I thought that this Chuck Colson piece would be appropriate for Easter Sunday:

Just think about the situation Christ’s disciples were in after He left them. Here was a group of peasants, powerless, up against the most powerful empire in the world. Possible prison time was the very least of their worries. They knew that torture and execution could be in their future if they refused to stop preaching the name of Jesus Christ.

But they couldn’t stop.

To a man, they kept talking about Christ’s life, death, and resurrection to anyone who would listen. None of them would deny or retract their story. Eventually, just as the authorities had threatened, most of them were executed for it. But still, all of them maintained to the very end that Jesus had risen from the dead—that they had seen Him, touched Him, talked with Him.

What would inspire men to suffer and die for a belief? Only one thing—the absolute certainty that their belief was true. Who would die to protect a lie or a hoax, especially if he knew it to be a lie? You’d have to be insane. As we’ve seen from the examples I gave, most of us won’t face prison—no, never mind prison. Most of us won’t face public humiliation to defend a lie.

Which leads me inescapably to one conclusion: Jesus’ resurrection was not a lie. These apostles would have turned state’s evidence in a heartbeat, copped a plea, unless they had seen the risen Christ in the flesh.

Chuck didn’t address it here, but if many of the stories of the New Testament were really mere fables, then why did Christianity grow so rapidly, and through mostly non-violent means? If there had been any doubt at the time about the validity of the events, Christianity would have quickly joined the league of forgotten religions, and Christ dismissed as just another false prophit. It would not have become the dominant religion of the region within mere decades.

The only possible explanation is that the resurrection did indeed happen, as well as the other stories of the New Testament.