When World War II was ending and General Douglas MacArthur was meeting with representatives of the Japanese government on the deck of the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay to sign the papers which were to bring an official end to the hostilities, large sectors of the world were in glad suspense. When the papers were signed, news of the event was flashed around the globe and at once men and women everywhere went wild with joy.
I was just a boy at the time. My father had been in the service for some years, and the family was then stationed at a large military base in the southern part of the United States, far from the action. But even now, as I look back on the event, I can remember the yelling and shouting that occurred when news of the end of the war finally came. In those hours parties began which went on for days.
The ending of World War II was great news. Yet, great as that news was, it does not compare with the truly stupendous news of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. This was the best news in the world.
Let me ask a very simple question: Why? Why is the resurrection of Jesus Christ the best news the world has ever heard?
First, the resurrection of Jesus Christ is good news because it is true. It is always possible to have reports of events that sound like good news but later prove to be disappointments because the facts of the reports are wrong or because the events did not actually happen. To use my former illustration, this actually happened several times prior to the real end of World War II. False reports of an end to the war spread, but they were eventually proved false and so were terribly disappointing. This was not the case with news of the resurrection of the Lord.
The first great evidence for the resurrection of Jesus Christ is the evidence of the narratives themselves. These stand up to the most stringent of critical scrutinies. To begin with, there are apparently four independent accounts. These were obviously not made up in collusion, for if they were they would not possess the number of apparent contradictions that they contain: the number of angels at the tomb, the number of women who went to the garden, the time of their arrival, and other things. I believe that all of these accounts can be harmonized, but the point here is that these apparent discrepancies would have been eliminated if the writers had gotten together to make up a story, which they did not do.
On the other hand, it is also apparent that they did not make up the stories separately. For if they had done this, there would never have been the large measure of overriding agreement that they do possess. Thus, the setting and the characters are the same, and the sequence of events makes sense. Well, then, if the accounts were not made up in collusion and if they were not made up separately, the only remaining possibility is that they were not made up at all. That is, they are simply four true and independent accounts by four men who knew that about which they were writing.
