All four Gospels of the New Testament record the event of the resurrection of Jesus. The account of the resurrection is depicted by each of the Gospel writers in the discovery of the empty tomb--the heavy stone which had sealed the entrance having been rolled aside--even as it had been under guard. It is upon this event that all of Christianity rests, for as Paul writes in I Corinthians:
Now if Christ raised from the dead is what has been preached, how can some of you be saying that there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, Christ himself cannot have been raised, and if Christ has not been raised then our preaching is useless and your believing it is useless; indeed, we are shown up as witnesses who have committed perjury before God, because we swore in evidence before God that he raised Christ to life. For if the dead are not raised, Christ has not been raised, and if Christ has not been raised, you are still in your sins. And what is more serious, all who have died in Christ have perished (I Corinthians 15:12-19, The Jerusalem Bible (New Testament) [JBNT], 227).
In the aftermath of the resurrection, the fate of Jesus has been hotly debated for centuries. Herein lies the greatest challenge to Christian faith.
For the fundamentalist believer, the answer is rather easy to come by: "The Bible says it, I believe it, and that's that." In other words, the Bible is the Word of God committed to writing at the hand of man, but it was God Himself who moved the hands, formed the letters into words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters, and books. God is Truth and, as such, has no purpose in lying to us. He does not speak to us through the "ordinary product written by humans which requires some discernment and judgment, but strictly literally" (Commentary Notes on the Christian Biblical Movement, 11).
Fundamentalism tends to put on "the blinders" when confronted with the textual var...