The Resurrection with a Cold-Case Detective Part 4

Viewpoint on Mormonism, the program that examines the teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from a Biblical perspective. Glad you could be with us for this edition of Viewpoint on Mormonism. I'm your host, Bill McKeever, founder and director of Mormonism Research Ministry, and with me today is Eric Johnson, my colleague at MRM.

But we're also pleased to have with us J. Warner Wallace. He's the author of Cold Case Christianity, God's Crime Scene, and Forensic Faith. He speaks all over the country on apologetic issues, and he is a wealth of information. In fact, the late Dr. Norm Geisler said, That's quite a statement. My big claim to fame, Jim, with Dr. Geisler is I drove him from the airport to a conference in Kansas City once, and that's about it.

I never got a statement like that from him. We're asking good investigative questions to get to the truth about what happened to Jesus. Yesterday, we were talking about some of the objections that critics have raised regarding the bodily resurrection of Christ, and we were talking about what has come to be known as the swoon theory.

Eric thought we needed to continue with that thought because there's so much that you can say about it. Today, Jim, you were telling us about how Jesus didn't have his legs broken, but he did have a spear through his heart. What are some other things that you have seen that can help us to prove that Jesus actually was dead so that we could have had a resurrection?

Because you've never seen one before in real life, and that's, I think, what happens here. Some of us actually work where we are in contact repeatedly with dead people, okay? Those professions are out there, first responders, nurses, funeral homes, coroners, all that stuff. I certainly have seen my share or more of dead people. Every time you're assigned a case as a homicide in Los Angeles County, you have to be present at the autopsy, but I've actually been at the scene, both as a patrol officer and as a detective, where I'm not long behind the death, right? I've never, ever mistaken a living person or a dead person or vice versa, because unlike most people, people who touch dead bodies have a firsthand experience of dead bodies, and nobody else has got an idea of what death looks like based on watching TV. So here's why I bring this up. If your grandmother dies, you're probably not going to go in and treat her body, wrap it up and carry it down to the morgue or carry it down to the funeral home.

You're going to call somebody, and you may never even touch your grandmother, and they'll take care of all of it. But this was not the case in the first century. In the first century, the ancients did their own work in this regard. They were also their own midwives. They were responsible for birth to death, and that's why you see in the pages of the New Testament that followers of Jesus had to prepare his body. I don't think that this generation of humans was as ignorant about the signs of death as we are today. So it turns out the signs of death are called the mortis triad, and if you've worked as an investigator or been around dead bodies, you will know that these things give away death quickly.

And if you're pulling a body off a cross, bringing it to a tomb, wrapping it up and preparing it, locking it down and leaving it overnight, there's no way you're going to miss the mortis triad. The first thing that happens is you start to lose body temperature. You start to cool down because the thing that's keeping you hot is the blood that's coursing through your veins. When your heart stops beating, that hot blood stops moving, and you start to decline in temperature to the temperature of whatever environment you happen to be in. Dead people don't feel like living people.

They are cooler to the touch when you are handling them. You'll know they're dead because they're kind of creepily cool to the touch. That is called algar mortis, and that's the first of the mortis triad. The second is that when your heart stops beating, you start to decay in the smallest ways that lead to rigidity. You start to become rigid. It's called rigor mortis. This idea is that if you're in a cross position, and I've got to go and talk to Pilate, which is what we know happened in Scripture in the Gospel of Mark, and ask for the body, and he's got to check and make sure that it's all good to go. And then you have to go out, and it says that they went out and bought the linen cloths, and then they took down the body. Well, when you take that body off the cross, it's not just going to flop down like a bag of wheat.

It's going to be stiff. It's going to become rigid, but the biggest giveaway is the third leg of the mortis triad, and that is that when your heart stops pushing your blood, gravity takes over and starts to draw your blood. So if you're on your back when you die, and I get there, and I roll your body over, I will find that on your back, you're bruised, that the blood is settled by gravity to your back.

If you're in a cross position, and your heart stops, your feet will begin to swell in purple. And these are the signs that nobody talks about, right, but these are the three things that all dead bodies exhibit. And so I've asked audiences this all the time, if you're a first responder, you're somebody who's seen dead bodies, you've handled dead bodies, would you ever be able to mistake an unconscious body for a dead body?

That's stuff that's like movie stuff. It's like novel stuff, but in real life, the mortis triad gives it away every time. And we're talking about a generation that was accustomed to handling its own dead. They understood the mortis triad. So this idea that somehow they could be fooled by an unconscious Jesus who's eventually going to become conscious again, I don't think it gets past the first minutes of this idea, because I never concern myself, well, how would he get out of the tomb, and how would he look so good in front of the people on the road to Emmaus?

Guys, you would spot this immediately. No one's going to be fooled by an unconscious Jesus because of the mortis triad. I think you're making a great point there, Jim, and as far as the professional status of the people you just mentioned, back in those days, they had Roman soldiers. Do you think that they were going to miss that this man was alive when they took him off the cross?

I think that's a great point, you're right. And the triad is why we make those kinds of claims. When we say, oh, hey, Romans understood the nature of death, and everyone goes, oh, how do you know? Well, because it's the mortis triad. Trust me, if you've been around three dead people, you would understand it, okay?

