Top 10 Secular Evidences for the Resurrection

04/19/25 • -1 min

This week, in honor of the world giving lip service to The Resurrection at Easter, your host Fred Williams and co-host Doug McBurney condescend to entertain secular alternatives to the bodily death, burial & resurrection of Jesus Christ by listing the top 10:

* Jesus Died by Crucifixion: The resurrection means nothing if Jesus didn’t actually die. But virtually all scholars — even skeptical ones — agree Jesus died by Roman crucifixion. Why?

The Roman method was brutal and efficient.
The Journal of the American Medical Association published a medical study affirming death by crucifixion.
Eyewitness accounts, including Roman historians like Tacitus, confirm it.

Jesus wasn’t resuscitated. He was dead. The resurrection wasn’t a near-death experience — it was a reversal of death.

* The Tomb Was Empty: The empty tomb is reported in all four Gospels, and it’s confirmed by:

Jewish leaders never produced the body. Instead, they said, “His disciples stole the body” — confirming the tomb was empty.

Even critics like atheist historian Bart Ehrman admit the tomb was likely empty — the question is why.

* The Disciples Believed They Saw the Risen Jesus: Something transformed a group of cowardly fishermen into bold proclaimers of a risen Christ.

After Jesus’ death, they were in hiding.
Then they claimed to have seen, touched, and eaten with the risen Jesus.
Many of them were martyred — not for what they believed, but for what they claimed to have seen.

People don’t generally die for a lie they made up, especially when they get nothing in return but beatings and exile.

* The Rapid Spread of Christianity: How did a tiny, persecuted sect become the largest religion in the world?

No political power. No money. No military. Just the message: He is risen.
Within weeks, thousands of Jews — fiercely monotheistic — believed Jesus was Lord and worshipped Him as God.
That doesn’t happen unless something earth-shaking occurred.

* Testimony of Enemies: Who testified to the resurrection? Not just friends — enemies.

James, Jesus’ own skeptical brother, didn’t believe in Him during His ministry. After the resurrection, James becomes a leader of the Jerusalem church and is martyred.
Paul was a violent persecutor of Christians. He had every reason to stop this movement — until he says he saw the risen Jesus himself.

Enemies don’t convert unless they believe something really happened.

*The First Witnesses Were Women: All four Gospels say women were the first to find the tomb empty. In a culture where a woman’s testimony didn’t even count in court, this detail would never be invented.

If the story were fabricated, the writers would’ve said Peter or John found the tomb.
The only reason to include women is because that’s how it happened.

This is what scholars call the criterion of embarrassment — details that are awkward but truthful.

* I Corinthians 15: Paul lists post-resurrection appearances in I Cor 15.

This shows belief in the resurrection wasn’t a legend that developed decades later — it was immediate.
He names witnesses: “He appeared to Peter... the twelve... over 500 at once... James... and last of all to me.”

Paul is essentially saying: Go ask them yourself.

* The Martyrdom of the Apostles: Nearly all of the apostles suffered and many were killed for proclaiming Christ’s resurrection.

James: Certainly Beheaded in Jerusalem.
Paul: Likely Beheaded in Rome.
Peter: Likely crucified (allegedly upside down)
Thomas: Allegedly Speared in India.
Tens of thousands of Christian martyrdoms witnessed privately by millions of average people over the past 2,0000 years, (God knows and will bring the record on Judgment Day)

They didn’t die for abstract beliefs — they died for claiming they saw or believed in the risen Jesus. Liars make poor martyrs.

* The Conversion of Saul (Paul): Paul went from persecuting Christians to becoming Christianity’s most influential missionary.

He lost status, privilege, safety.
He was beaten, imprisoned, and eventually executed.
And he writes about meeting the risen Christ with personal conviction and detail.

What changes a man like that? Something real. Something undeniable.

* Bodily Resurrection from the Dead Fits A...

* Jesus Died by Crucifixion: The resurrection means nothing if Jesus didn’t actually die. But virtually all scholars — even skeptical ones — agree Jesus died by Roman crucifixion. Why?

The Roman method was brutal and efficient.
The Journal of the American Medical Association published a medical study affirming death by crucifixion.
Eyewitness accounts, including Roman historians like Tacitus, confirm it.

Jesus wasn’t resuscitated. He was dead. The resurrection wasn’t a near-death experience — it was a reversal of death.

* The Tomb Was Empty: The empty tomb is reported in all four Gospels, and it’s confirmed by:

Jewish leaders never produced the body. Instead, they said, “His disciples stole the body” — confirming the tomb was empty.

Even critics like atheist historian Bart Ehrman admit the tomb was likely empty — the question is why.

* The Disciples Believed They Saw the Risen Jesus: Something transformed a group of cowardly fishermen into bold proclaimers of a risen Christ.

After Jesus’ death, they were in hiding.
Then they claimed to have seen, touched, and eaten with the risen Jesus.
Many of them were martyred — not for what they believed, but for what they claimed to have seen.

People don’t generally die for a lie they made up, especially when they get nothing in return but beatings and exile.

* The Rapid Spread of Christianity: How did a tiny, persecuted sect become the largest religion in the world?

No political power. No money. No military. Just the message: He is risen.
Within weeks, thousands of Jews — fiercely monotheistic — believed Jesus was Lord and worshipped Him as God.
That doesn’t happen unless something earth-shaking occurred.

