The Case for Christ Student Response #4

In the first term of this school year my grade 7/8 class has read The Case for Christ: Student Edition by Lee Strobel. At the end of the study of the book each student was asked to answer one of the questions posed in the chapters of the book. I told that I would be sharing their responses online. So, throughout the rest of the year I will be posting their work. Please note, I have not edited these responses, they are exactly what the student handed me.

Did Jesus Fake His Death

Some of the reasons why Jesus was put of the cross is that the Pharisees . Some people say that Jesus might have faked his death, but some believe that Jesus died on the cross and rose from the grave.

Getting put on the cross back then was a slow and very bad way of killing people. People about to get nailed to the cross would lay down on the cross that is on the ground and the executioner would take large spikes(nails) and drive them down into the hands and the feet of the victim. In the bible it says that the spikes or nails are put through the hands of Jesus but it actually means that the are driven through the wrists because the bone is strong enough to hold more of the body weight. People die on the cross because of suffocation, it is when some of your organs start to fail. It is hard for the body to breath when all of your body weight is hanging on just by your arms, so to stay alive for longer the victim pushes up with his feet to take a breath. When someone does push up with his feet it will hurt a lot just to get one breath and to keep doing it over and over again.

It would be hard to steal the body from the tomb that Jesus was kept in because there would have been guards and the stone that sealed the tomb was really big and would be hard to roll away. Nobody really knows the exact amount of guards that were guarding the tomb at the time, they would have made sure that nobody would be able to steal the body inside. The rock would weigh a lot and they would have needed a lot of people to maybe roll it away.

Another theory is that when Mary-Magdalene and Mary found the tomb empty, they could have went to a different tomb and not Jesus’ tomb. But another theory that sort of goes along with this is that the two women could have imagined that they saw an angel telling them that Jesus rose from the grave, but there could have been just a caretaker of the tomb that told them that Jesus wasn’t in that tomb.

The NIV bible says, there was a violent earthquake and an angel of the Lord came down from heaven, rolled back the tomb and then sat on it. The guards were so afraid of him that they shook and became like dead men. Then the angel said to the women, Jesus has risen from the dead, just as he said, now quickly go tell his disciples.

Bibliography goes here:

"How Did Crucifixion Kill." The Guardian. N.p., Thursday Apr. 2004. Web.

Strobel, Lee, and Jane Vogel. The Case for Christ: A Journalist's Personal Investigation of the Evidence for Jesus. Grand Rapids, MI: ZondervanPublishingHouse, 2001. Print.