THE TRUTH ABOUT WHAT “THE DISCIPLES RAN AWAY” MEANS

I am fed up of Muslims alleging there were no witnesses to the crucifixion because “all the disciples ran away.” Ran away from where and on what day? It wasn’t the scene or day of the crucifixion they fled from. This was on the night of Jesus arrest (Matthew 26:56).

Peter along with the other disciples only fled the initial scene of Jesus arrest. Peter at least did not go far because he was very soon back following Jesus at a distance with another disciple:

“Meanwhile, Simon Peter was following Jesus, as was another disciple. That disciple was an acquaintance of the high priest; so he went with Jesus into the high priest’s courtyard. But Peter remained standing outside by the door. So the other disciple, the one known to the high priest, went out and spoke to the girl who was the doorkeeper and brought Peter in.” (John 18.15-16)

Note the “other disciple” is not named. It might be the Gospel author John which would seem unlikely since he likewise would have feared arrest (unless a very close relationship with the High Priest might have been enough to count on immunity). It might have been Joseph of Arimathea. The fact is we don’t know and aren’t told but that in itself is significant. It shows us that not EVERY detail of the story is recorded only what we need to know for the narrative. Clearly John the writer of the Gospel knew MORE than he tells us here. That principle needs to applied and kept in mind when reading the entire sequence of events surrounding the Passion of Christ.

We do know Peter and John were the first two disciples to witness the empty tomb but they were not the first to whom the risen Lord appeared. In a way which makes the entire narrative credible is the fact that women were the first witnesses of the resurrected Lord. No one would have written that into the story if it was a fabrication. Scholars regard that fact as highly indicative of its authenticity because by the Criterion of Embarrassment anyone inventing it would NEVER have had women as the first witnesses.

Jesus was crucified in public in front of hundreds of witnesses. We know from his gospel that John was there because Jesus speaks to him and his mother while hanging on the cross. We don’t know whether others were watching at a distance. Given Peter’s behaviour at the high priest’s house it would be surprising if he was not watching the crucifixion from a distance. Likewise others of the 11.

When Peter says to the crowd in Acts 2 that “we are witnesses to the crucifixion and resurrection” he is telling the truth. He had no reason to lie. In fact it’s impossible that he could be doing what he was doing continuing the miraculous healing works of Jesus based on a lie.

It’s high time Muslims stopped their jaundiced brainwashed denials of the Gospels and started reading the EVIDENCE objectively and not to fit your bigoted prejudiced mindset.

As with any crime scene which took place in public over a course of hours there were always going to be a crowd of witnesses, some closer and some further from the spectacle. That is not speculation that is fact. Those that are recorded by the four gospel writers are set out below. But you can bet there were many more than they were aware of.

Some witnesses are there anonymously and do not want to be seen or associated with what is happening. Others are people who were actors on the stage so to speak. Had there been a police investigation and witness statements taken and appeal for witnesses to come forward you can be sure some would have been reluctant to do so. They would be afraid. That doubtless would have included some of the disciples.

But we know at the very least John was present right at the foot of the cross. That is all we need to know. Peter would have taken his cue from John if he had been absent himself. Peter and John were Jesus’ closest disciples. They both saw the empty tomb for themselves. The women had seen where the body was laid to rest. There is no unexplained gap in the story and there is a chain of custody for the recorded sequence of events.

And you Muslims dare to criticise this multiple witness testimony on the say so of one demon obsessed pagan who has no first hand knowledge of the events and was not present, knew none of the witnesses and could have no perspective on events nor was anything he was supposed to have been told by an angel verified or corroborated. And you prefer to believe him a self confessed liar in preference to the testimonies of those present?

Muhammad is not a credible witness. Presented in court he would not have lasted 5 minutes.

Muslims try to claim the Gospel was corrupted. Corruption means that the central message of God’s word has been altered beyond recognition. You have failed abysmally and spectacularly to bring a single instance of that. I will show you corruption.

Corruption is what the Quran does. It turns the message of redemption on its head replaces the Ten Commandments with commands that are the polar opposite of them. It twists the narrative of the patriarchs and prophets to make them appear as evil as Muhammad was. It removes Jesus as the equal to God and replaces Him with Muhammad. In place of love and relationship with a paternal God who reveals Himself fully in the person of Jesus it makes God cold remote unknowable and obscure and turns mankind into mere slaves rather than the adopted sons of God.

That Muslims is what corruption is.