It doesn't take long to learn this because it's so obvious. Well, what if the disciples merely lied about the resurrection? You write, some non-Christians claim that the disciples stole the body from the grave and later fabricated the stories of Jesus' resurrection appearance. What's your response to that?

I'll just be honest with both of you guys. I'm a little bit disappointed sometimes by Christians, Mormons, and other believers who are so quick to embrace conspiracy theories because I've worked conspiracy theories because if you have more than one person who is involved in a crime, well, then you're going to have to include the, I can if I want to, include the conspiracy charge in addition to the murder charge. But I've got to be able to make the conspiracy.

There are certain elements of a conspiracy in state law in every state, in California also, and I've learned over the years that there's five things you have to have for a successful conspiracy. Number one, the smallest number of co-conspirators. Two people can tell a lie and keep a secret for years, but 20 people, that's harder.

You need the shortest period of time. It turns out it's easier to tell the lie and keep the secret for a day than it is for a year. So if you have the smallest number of people in the shortest amount of time, you can get away with it. Not to say that you can't get away with a conspiracy, but you need these five things in order to do it. And by the way, if you think you know of a successful conspiracy, it wasn't successful by definition.

It's the ones that are successful, the ones you never detect. So if this is a conspiracy amongst the 12, there's only too many, and they've got to hold it for 60 years. How many are there? There's 120 in the upper room, according to Luke in the book of Acts, chapter one.

Paul says there's 500 still available in 1 Corinthians 15, three to eight. So if you look at the text, I mean, there's just too many people involved for too long a period of time. It's like 60 years, right, that this goes on before the last witness is dead. But you also need, a thing that's really deceptive, is you need excellent communication between co-conspirators. And you need that because in the end, what's the first thing we're going to do? We've got two or three people involved in a murder. We're going to separate them so they can't talk to each other. And then we're going to ask all kinds of detailed questions that are in the weeds, right? Because we are trying to see if any of them are lying.

And we're going to compare their statements to each other. And if we find that they don't match, they can't communicate, we separated that. Disciples are separated all over the Empire. You've got Thomas in India, potentially. You've got Matthew in North Africa. You've got Paul as far away as Rome. You've got James and John in Ephesus. How are they communicating with each other? How is it that their details related to the story of Jesus all match when they're separated by thousands of miles without any way to communicate? That makes sense if you've got eyewitnesses, not sense if you've got a lie that you could actually investigate. So those things are incredibly important.

You also want family relationships. You have no family relationship, say, between Matthew and any of the other disciples. And Matthew writes an early gospel.

And finally, you need low pressure. And we know that the disciples experienced high pressure. So all of the things that I have to employ to break a conspiracy were applied to the authors.

They didn't have any of the five things needed to be successful in a conspiracy. Yet they never changed their story. By the way, you know this already by the changes in the stories related to the Book of Mormon and those who allegedly were eyewitnesses of the gold tablets, right?

So we know that this kind of thing that we have experienced, that when people aren't telling us the truth, their stories begin to break down once they experience pressure. And this did not happen with the disciples. I think that's also a problem with Joseph Smith's accounts of the first vision. I mean, he alone gave four different accounts. I know Mormon apologists and leaders have tried very hard to convince their people that they merely compliment rather than they contradict.

But certainly that isn't the case all the time. As far as motives, what motives would the disciples have had to have lied? Because you have to have a motive, right? Yeah, all lies, like all murders and all crimes and all sins are only driven by three motives.

I discovered this work in investigations, but I later found it in First John chapter two. Only three reasons why anyone tells a lie or commits a crime or commits a murder or commits a sin. It is financial greed, sexual lust or desire, and the pursuit of power. Those are the only three reasons. So for example, we know that Joseph had all three, right? Joseph had all three things.

It doesn't mean he's lying. It just means that he was well motivated to lie because he gained from it in terms of the number of wives he had. He gained from it in terms of being supported by the church. He gained from it in terms of the power and authority and position he had as a leader in the church.

Now you tell me, compare Joseph to any of the disciples. They certainly weren't getting money out of this and they weren't getting girlfriends out of it or multiple wives. So what are they getting out of this? Well, Bart Ehrman, the skeptic, might say, well, they're getting power. They're the leaders of movements. Really? So the author of the largest section of the New Testament, who is Paul, who is already a leader in a religious group that is larger than Christianity, he decides one day I'm going to jump out of this group and get beaten up all over the world for the next 30 years hoping to return to the status and authority and power I already have.

This is ridiculous. So one of those things I was talking about that if you apply that idea, that template for motive to Mormonism, it quickly disqualifies its authority. If you apply that to Christianity, it quickly leaves you thinking, yeah, what was in it for them?

Like, why would they tell this story? If you know anything about first century history in the Roman Empire, they were tolerant of a lot of different religions. If the adherence to those religions would also embrace the pantheon of Roman gods, only two groups would say I can't do that. That was the Jews and the Christian.

It just turns out that those two groups are the ones that suffered the most for their truth claims. If you're going to claim Christianity is true in the first century, you're going to pay for that. We're talking to Jay Warner Wallace. He is the author of Cold Case Christianity. And this week we are talking about a booklet that he put together called Alive, a cold case approach to the resurrection. And tomorrow we're going to continue this conversation with Jim. Visit us at www.mrm.org where you can request our free newsletter, Mormonism Researched. We hope you will join us again as we look at another viewpoint on Mormonism.