Apologetics

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**The Disciples Believed They Saw the Risen Jesus – Part 2**

We began Part 1 by explaining the significance of the disciples’ reaction to seeing the risen Jesus. Critics are forced to accept that the disciples truly believed that they saw Jesus alive after His crucifixion because of the changes that took place in their lives. They went from cowering in the upper room to being bold proclaimers of the gospel—the message that Jesus had come to the earth and taken on the form of a man, that He had died, and that He had been raised to life again through the power of God.

The Swoon Theory: Could Jesus Have Survived the Cross?

While there is strong historical documentation that Jesus died by crucifixion, some still wonder if Jesus only appeared to die and all the sources got it wrong. What if Jesus merely fainted (or “swooned”) on the cross and the soldiers mistook Him as dead? What if Jesus then resuscitated in the tomb, escaped, and convinced His disciples that He had been resurrected from the dead?

The Historical Basis for Jesus’ Death by Crucifixion

In recent years, doubt concerning the historicity of Jesus’ life and death has increased among the general populace. In 2015, the Barna Group and ComRes found that “four in 10 (40%) of all adults in England either don’t believe or aren’t sure, that Jesus was a real person who lived on earth. Among younger adults the percentage grew to 46%.

The Holy Spirit Displays the Characteristics of Personality

“It is a fundamental revelation of Scripture that the Holy Spirit is a person in the same sense that God the Father is a person and the Lord Jesus Christ is a person. The Holy Spirit is presented in Scripture as having the same essential deity as the Father and the Son and is to be worshipped and adored, loved and obeyed in the same way as God.”[1] Personality, John Walvoord explains, “is commonly defined as containing the essential elements of intellect, sensibility, and will.”[2] We shall briefly look at each of those elements.

The Holy Spirit: Not a “Thing” but a Person

In the Introduction to her book Jesus in Me, Anne Graham Lotz says, “I’ve heard the Holy Spirit spoken of as an ‘it,’ a feeling, a dove, a flame, a ghost, an emotion, or even an ecstatic experience…. The Holy Spirit is not a thing but a person.”[1] Not only that, we learn from Scripture…