Moreover HEARSAY and CONJECTURE is what the Quran is based on. Not even second-hand hearsay, but speculation many generations after the events in a foreign land that has no relation to the time or place where they occurred and which the Gospels faithfully record.

Jesus was a public figure. As Paul himself said when addressing King Agrippa “the things Jesus did were not done in a corner” (Acts 26.26).

The crucifixion was a public event witnessed by hundreds including Jesus nearest and dearest with the disciple John amongst them.

Likewise the resurrection and post mortem appearances were witnessed by hundreds.

Muslims cannot stand the facts. The Gospels are first hand accounts written within a generation and within the lifetime of all the witnesses. They are accurate primary source accounts based upon witness testimony written by men of good standing and repute who had absolutely NO reason to lie or misrepresent anything. In a court of a law a witness is to be treated with respect and regarded as reliable until and unless they can be proved otherwise. No one has ever produced a shred of evidence for WHY the Gospel writers would distort the original events or why any scribes would later have altered the narrative.

There are on the other hand very good grounds for asserting that the heretic Muhammad was an unreliable witness to what he saw. He was so unbalanced by what he had experienced that he repeatedly tried to commit suicide.

“…the Prophet became so sad as we have heard that he intended several times to throw himself from the tops of high mountains and every time he went up the top of a mountain in order to throw himself down, Gabriel would appear before him and say, “O Muhammad! You are indeed Allah’s Apostle in truth” whereupon his heart would become quiet and he would calm down and would return home. And whenever the period of the coming of the inspiration used to become long, he would do as before, but when he used to reach the top of a mountain, Gabriel would appear before him and say to him what he had said before.” (Bukhari-9-111) See also Ibn Ishaq’s “Sirat Rasulallah” from Guillaume’s translation, “The Life of Muhammad”, page 106

Muhammad made actual attempts to commit suicide. He later admitted to lying. Reliable witness he was not. Hearsay was his game. Plagiarism was his tool. Muslims have nowhere to hide.

CRUCIFIXION WITNESSES

The eyewitnesses to the crucifixion and resurrection:

-The chief priests, scribes and elders, (found in Matthew 27:41)

• A centurion and Roman soldiers, (found in Matthew 27:54)
• Crowds of bystanders, (found in Matthew 27:37, Luke 23:48 and John 19:20)
• Simon of Cyrene, (found in Mark 15:21)
• Many women including Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Joseph and wife of Clopas, Salome the mother of the sons of Zebedee, (found in Matthew 27:56, Mark 15:40, John 19:26)
• Jesus’ mother, Mary, (found in John 19:26)
• The “disciple Jesus loved,” (found in John 19:26)
• Acquaintances of Jesus, (found in Luke 23:49)
• Joseph of Arimathea, (found in Matthew 27:57)
• Nicodemus, (found in John 19:39)
• Peter & John: “You killed the author of life, but God raised him from the dead. We are witnesses of this.” (found in Acts 3:15)
• All twelve apostles, including Matthias the replacement for Judas: (found in Acts 1.21-26)

“Therefore, from among the men who have accompanied us during the whole time the Lord Jesus went in and out among us — beginning from the baptism of John until the day He was taken up from us — from among these, it is necessary that one become a witness with us of His resurrection.” (Acts 1:21‭-‬22)

• The Apostle Paul both as a persecuting (and at that time unbelieving) witness of the death of the early martyrs such as Stephen but soon to be transformed by His personal encounters (plural) with the Risen Lord as confirmed in his first Letter to the Corinthians: “Last of all, as to one abnormally born, He also appeared to me. For I am the least of the apostles, unworthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by God’s grace I am what I am, and His grace toward me was not ineffective. However, I worked more than any of them, yet not I, but God’s grace that was with me.” (1 Corinthians 15:8‭-‬10)
• The Criterion of Embarrassment authenticates the gospel narrative

Do the New Testament documents tell the truth about what really happened in the first century? Authors claiming to write history are unlikely to invent embarrassing details about themselves or their heroes. Since the New Testament documents are filled with embarrassing details, we can be reasonably certain that they are telling the unredacted truth.

There are many examples. The disciples allow themselves to be humbled as equal brothers and disabused of any pretensions to self importance or self aggrandizement, such as any false storyteller would be motivated by.

