It changes it enormously because I grew up thinking that the ascension was about Jesus sort of going back to being God again.

That's completely a misunderstanding.

This is about Jesus becoming God's right-hand man because heaven is the place from which earth is run.

The point is that Jesus is now sovereign.

He's now in charge. That's why after the ascension, the disciples go back to Jerusalem. They're not miserable because he's gone. They're

celebrating because he is now the Lord of the world. That's in T. Right. He's been studying the

New Testament for over 50 years. He's written close to 100 books. And he's one of the most

influential scholars

alive today. I'm Nate Hansen, and this is Faith Lab. The Apostle Paul said it himself in 1st

Corinthians 15. If Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless. Christianity staked everything

on one falsifiable historical event. And after spending the last couple years, reading the actual scholarship on this,

from Bacham to Laconia to NT Wright himself,

I can tell you, the historical case is far stronger than I ever thought it was,

and far stronger than many realize.

Here's what Wright lays out.

What's your number one argument for a bodily resurrection? Because I know even within Christian tradition, there are lots of different interpretations of what kind of resurrection it might have been.

In the early tradition, the first 200 years, say the Greek word anastasis doesn't mean a non-bodily and couldn't mean a non-bodily

resurrecting. The word means a sanding up. This is somebody who was bodily dead being bodily alive

again. It's only after about 200 years when some of the people that we loosely call the Gnostics

got hold of the idea that they used it,

used the word to mean, if you like, my body is still molding in the grave, but my soul goes

marching on or something like that. That is never what the word anesthetesis meant at the time.

...