Welcome to Defenders, the teaching class of Dr. William Lane Craig.

Today, the Doctrine of Christ, Part 37.

For more information and resources from Dr. Craig, go to reasonable faith.org.

We're talking about the historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus,

and we've been looking at the fundamental facts that any adequate historical hypothesis

needs to explain.

And the first of these, I argued, was for the, in support of the empty tomb,

namely the burial account of Jesus is historically

reliable. And we saw that the burial account has a number of lines of evidence that

suggests that indeed Jesus was buried by this member of the Sanhedron named Joseph of Arimathea

and that this goes to support the historicity of the empty tomb.

Now today we come to the second line of evidence in support of the historicity of the empty tomb.

You'll remember we saw that the burial account is multiply attested in very early independent sources. And the same

is true of the discovery of Jesus' empty tomb. And so our second line of evidence concerns the early

independent attestation of the fact of Jesus' empty tomb.

Now, you remember that the burial account of Jesus was to be found in the pre-Marcan

passion story, the passion source that Mark used in writing his gospel, and that the burial of Jesus was also summarized and referred to in that pre-Pauleine formula

that Paul quotes in 1 Corinthians 15.

And exactly the same is true of the empty tomb.

First of all, the pre-mark and passion source in all probability did not end with the burial

story, but it also included the story of the women's discovery of Jesus' empty tomb. In fact, the burial

story and the empty tomb story are really one story, not two.

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