were and what they looked at and what they saw, testifying right in the middle of available evidence all within walking distance. And so there's no basis to look for the Gospels and all being written later. There's no basis to look at them as mythology, not if you want to stand upon hard science.

OK, now, the disciples' expectations, because what we're going to do is we're going to take an approach here. The approach I'm going to take is different than what you see in a lot of books and even the pamphlet that you saw. Typically, what people will do is they will say, well, there's this objection. What if the apostles took the body and then made up the story? What if the swoon theory is Jesus wasn't really dead, he just passed out?

Things like that. So the tendency is to look at the theories and then come up with the evidence against them. What I would suggest we do here, and I'm going to follow along with, is let's just look at the evidence firsthand and then the various theories will drop out. So that's the approach we'll take.

The first thing is the disciples' expectations. Now, were the disciples expecting that Christ would resurrect? Winnie says a resounding no. Why do you say no? They were skeptical. And what evidence do we have that they were skeptical? He had to tell them more than once that he was going to the cross. Yes, he had to tell them and even we find more than one record of the opponents of Jesus stating that so that their expectation it was so well known that not only was the Apostles expectation but it was it was the opponents expectation You know, we've got something else going on here. We're concerned about him, you know, getting some kind of insurrection going. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, I'm going fishing. I'm going with you. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Yeah.

If you if you look at it, this was simply not a fulfillment of the apostles expectations. And in fact, I'll use the word disciples because they hadn't been sent yet. It was simply not a fulfillment of their expectations. It was not at all what they were saying. Oh, yeah, this is what's going to happen. And, you know, we'll cook up a good story because that's what everybody's thinking is going to take place. No, it's not at all what was going to happen according to their expectations.

Let's look on page two at the top there. There's a quote from Matthew. From that time, Jesus began to show His disciples that He must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed and raised up on the third day. Peter took Him aside and began to rebuke Him, saying, God forbid it, Lord.

This shall never happen to You." Was Peter expecting that this should happen? Absolutely not. For him, it wasn't a, are you sure about this? Here he was taking Jesus himself and saying, hey, no way. And this shall never happen to you. Why would he say this shall never happen to you? Why would he make such a statement? I'm not going to let this happen. Don't even think of it. So Peter's expectation is not only this isn't going to happen, not only is that not going to take place, but I'm going to keep it from happening. So here's Peter's expectation here. Now, I give below that a whole bunch of other quotes. You can take a look at that on your own time here.

But one of the things that I think is clear, if you look through these passages, and the sampling we had for Matthew 16 was only one of them, it was simply not the disciples' expectation that Jesus should die and then be resurrected, and then the disciples, you know, saying, well, he didn't actually resurrect, but we cooked it up and made up a good story. Okay.

It was simply not the way things were working towards to begin with. And we have multiple records for, and notice that this is from Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Acts. We have five different books, four different authors recording this perspective as they came up to the cross. It was simply not their view. The next one is the disciples radically change character. Before the cross, they had the opportunity to fight for Jesus as they were expecting.

Here's Peter, right? And so, here's Peter, and there's hundreds of soldiers, and who does he go after? The high priest's servant, Malchus, the name is given, right? So here's Peter in the Garden of Gethsemane, and I'm not going to let this happen. He pulls out probably something like a fishing knife, and he goes after the high priest, not the Roman soldiers, not the guys who've got all the armor on and all that. He goes after the high priest's servant who may not have had anything in his hand, and he just stabs him in the heart, right? What does he do? Whacks off his ear, real fatal, right?

So, I mean, this was really a bad attempt at preventing this from happening, okay? Not very impressive. If you were to say, you know, give Peter a grade for being a strategic soldier, not so good, okay? Didn't come off so well on this one. And Jesus said, stop, this isn't the way this is going to happen, okay? Yes, Marilyn.

What's the use of expecting him to declare himself a king? Well, here's what's interesting. As we'll see as we go through Isaiah, there are two kinds of prophecies that were striking the Jews' ears. One is the suffering servant. The other is the triumphant Messiah. And the Jews were always kind of scratching their heads about that.

