Assuming the facts I discussed from previous post, it seemed to me that the disciples’ preaching of their teacher’s resurrection was just as miraculous as the claim of resurrection itself.
What happened to the disciples after they watched their teacher to be taken away by the authorities and then be killed? The bible said they were very much scared. They hid themselves and later on, some of them wanted to go back to their old career of fishing.
Was I trusting the stories in the bible now? I thought it was fine to take these parts of the biblical stories to be trustworthy. The disciples should be scared! Their beloved teacher, whom they even called as their “Lord”, was arrested and executed. What would happen to his close associates like his disciples? After some time when they felt like they were not targeted by the authorities anymore, then what would they do? They still needed to earn a living. What was more natural than just going back to their old career?
However, it was these disciples who started the huge movement of Christianity. Who else? The bible said they told everyone around them, even people not in Israel, that Jesus resurrected.
I was told back then that all of these disciples were executed because of what they said about Jesus. Was it true? I thought so. I knew that Christians were persecuted in Romans before the Romans adopted Christianity as the religion of their own, which was a few hundred years after Jesus was executed. Furthermore, it seemed quite reasonable that the Jews and the Romans should hate these people. They thought they had finished whatever disturbance that Jesus started by killing Jesus. Now his disciples wanted to cause even bigger troubles, which the authorities definitely wanted to suppress.
Why did the disciples risk their lives to proclaim Jesus’ resurrection? What changed them from being scared when Jesus was dead, to becoming brave enough even to embrace death, just to preach the resurrected Jesus? Obviously, the simplest answer was that they really saw what they claimed to see – their resurrected Lord.