“But as for you, do not be called ‘Rabbi,’ because you have one Teacher, and you are all brothers. Do not call anyone on earth your father, because you have one Father, who is in heaven. And do not be called masters either, because you have one Master, the Messiah.” (Matthew 23:8‭-‬10)

Notice that the disciples frequently depict themselves as dim wits. They often fail to understand what Jesus is saying, and don’t understand what his mission is about until after the resurrection. Their thick-headedness even earns their leader, Peter, the sternest rebuke from Jesus: “Get behind me Satan!” (What great press the disciples provided for their leader and first Pope! Also “Do not be called Father!” Contrary to popular opinion, it seems the church really didn’t have editorial control of the scriptures after all.)

After Jesus asks them to stay up and pray with him during his greatest hour of need, the disciples fall asleep on Jesus not once, not twice but three times! Then, after pledging to be faithful to the end, Peter denies Christ three times, and they all abandoned Him to His captors by fleeing the scene of His arrest..

The scared, scattered, skeptical disciples make no effort to give Jesus a proper burial. Instead they say a member of the Jewish ruling body that sentenced Jesus to die is the noble one — Joseph of Arimathea buries Jesus in a Jewish tomb (which would have been easy for the Jews to refute if it wasn’t true). Two days later, while the men are still hiding, the women go down and discover the empty tomb and the risen Jesus.

Who wrote all that down? Men — some of the men who were characters in the story. Now if you were part of a group of men trying to pass off a false resurrection story as the truth, would you depict yourselves as dim-witted, bumbling, rebuked, lazy, skeptical sissies, who ran away at the first sign of trouble, while the women were the brave ones who discovered the empty tomb and the risen Jesus?

If men were inventing the resurrection story, it would go more like this:

‘Jesus came to save the world, and he needed our help. That’s why we were there for him every step of the way. When he was in need, we prayed with him. When he wept, we wept with him (and told him to toughen up!). When he fell, we carried his cross. The gates of Hell could not prevent us from seeing his mission through!

So when that turncoat Judas brought the Romans by (we always suspected Judas), and they began to nail Jesus to the cross, we laughed at them. “He’s God you idiots! The grave will never keep him! You think you’re solving a problem, but you’re really creating a much bigger one!”

While we assured the women that everything would turn out all right, they couldn’t handle the crucifixion. Squeamish and afraid, they ran to their homes screaming and hid behind locked doors.

But we men stood steadfast at the foot of the cross, praying for hours until the very end. When Jesus finally took his last breath and the Roman Centurion confessed that Jesus was God, Peter blasted him, “That’s what we told you before you nailed him up there!” (Through this whole thing, the Romans and the Jews just wouldn’t listen!)

Never doubting that Jesus would rise on the third day, Peter announced to the Centurion, “We’ll bury him and be back on Sunday. Now go tell Pilate to put some of your ‘elite’ Roman guards at the tomb to see if you can prevent him from rising from the dead!” We all laughed and began to dream about Sunday.

That Sunday morning we marched right down to the tomb and tossed those elite Roman guards aside. Then the stone (that took eleven us to roll into place) rolled away by itself. A glowing Jesus emerged from tomb, and said, “I knew you’d come! My mission is accomplished.” He praised Peter for his brave leadership and congratulated us on our great faith. Then we went home and comforted the trembling women.’

There are other events in the New Testament documents concerning Jesus that are also unlikely to be made up. For example, Jesus:

• Is baptised by John. Jesus was “supposedly superior and sinless,” yet he was baptized “by his supposed inferior who proclaimed ‘a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.’” Jesus’ followers, therefore, struggled to narrate Jesus’ baptism without undermining belief in his sinlessness or his superiority vis-à-vis John. (Matthew 3:13-17, Mark 1:9-11, Luke 3:21-22)
• Is considered “out of his mind” by his own family who come to seize him to take him home (Mark 3:21 & 31).
• Is deserted by many of his followers after he says that followers must eat his flesh and drink his blood. (John 6:66).
• Is not believed by his own brothers (John 7:5). (Disbelief turned to belief after the resurrection—ancient historians tell us that Jesus’ brother James died a martyr as the leader of the church in Jerusalem in A.D. 62).
• Is thought to be a deceiver (John 7:12).
• Turns off Jewish believers to the point that they want to stone him (John 8:30-59).
• Is called a “madman” (John 10:20).
• Is called a “drunkard” (Matthew 11:19).
• Is accused of being “demon-possessed” (Mark 3:22, John 7:20, 8:48).
• Has his feet wiped with hair of a prostitute which easily could have been seen as a sexual advance (Luke 7:36-39).
• Is crucified despite the fact that “anyone who is hung on a tree is under God’s curse” (Deuteronomy 21:23).