And of course, now we have a perspective looking backwards that makes things very clear. So they had a mixed expectation, but certainly the Romans being on top of the Jews motivated an increasing number of the Jews to look for a saving Messiah in the sense of someone who's going to blast the Romans out of here and give us back our country. That's what they were looking for in great part. Now there's a whole spectrum of variation in how they saw that.

That was something that, one, the Romans certainly didn't want, and two, the Jewish leaders didn't want, because they had an arrangement with the Romans. They said, well, this isn't exactly optimum, but at least we're in power, and we get to call the shots, and it's fairly calm, so let's just settle for things being relatively calm and us in power. The Jewish leaders, although they would read these prophecies, they didn't want anything getting upset, not during their watch, not during their lifetime. Because after all, they had a pretty cushy deal.

It wasn't really good for all the Jews, but it was good for them. Now we have the radically changed character. Look on page 3, and there are two quotes from Acts. I won't read through all of them, But there are a couple of places that are bolded and we will take a look at those.

Acts 4.13, Now as they, that is the Sanhedrin, this is the gathering of 70 Jewish leaders plus the chief priests, observe the confidence of Peter and John. Confidence? These are the guys that ran. Where did the confidence come from?

Here they saw these simple fishermen from Galilee as they observed the confidence of Peter and John and understood that they were uneducated and untrained men. In other words, it doesn't mean that they were rank ignorant, but they weren't at the top echelon like these guys who were the Sanhedrin. The Sanhedrin, these were the PhDs, if you will, of the Jewish elite. And understood that they were uneducated and untrained men, they were amazed. and began to recognize them as having been with Jesus. Can you imagine what was dawning on them?

Oh, no, we're in trouble. We're in trouble. These guys are going to cause a big problem because they're not just some babbling Galilean. These guys are talking. They're talking boldly. They're making testimony about things that are all within walking distance of where we're meeting. things that are miraculous and irrefutable.

Things so irrefutable that when the Roman soldiers who were guarding the tomb came to these very same leaders, just not that long before this event, they just paid off the Roman soldiers and said, don't tell anything to Pilate and we'll cover for you. These are the guys that were starting to get startled and amazed about Peter and John.

Let's look at the rest of the passage where it's bolded down to verse 20. Here is Peter responding, he says, for we cannot stop speaking about what we have cooked up, what we have imagined, what we've hallucinated about. No. What we have seen and heard. And here is Peter speaking for himself and John. 1 John 1, verse 4, repeatedly makes reference to what he's seen and heard.

Same words. This is real stuff. Multiple people testifying. If this is some mass hallucination, how come 500 plus people are hallucinating? All the same thing. And if you doubt any of it, it's all within a short walk. Want to go walk? No, they didn't want to. They knew it. Further down there in Acts 4, there's a third bolded item on that page. Grant that your bondservant may speak your word with all confidence.

See the radically different character from guys that are running around? It had only been a short time before that Peter stood in Caiaphas' courtyard and three times said, I never knew him. I swear I never knew him. Now what is he doing? He's testifying with confidence. It's believed that that courtyard has been identified, even the steps up to Caiaphas' house. He stood, you know, here in Jerusalem.

Again, all these things are very close distance. And then the last one there in verse 31, began to speak the word of God with boldness. These men who were cowards, who ran who denied that they even knew Christ, now under threat from the most powerful group of Jews who had a temple guard and they had the authority to have them whipped. Those guys, they're standing in front of them and they tell them, no, we're going to say what we've seen and heard, and then they go right out in the temple area there and preach with boldness. Okay, go ahead. Yeah, yeah. Something radical had taken place. Very radical had taken place. Guys who were cowards, denying... You know who Peter denied? A servant girl. He was afraid of a servant girl. And here He turns around in front of guys that can have Him whipped at a moment's notice, and He speaks with boldness.

I'm going to tell what I've seen and heard. Why? Because I've seen it and I've heard it. Okay? And I can't deny it. And this is so life-changing, I have to tell you. And the very Lord of glory who was resurrected and I saw ascended, right from the top of the Mount of Olives there, short distance from here, I saw Him ascend. That one told me that I'm to be his witness, and so I am. The disciples' individual backgrounds. It starts at the bottom of page three. The primary distinction I'll make is this. It's probably the most extreme case. There may have been others. And let's look at it this way.

