he defeat of sin and death. Remove the empty tomb from the gospel, and the storyline becomes a senseless death and an incomplete resurrection. But with the stone rolled away, the cross and the resurrection of Jesus are proven true and efficacious.

Alright, let me go to a hymn that’s a knockout. Scholars just say, you know, “Let’s just show you that this is a hymn that the Christians sang.” Listen to the words and the content of this song, this hymn, that they sang, and it is talking about the earliest Christians’ belief in Jesus.

“When I was young, I was reading a book by C. S. Lewis, who wrote that the New Testament says nothing about the Resurrection. I wrote a real big ‘No!’ in the margin. Then I realized what he was saying: nobody was sitting inside the tomb and saw the body start to vibrate, stand up, take the linen wrappings off, fold them, roll back the stone, wow the guards, and leave.” – Gary Habermas[1]

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.

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?