If you’re inventing a Messiah to the Jews, you don’t say such things about him. You also don’t admit that some of you “still doubted” Jesus had really risen from the dead, especially while he’s standing right in front of you giving the great commission (Matthew 28:17-19).

Finally, anyone trying to pass off a false resurrection story as the truth would never say the women were the first witnesses at the tomb. In the first century, a woman’s testimony was not considered on par with that of a man. An invented story would say that the men—the brave men—had discovered the empty tomb. Yet all four gospels say the women were the first witnesses – all this while the sissy-pants men had their doors locked for fear of the Jews.

THEY WERE WITNESSES TO THE RESURRECTION.

Those who wrote the New Testament were witnesses to the Resurrected Lord Jesus. ALL of it written within the lifetime of those (friend and foe alike) who could have challenged or corrected the narrative had it been invented altered or corrupted. The fact is NO ONE ever challenged it at the time and there is no OTHER contemporary version of events. There is not a shred of evidence for an uncrucified Messiah not in the Bible nor from any other reputable source.

“Brothers, I can confidently speak to you about the patriarch David: He is both dead and buried, and his tomb is with us to this day. Since he was a prophet, he knew that God had sworn an oath to him to seat one of his descendants on his throne. Seeing this in advance, he spoke concerning the resurrection of the Messiah: He was not left in Hades, and His flesh did not experience decay. “God has resurrected this Jesus. WE ARE ALL WITNESSES OF THIS.” (Acts 2:29‭-‬32)

“The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of our fathers, has glorified His Servant Jesus, whom you handed over and denied in the presence of Pilate, when he had decided to release Him. But you denied the Holy and Righteous One and asked to have a murderer given to you. You killed the source of life, whom God raised from the dead; WE ARE WITNESSES OF THIS.” (Acts 3:13‭-‬15)

“For I passed on to you as most important what I also received: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that He was buried, that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that He appeared to Cephas, then to the Twelve. Then He appeared to over 500 brothers at one time; most of them are still alive, but some have fallen asleep. Then He appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one abnormally born, HE APPEARED ALSO TO ME.” (1 Corinthians 15:3‭-‬8)

“For we did not follow cleverly contrived myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ; instead, WE WERE EYEWITNESSES OF HIS MAJESTY. For when He received honor and glory from God the Father, a voice came to Him from the Majestic Glory: This is My beloved Son. I take delight in Him! And we heard this voice when it came from heaven while we were with Him on the holy mountain. So we have the prophetic word strongly confirmed. You will do well to pay attention to it, as to a lamp shining in a dismal place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.” (2 Peter 1:16‭-‬19)

“What was from the beginning, WHAT WE HAVE HEARD, WHAT WE HAVE SEEN WITH OUR OWN EYES, WHAT WE HAVE OBSERVED AND HAVE TOUCHED WITH OUR HANDS, concerning the Word of life — that life was revealed, and WE HAVE SEEN IT and we testify and declare to you the eternal life that was with the Father and was revealed to us — WHAT WE HAVE SEEN AND HEARD we also declare to you, so that you may have fellowship along with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ.” (1 John 1:1‭-‬3)

CONCLUSIONS

In light of these embarrassing details—along with the fact that the New Testament documents contain early, eyewitness testimony for which the writers gave their lives—it takes more faith to believe that the New Testament writers were not telling the truth.

We have the specific testimony of the disciple John that he was present at the cross and Jesus even told him to take care of His mother. He and Peter were the first disciples to witness the empty tomb. All the disciples saw the resurrected Lord including the doubting Thomas who’s confession of His “Lord and His God”, Jesus benchmarked as the basis for a blessing for all those who would believe to this day, but without the advantage Thomas had of seeing Jesus scarred hands and side.

No Muslim is honest enough to acknowledge these facts.

“Standing by the cross of Jesus were His mother, His mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus saw His mother AND THE DISCIPLE HE LOVED standing there, He said to His mother, “Woman, here is your son.” Then HE SAID TO THE DISCIPLE, “Here is your mother.” And from that hour the disciple took her into his home.” (John 19:25‭-‬27)

“After eight days His disciples were indoors again, and Thomas was with them. Even though the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them. He said, “Peace to you! ” Then He said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and observe My hands. Reach out your hand and put it into My side. Don’t be an unbeliever, but a believer.” Thomas responded to Him, “My Lord and my God! ” Jesus said, “Because you have seen Me, you have believed. Those who believe without seeing are blessed.” (John 20:26‭-‬29)