Did Jesus Really Rise from the Dead? Paperback – April 29, 2016

Christianity has in recent years started to strike back at the shrill but superficial criticism of the New Atheists, and this book is a good example of the valuable and important work being done.In a thorough, detailed and very generous manner the author deals with just about all the Resurrection denying theories. He does so honestly, dealing with the best version of such arguments, and in the process leaves none of them standing.I believe that the combination of scholarly arguments / research delivered in a popular and easy-going manner will be very popular. This is an important book that belongs on the shelves of all Christians, and those who may instinctively feel that the glib dismissals of the Resurrection are missing something.

Great book. He does help sort through the arguments that people have. Ultimately, no words will be enough for some people. They like the rich man what to have "proof"...which they have and refuse to see.

This is one of the best books on the evidence of the resurrection (both inside and outside of the Gospels), and I highly recommend it - In fact I purchased many more copies to give out to others, as I hope others will "come to Jesus" like I did after all my research. This particular book provides a good overview of the topic, good responses to the many arguments and claims critics and cynics make, and is perhaps a better place to start than "Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony" by Richard Bauckham - which is equally excellent but reads more like a college textbook, costs a lot more, and is much more detailed than this book. So I would make this my first read on the topic and that my second read. ("Jesus outside the New Testament" and "Searching for Jesus" are also good reads on this topic - frankly I would start with this one and then read them all ... they all have different approaches and cover different forms of evidence.)

If you're struggling with the logic of the resurrection of Jesus, then you need to read this book. It shows why all of the other possible explanations don't hold up to logic. A real and actual resurrection, despite how difficult it might be for those who are averse to the supernatural, really is the only logical explanation. After all, if a little piece of matter can explode into a universe (as the Big Bang theory holds), maybe we shouldn't be as quick to say that something like the resurrection of Jesus is impossible. Maybe reality is more than we can see and understand. Maybe there is Someone behind that "explosion" and maybe that Someone entered into human history. Interestingly, many modern scientists, especially physicists, are increasingly turning to alternate explanations, bordering on the supernatural, in order to explain the mystery in the world. If a theoretical "higher dimensional being" can, according to secular physicist Michio Kaku, walk through walls and appear and reappear as Jesus does according to the New Testament, maybe the resurrection isn't as far out as some make it.

Very interesting read refuting all arguments posited against the Ressurection. The author does a good job refuting those arguments.

I was curious about how he would speak to the Resurrection. This book repeats the same thing over and over. I kept reading because I wanted to find out what his conclusion was. It was pretty compelling. I would almost have to read it a second time to really have good answers for my secular friends as it was i got some real answers for myself. The editors need to fix the typos so many words without th last letter?

Awesome book

This is a book that could only convince the already convinced. Although the author makes some arguments that the New Testament documents are historically reliable, he uses Scripture not as a historian or even a biblical scholar, but as a "conservative," Bible-believing Christian. No attempt is made to explain why the four Gospel accounts of the resurrection do not agree with one another. The author harmonizes what he can and makes do with his own composite account. This does not pretend to be a scholarly work, but it is not so low-level that the question-and-answer format is appropriate.In response to the author's comment regarding the above, I am adding the following to my earlier review:Among several significant problems I found with the book is the argument in favor of the historicity of the guards at the tomb, attested to only in one Gospel (Matthew). The book says, “It is unlikely the guards at the tomb were fabricated since we have good grounds for thinking that the Jewish authorities would have wanted to ensure that Jesus disciples wouldn’t steal the body and claim to have witnessed the Resurrection.” Yet only a few pages earlier, in trying to refute the possibility that the disciples hallucinated the resurrected Jesus, we have the following: “The Gospels report that Jesus made cryptic statements about his Death and Resurrection, yet the same sources tell us that his disciples didn't understand what he meant. This is more consistent with what the sources tell us about the disciples’ initial general disbelief when they heard of the resurrection than with the idea they anticipated encountering a risen Jesus. We see in the Gospels that while Jesus told the disciples that he was going to be killed and would rise again, the disciples either pushed back against it (cf Mt 16:21-23) or they pushed it to the side and out of their memory (cf Lk 24:6-8).” The argument is basically that the disciples would not have hallucinated a resurrected Jesus because the idea of resurrection was the furthest thing from their minds. If they were expecting a resurrection at all, it would be at the end of time. But apparently what was the last thing on the minds of the disciples was very much on the minds of the Jewish authorities. Fully aware of the idea of a possible resurrection, they allegedly tried to prevent the disciples from staging a fake one. The argument tries to have it both ways. For the disciples, the idea of the resurrection didn’t appear in their wildest dreams. They didn’t even believe it *after* it happened. They completely missed any “cryptic” predictions Jesus made. But the Jewish authorities understood!Raymond E. Brown, does seriously question the historicity of the story about the guards in The Death of the Messiah, saying, “Yet there is a major argument against historicity that is impressive indeed. Not only do the other Gospels not mention the guard at the sepulcher, but the presence of the guard there would make what they narrate about the tomb almost unintelligible.” That is his principal concern. He does, however, state: “There are other internal implausibilities in Matt's account (e.g., that the Jewish authorities knew the words of Jesus about his resurrection and understood them, while his own disciples did not . . . )”Other works I have read in which the Gospels are evaluated as historical sources use criteria to gauge the degree of confidence we can have in a passage’s historicity. Such criteria are almost entirely absent from Did Jesus Really Rise from the Dead? Quotes from the long ending of Mark (generally considered to be a later addition by someone other than Mark), and passages from 2 Peter (purporting to be from Simon Peter but generally regarded to have been written after his death) are quoted without any cautions. (See the New American Bible Rev2E on the long ending of Mark and the authorship of the epistles attributed to Peter.)One major problem is that the author never explains in any detail what it means to say the Gospels are “historically reliable” or “historically accurate.” Is everything in the Gospels to be taken at face value, even when there are apparent contradictions? Must an effort be made to harmonize, say, the infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke, or the four differing accounts of the crucifixion and the resurrection? If there is an instance in the book in which the author opines that a particular incident or saying is unlikely to be historical, I don’t recall it. I mentioned that Raymond E. Brown questions the historicity of Matthew’s account of guards at the tomb. The New Jerome Biblical Commentary characterizes the two scenes involving the guards as “peculiarly Matthean passages motivated by late apologetics." Would Carl E. Olson say these are matters on which faithful Catholic biblical scholars can legitimately disagree, or would he put the New American Bible, The Death of the Messiah, and The New Jerome Biblical Commentary in the same category as the works of Bart Ehrman and the Jesus Seminar? Without any definition of what it means for the Gospels to be “historically reliable,” the reader is left to wonder.

Estes livros da catholic Answers deveriam ser traduzidos ao português, para possibilitar seu acesso aos católicos brasileiros. São material de excelente qualidade, e eu recomendo para todo mundo que consiga ler em inglês, mesmo com dificuldade.

This is an excellent book. Easy to read but grounded in scripture and academic studies. Well structured, clear and compelling arguments. Recommended to beginners in the subject through to well read and confident defenders of Christianity. All will gain. Five stars.

I found that I learn a lot from this book but it didn't convince me at all that Jesus rose from the dead most because the author just asserts that the disciples were martyred for the beliefs and so are therefore reliable sources. He doesn't go into the (weak) evidence for their martyrdom.

Well written, highly informative, well researched and evidence well documented.

A very sound book. Fully explains the Resurrection.