"The Bible Records that three days after the death of Jesus" "Mary Magdalene and Mary Mother of Jesus made their way to his tomb" "But when they arrived they found only the grave clothes" "The body of Jesus had disappeared" "The Gospels say the women saw an angel who said Jesus had been raised from the dead" "The Resurrection has been called the miracle of miracles" "This single miracle changed the world" "Brock Gill's mission is to find out what happened at the tomb" "As a Christian the story of the resurrection is the central pillar of his faith" "But Brock Gill is also a professional magician" "Together with the greatest inventors of illusions he'll be putting the astonishing claim made by Jesus' disciples to the test" "The thing about the resurrection is that was the miracle of all miracles lf it was the art of illusion then I want to find out how" "Illusionist Brock Gill has come to Jerusalem to find out the truth about the resurrection" "He's on the last leg of a journey to put the miracles of Jesus to the test" "Many at the time believed that Jesus worked his miracle through the power of magic" "As a magician in his own right Brock knows all about the art of illusion and deception" "He can multiply objects and make people disappear" "So far Brock has looked at many of Jesus' miracles from the point of view of a magician" "The miracle of the loaves and fishes" "The walking on water" "The healings" "The turning of water into wine" "And the stilling of the storm" "There's no way Jesus could have done his miracles as illusions or magic tricks or anything like that" "First of all he didn't have the Technology I mean it was so primitive back then" "Plus through illusion how did he make a blind person see?" "How do you cast out a demon?" "I mean it's just, I mean that's not even a magic trick" "But now Brock decides to examine the resurrection" "The foundation of the Christian faith" "Without it Jesus would have been another of many Christian martyrs" "His quest for clues takes him to the tomb of Jesus itself" "The church of the Holy Sepulchre, in the heart of the old city of Jerusalem" "This is the place where Jesus is supposed to have been raised from the dead" "Wow, this is amazing" "It's the miracle of all miracles lt's the one miracle that" "it defines all the others, I mean without this miracle the other ones wouldn't even be talked about any more you know, but this is the one that changed the world forever" "This is the miracle" "ln fact historians have discovered that the claim that Jesus was raised from the dead is unique in the ancient world" "From the perspective of a miracle worker l would say that the resurrection is the one attribute that would be unique about Jesus versus other miracle workers" "But these people did not actually physically resurrect themselves in the physical body from the dead" "They may have resurrected other people from the dead but they did not physically resurrect themselves" "So what did really happen 2,000 years ago" "The story of the resurrection is told in the gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke and John" "Around 30 A.D. Jesus was crucified under orders of the Roman Governor," "Pontius Pilate" "The gospels say that Jesus' body was taken down from the cross and placed in a tomb donated by Joseph of Aramathea" "Just before dawn, three days after the death of Jesus" "Mary Magdalene and Mary mother of Jesus made their way to his tomb" "They were taking oils, herbs and spices in order to clean the body, as Jewish tradition demanded" "But when they stepped inside the tomb they found the grave clothes but no trace of the body of Jesus." "No-one knew what to think at first" "The women ran off to tell the disciples" "Later on the road to a mass Jesus appeared before two of his followers" "ln total Jesus is said to have made 1 1 appearances after the resurrection lt is the crux of the greatest story ever told." "But is it true?" "Indeed is it something that a magician can re-create?" "Some say that his body was stolen" "Some say that he never quite passed away, maybe they went to the wrong tomb, and some say that the writers just made it all up" "I want to find out the answer to this age-old mystery" "Jesus' enemies believed he was a magician" "They said that the resurrection was an elaborate hoax" "Brock will put this claim to the test" "He will team up with the world's leading inventor of illusions to see if the resurrection can be staged as an illusion" "Brock Gill is an illusionist on a quest to test the claim that Jesus was a magician" "His mission is to discover the secret of Jesus' greatest miracle." "The resurrection" "As a magician in his own right" "Brock