Second Coming of the New Age, The by Bancarz Peck

Author:Bancarz, Peck [Bancarz, Peck]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Jesus as Risen Lord

Surprisingly, the New Age movement generally wants to affirm the basic outline of Jesus’ life as revealed in the Gospels. Those who do believe in a historical Jesus generally don’t have a problem with His bodily resurrection. They typically understand it as being “ascension” of one form or another. We must, however, combine what we know about the resurrection narratives with the teachings of Jesus. Jesus was raised from the dead by God as Jewish Messiah who claimed He was the only path to the Father (John 14:6). He was raised claiming to be the sacrifice for human sin (John 10:11). If Jesus was raised from the dead by God, this would be His stamp of approval on the ministry and self-revelation of Jesus. Unless we want to say that God raised Jesus from the dead as a liar or a lunatic, the resurrection story understood in the context of Jesus’ Jewish-ness leads us not to an Ascended Master but to our risen Lord and Savior.

The tomb of Jesus was found empty; the Gospels are clear about this. Matthew 28:11–15

and reports by Justin Martyr and Tertullian tell us that the Pharisees tried to explain away the missing body, not deny that there was a missing body. All they had to do was point to the tomb where they had buried Him and the entire Christian faith would have never developed, but rather

than debunk the claim, they tried to explain how the body had gone missing. This suggests that it really was missing. Furthermore, the first reports of the empty tomb were given by women—a culturally unlikely choice of messengers for reliable testimony if they were trying to develop a legend of a savior-god.

For these reasons and many others, historian Gary Habermas states: An intriguing development in recent theological research is that a strong majority of contemporary critical scholars seems to support, at least to some extent, the view that Jesus was buried in a tomb that was subsequently discovered to be empty.257

The empty tomb is reported in at least three, if not four, of these Gospel sources.

This helps to understand why these items are taken so seriously by contemporary critical scholars.258

Shortly after the tomb was found empty, the disciples saw appearances of the risen Jesus.

We have record of this in Mark, Matthew, and John. We also have a record of His appearing to the women in Matthew and John. In 1 Corinthians 15:1–11, Paul tells of information he “received” during a meeting with the apostles; we learn that Jesus appeared to more than five hundred people at one time as well as to James, Peter, the disciples, and Paul himself.

At the very least, most scholars concede that they have had experiences that caused them to believe that Jesus arose. They attribute these experiences to mass vision, hallucination, or some kind of illusion created out of trauma. New Testament scholar Dale Allison reminds us that

“typical encounters with the recently deceased do not issue in claims about an empty tomb, nor do they lead to the founding of a new religion.

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