Matthew, author of the Gospel of Matthew, also was named Levi, and it was common. You notice a number of different people in the Bible had A couple of different names that they were called by. Peter was also called what? Simon and Cephas. Yeah. So Peter had alternate names as well. And so anyway, here's Matthew, also called Levi. And what was his occupation?

A tax collector. Oh, that's nice. That's sweet. Tax collector for whom? The Romans. That's not so sweet. Okay. This would be a ghastly occupation. It was an occupation, and we give multiple references there. A standard phrase among the Jews, and you see it throughout the Gospels, a standard phrase to indicate somebody who was completely morally unacceptable was who?

Taxpayers and sinners. Yeah, taxpayers and sinners. Yeah, these, excuse me, tax collectors, thank you. Tax, not the payers. It's the tax collectors who were the problem. Now, think about this. Here is the moral epitome of the worst of the worst. And Matthew is one of them. Now, on the other end of the scale, you have Simon, who's not Simon Peter, but Simon the Zealot.

Now, the zealots were of what kind of people? They were just really enthusiastic? No. Yeah, these were Jewish vigilantes, and they actually developed... One of the guys we studied who went through Axis is the procurator, Governor Felix. Now, Felix was known for two things.

One is he was known for being dishonest, which the Jews didn't like. The other thing was he was also profoundly cruel, and that developed an even more extreme group called the Sicarii among the Zealots, and they kind of became known as the Jewish terrorists because they were increasingly opposing the Jews.

Simon the Zealot was among this group. The group had begun, according to Josephus, In the year 6 AD, and it was a tax revolt based on one of the census events, similar to what is described for the birth of Jesus. It was kind of the next tax census. That generated the revolt that is recorded in scripture and by Josephus. So that tax revolt generated this group called the Zealots. Simon was one of them.

Since that started 6 AD, and we're talking about time a couple decades later when Jesus started his ministry that excuse me 80 this the tax revolt that generated the zealots was not the tax event it was it was after the one for the birth of Christ so I mean 680 Jesus the census for Jesus that caused Mary and Joseph to have to go to Bethlehem was an earlier census event. And it would have to have been dated before March of 4 BC when Herod died, right? Since Herod was obviously involved in the account. And it was when Herod died, March of 4 BC, that Joseph and Mary came back from Egypt. So anyway, that was an earlier tax event. Does that clarify it? Okay. All right. Another question, yes?

Yeah, and so yeah, you've got different nicknames that people would take on. Here's Paul and Saul, right? By two various names. Now, so as you look at this, Imagine putting together Matthew, the tax collector for the Romans, and Simon the zealot. And, you know, I even imagine the Lord's sense of humor and things. Can you imagine? Because remember the Lord sent the disciples out two by two? We don't know who got paired up with who. But some of the combinations you could imagine. Imagine the Lord says, Matthew, Simon, you two are going out together.

Okay? Another one, I don't know who got paired up with Judas, but that must have been a lot of fun. Okay. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. No, the crucifixion was about 30 AD. Yes. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, here's two things that puzzle people at times. We just want to clarify them. One is the year zero. That is typically thought of as that's the birth of Christ. Well, two things.

One is there never was a year zero. There was 1 BC and 1 AD. Nobody lived in year zero. Never happened. Zero is the dividing point between 1 BC and 1 AD. So that's one thing to clarify it. If people say that Jesus was born in the year zero, there wasn't any such year, okay? It was just the dividing line between BC and AD.

The other thing is because, you know, they hadn't worked out their chronology real exactly when they went and established this calendar that we have now, okay? As it turns out, using the chronology that we're working with now, here's Herod dying in March of 4 BC, We also know that the census tended to be on about a 12 to 14 year cycle. So if the one recorded in Acts 5 and recorded by Josephus took place in 6 AD, the prior one would have been something like, you know, 6 to 8 BC.

Okay? So that would have been the one that Joseph and Mary were called under. And by the way, we have a whole bunch of those tax declaration documents, lots of them, because the Romans continued to use that same system where you'd have a tax census and they would declare, you know, the people that they had in the household and things of that sort and then sign it. And so anyway, that there were a number of census events, this without doubt, reality. Okay.