knows a lot about the art of deception and illusion" "But is that what Jesus did?" "My goodness." "One of the first to attempt to stage the resurrection as an illusion is André Kole, an inventor of illusions" "Do you want to run through some of the scenes?" "Let's just take it from the top and see what you got" "This is general wash that would be on the scrim, to scrim down..." "André has spent a lifetime creating stage illusions for his own shows as well as for leading magicians like David Copperfield" "With the help of set designers" "André has recreated the setting of the empty tomb" "Actors play the parts of Jesus and those of his followers" "The body of Jesus is wrapped in linen cloths, just as the body of Jesus would have been" "The face cloth is put in place." "And the tomb is sealed" "It's an illusion that André Kole has staged many times, but is it one that Jesus and the disciples could have staged?" "Many of the illusions that I've worked on with David Copperfield have taken two or three years to develop and perfect lf Jesus had been a magician he would have to visualise 2,000 years ago" "Jesus and his disciples walking through the dusty streets of Galilee, through long robes and sandals with 3 decent trucks following along behind to carry all the equipment that would have been necessary for him to be a magician" "But the empty tomb is not the only basis for the resurrection" "The gospels say that after his disappearance from the tomb" "Jesus reappeared to his disciples" "Brock himself is an expert in the art of Disappearance ln this trick he enters a box and is tied in chains" "The box is then raised up 100 feet" "Seconds later Brock reappears on his Motorbike" "This kind of trick is the bread and butter of modern magicians" "But Brock believes it would have been impossible for Jesus to pill off this kind of trick" "Jesus had three days to pull this off if he would have done some type of trick" "And he had no help" "His disciples were kind of scattered at that point;" "there wasn't, he didn't have a team around him" "For me, it took weeks to prepare, this stunt lt took a team of builders, it took lots of preparation and everything had to be so perfect to pull this off" "The resurrection may not have been staged as an illusion but rumours of trickery resound through the centuries" "Biblical scholars agree that one of the earliest explanations for the resurrection is that it was a simple hoax perpetrated by the disciples" "The most popular one is that his body was indeed stolen from the tomb" "And had been taken off perhaps by whether by his enemies or either of his followers" "To perpetrate the hoax the disciples would have had to sneak into the tomb during the night of either Friday or Saturday and removed the body" "Of course it would have been illegal to do so" "But if the disciples out numbered the soldiers guarding the tomb then there's no physical reason why they couldn't have done so" "For scholars like Bruce Chilton a bigger objection is psychological lf they wish to make up a fraud they would have made up a fraud from which they would profit instead by their claim that he was still alive they subjected themselves to persecution" "and in many cases ultimately to death" "Psychologically it is difficult to understand why any group of people would make up a story in order to suffer in that fashion" "But there is one reason why the disciples might have stolen Jesus' body" "What if he hadn't actually died on the cross?" "What if the disciples removed him from the tomb in order to revive him?" "If Jesus survived the cross he could have been nursed back to health" "Perhaps by Mary Magdalene one of his closest followers" "This theory hinges on the idea that Jesus was given a drug that helped him survive the crucifixion" "There was at the time a drug made of the mandrake plant that acted as an anaesthetic lt was mixed with vinegar and often given to victims while they were on the cross" "It has been argued that the mandrake solution could have kept Jesus alive" "But this idea does not square with the brutality of what Jesus had to endure during his last 48 hours" "After his arrest and trial Jesus was thrown into prison" "The morning of his execution he was scourged many times" "The claim would have seriously weakened Jesus" "Exhausted, Jesus would then have been forced to carry the heavy crossbeam" "No wonder the gospels say he collapsed" "That ordeal alone would have brought Jesus close to death but there was more to come" "Jesus was crucified" "The trauma of the scourging and nailing to the cross, alone, could have been fatal" "At this point Jesus would have been given the mandrake solution" "But