* Testimony of Enemies: Who testified to the resurrection? Not just friends — enemies.

James, Jesus’ own skeptical brother, didn’t believe in Him during His ministry. After the resurrection, James becomes a leader of the Jerusalem church and is martyred.
Paul was a violent persecutor of Christians. He had every reason to stop this movement — until he says he saw the risen Jesus himself.

Enemies don’t convert unless they believe something really happened.

*The First Witnesses Were Women: All four Gospels say women were the first to find the tomb empty. In a culture where a woman’s testimony didn’t even count in court, this detail would never be invented.

If the story were fabricated, the writers would’ve said Peter or John found the tomb.
The only reason to include women is because that’s how it happened.

This is what scholars call the criterion of embarrassment — details that are awkward but truthful.

* I Corinthians 15: Paul lists post-resurrection appearances in I Cor 15.

This shows belief in the resurrection wasn’t a legend that developed decades later — it was immediate.
He names witnesses: “He appeared to Peter... the twelve... over 500 at once... James... and last of all to me.”

Paul is essentially saying: Go ask them yourself.

* The Martyrdom of the Apostles: Nearly all of the apostles suffered and many were killed for proclaiming Christ’s resurrection.

James: Certainly Beheaded in Jerusalem.
Paul: Likely Beheaded in Rome.
Peter: Likely crucified (allegedly upside down)
Thomas: Allegedly Speared in India.
Tens of thousands of Christian martyrdoms witnessed privately by millions of average people over the past 2,0000 years, (God knows and will bring the record on Judgment Day)

They didn’t die for abstract beliefs — they died for claiming they saw or believed in the risen Jesus. Liars make poor martyrs.

* The Conversion of Saul (Paul): Paul went from persecuting Christians to becoming Christianity’s most influential missionary.

He lost status, privilege, safety.
He was beaten, imprisoned, and eventually executed.
And he writes about meeting the risen Christ with personal conviction and detail.

What changes a man like that? Something real. Something undeniable.

* Bodily Resurrection from the Dead Fits A...

Previous Episode

Not So Old

Listen in as Real Science Radio host Fred Williams and co-host Doug McBurney review and update some of Bob Enyart's legendary list of not so old things! From Darwin's Finches to opals forming in months to man's genetic diversity in 200 generations, to carbon 14 everywhere it's not supposed to be (including in diamonds and dinosaur bones!), scientific observations simply defy the claim that the earth is billions of years old. Real science demands the dismissal of the alleged million and billion year ages asserted by the ungodly and the foolish.

* Finches Adapt in 17 Years, Not 2.3 Million: Charles Darwin's finches are claimed to have taken 2,300,000 years to diversify from an initial species blown onto the Galapagos Islands. Yet individuals from a single finch species on a U.S. Bird Reservation in the Pacific were introduced to a group of small islands 300 miles away and in at most 17 years, like Darwin's finches, they had diversified their beaks, related muscles, and behavior to fill various ecological niches. Hear about this also at rsr.org/spetner.

* Finches Speciate in Two Generations vs Two Million Years for Darwin's Birds? Darwin's finches on the Galapagos Islands are said to have diversified into 14 species over a period of two million years. But in 2017 the journal Science reported a newcomer to the Island which within two generations spawned a reproductively isolated new species. In another instance as documented by Lee Spetner, a hundred birds of the same finch species introduced to an island cluster a 1,000 kilometers from Galapagos diversified into species with the typical variations in beak sizes, etc. "If this diversification occurred in less than seventeen years," Dr. Spetner asks, "why did Darwin’s Galapagos finches [as claimed by evolutionists] have to take two million years?"

* Opals Can Form in "A Few Months" And Don't Need 100,000 Years: A leading authority on opals, Allan W. Eckert, observed that, "scientific papers and textbooks have told that the process of opal formation requires tens of thousands of years, perhaps hundreds of thousands... Not true." A 2011 peer-reviewed paper in a geology journal from Australia, where almost all the world's opal is found, reported on the: "new timetable for opal formation involving weeks to a few months and not the hundreds of thousands of years envisaged by the conventional weathering model." (And apparently, per a 2019 report from Entomology Today, opals can even form around insects!) More knowledgeable scientists resist the uncritical, group-think insistence on false super-slow formation rates (as also for manganese nodules, gold veins,

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Hydroplate Theory's Mic Drop Moment

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* Sportscaster Impressed with Isaiah: Here how America's poster boy for the terminally adolescent, Joe Rogan is expressing doubts about the big bang, (and how he's impressed with the preservation of the Book of Isaiah)! We wanted to link to it, but he's just too vulgar.

* Oxford Working for Walt Brown: A new study from Oxford University suggests that Earth's water didn't come from asteroid impacts as secular theorists previously tried to pretend. Instead, just as Genesis and Walt Brown's book "In the Beginning" have always contended: the building blocks of our planet were already here in the beginning.

Phys.org Keeps on Pretending: phys.org, (now officially known on RSR as FIZZ.org because the sounds of escaping gasses are now continuously greater than the sounds of scientific observations) is pretending to know when a baby mammoth died. While admitting that the species died out about 4,000 years ago, they insist the mammoth being dissected must have died "more than 130,000 years ago". And they include the obligatory homage to the climate change myth as well.