So that would be one thing that would say that something radical, something of higher priority than simply the, you know, you're a tax collector and I hate you and, you know, here's Matthew, he says, well, I collected taxes for the Romans and it worked for me and, you know, so if you've got a problem, you've got a problem, you know. That somehow was overridden and I would suggest to you that it was overridden by the magnitude of what was going on spiritually because of the presence of Jesus Christ. And that you cannot easily explain the lack of conflict between Matthew and Simon the Zealot unless you look at not something concocted, not a mass hallucination, because you don't mass hallucinate hundreds and hundreds of people, not something that they sat down over the campfire one night and cooked up. You cannot explain what took place.

And by the way, both Matthew, and we'll take a look at this later if we have time and we're running out of it, both Matthew and Simon paid with their life for what they claimed. Here's Matthew, the tax collector, who compromised by taxing his own people to give money to the Romans. And the record that we have was that while he was being staked with wooden stakes to the ground, he was declaring the gospel while he was being staked to death. He yelled it out with his last breaths. Now, that doesn't sound like a guy that compromised, does it? Doesn't at all. Alright, the other thing, and that's I think a key point here, the cost of the disciples' claims.

So far as we have any record at all, John is the only one of the disciples that died a natural death, and even that one may have been only by miraculous intervention. Outside of Scripture, so this is not something that has the level of reliability of Scripture, but outside of Scripture, the record is that Domitian, the emperor, had John boiled in oil with the attempt to kill him, but it didn't, and so he was then exiled to Patmos, which we see in the first chapter of Revelation. And otherwise John would have died as well as a martyr. All the other disciples, for any record we have, died a martyr's death.

The only one we have directly in scripture is James, the brother of John. So it's interesting. The first disciple to die is James, the brother of John. The last one to die is John. The ones in between we have no biblical record for directly. But the record that we do have in each case records that they died a martyr's death.

So let's take a look at that. You have a set of, I actually brought this together with some slides. We don't have a lot of time to look at them, but let's do that. What you have there, and I'm going to skip down to this one called Peter. This is on page five of your handout. Here's Peter.

Some scholars dispute that Peter ever went to Rome. The written account that we have says that he was crucified there upside down by his own request under Emperor Nero. Paul, and we'll be taking a look at this even in the main message here briefly, The extra biblical account we have that he ended his life in Rome, and that also fits fairly well with 2 Timothy, his last letter, which we have possession.

This room that you see pictured off to the right is the inside of the Mamertine prison. What they would do, you'll see a dark spot in the top. They would dump guys down just a hole in the rock and just dump them on the floor. And if they broke their leg or broke their neck or busted their head open or something like that in the fall, They didn't care because they were going to kill him in hours anyway.

This is believed, based on the various pieces of evidence that we have, to be Paul's last home, perhaps for hours. Then we see, here's Andrew. There are different places that he's recorded to have gone. Finally, Greece is one of the places that He's listed and that appears to have been where he died.

Thomas, the one who doubted, remember this is the one who said, I will not believe that Jesus rose from the dead until I see those wounds in his hands and his side. Won't believe it. He ended up going over to the area around Babylon initially, because by the way, his native language would have been Aramaic and that language was spoken over in Babylon. So he could just go there and immediately begin telling the gospel and they would understand him. However, it ends up that records have it that he died in India and I've talked to and read additionally people have been over with the Christians in India and they will say that Thomas was the one who brought the gospel here. So it's kind of confirmed by both lines of evidence. So here's Thomas the doubter spending his life basically spreading the gospel.

We'd ran out of time so I'll have to leave it there. You can look at the remainder of these but have the story of the rest of the apostles, including Matthias, of whom, you know, here's one kind of appointed at the last, and you'd say, well, boy, was that a good appointment or not? He also spent his life for the gospel, spent some time with Matthew spreading the gospel as well.

I'll let you catch up on that. Let's pray. Lord, as we look at this, and certainly we're far from done, As we look at this, the evidence that we can bring together here points so concisely, so irrefutably, so directly to the resurrection of Jesus Christ. And we thank you for that. We thank you that as Christ was resurrected, we were identified with him and raised with him to newness of life. We thank you for that. We thank you for your love and your care for us. We thank you that you've demonstrated that love with eternal consequence for us. In Jesus' name, Amen.