the aim of the mandrake was to make torture more bearable lt had no power to revive victims its aim was to make the ordeal more bearable to the watching relatives ln fact the mandrake was so toxic that the slightest overdose" "would have more likely hastened Jesus' death" "The Romans knew how to kill people" "But even if Jesus somehow was still alive" "And somehow managed to get out of that tomb I find it ridiculous to think that his disciples would look at the injured mangled Jesus and thinkhe's the resurrected lord" "They would have looked at him and thought call a doctor, our friend is injured and he needs help" "It's hard to see how the theft of Jesus' body could have been the root of the belief in the resurrection" "But that hasn't stopped investigators from searching for other reasons" "Brock wants to weigh up a radical new theory that said the reason the tomb was empty is the body of Jesus may never have made it to the tomb" "The body ended up somewhere else all together" "Could this theory explain why the disciples believed that Jesus' body was not in the tomb?" "Today the first rule I'm going to break in the illusion what you're not supposed to break this, you're supposed to do things once really fast so that no-one catches it I'm going to break that for you I'm going to slow everything down" "Brock Gill is a Christian illusionist from Nashville Tennessee" "He travels all around with his magic show" "As an illusionist I'm really interested in the miracles because what I do for a living is I do miraculous looking feats that make people more interested or make people watch and listen to what I have to say I can get the attention of people" "and I would imagine that Jesus did a lot of the same thing" "But Brock is now travelling in the holy land investigating the miracle of miracles" "Jesus' resurrection from the dead" "He's come to a tomb in Jerusalem from the time of Jesus lt was a tomb like this that Mary Magdalene and Mary mother of Jesus found empty" "A discovery that convinced them that Jesus had been raised from the dead" "That belief swept like wildfire 2,000 years on it's one of biggest mysteries in history" "Brock has already ruled out two explanations for the empty tomb" "Whether it was a staged illusion or that Jesus somehow survived the cross and his body was stolen from the tomb" "The Romans were professional executioners" "They were trained to execute people and I think they would have known if he was dead or not" "But there may be another reason" "Perhaps Jesus' body never made it to the tomb" "The basis of this theory is in this valley just south of Jerusalem lt's in fact a former quarry" "And it was in a quarry like this to the west of the city that the Romans executed rebels" "But 2,000 years ago quarries also doubled up as something else" "Garbage dumps" "What if the Romans took the body of Jesus down from the cross" "And then did the simplest thing?" "What if they threw it onto the dump?" "Shocking as it sounds a recent theory claims that the reason" "Jesus' tomb was empty is that his body never made it there" "It was eaten by scavenger dogs and birds" "The evidence for this theory seemed Devastating" "Archaeologists digging in Jerusalem were not finding any victims of crucifixions buried in tombs" "The tell tale signs - bones with crucifixion nails never seemed to show up" "But all that changed in 1968" "When a young archaeologist made a sensational discovery in this suburb of north Jerusalem." "At the time there were no buildings or roads" "And Doctor Tzaferis stumbled across an ancient tomb," "Right here under this road ln a stone box he found a skeleton but it was no ordinary skeleton" "The ankle bone had a bent rusty nail through it lt was the remains of a crucified man." "Dr Tzaferis could not believe his eyes I knew that it was a tremendous moment for me" "I knew that finding a case of crucifixion is a significant discovery" "The nail as you can see 1 7 or 18cm along the head of the nail and the tip of the nail bent" "An obvious case and evidence of crucifixion" "The discovery of a victim of crucifixion in a tomb in Jerusalem was in line with legal documents from the time" "The body of Jesus most certainly would have been placed in a tomb and for two reasons" "Jewish laws of purity would never allow for a corpse to remain overnight unburied and secondly Jewish piety required bodies to be properly buried" "Not buried with honour if you're executed as a criminal but buried properly according to Jewish law" "Any Roman soldier tempted to flout the Jewish laws would have had to answer to the Roman governor Pontius Pilate" "At the time that Pontius Pilate ordered the execution of Jesus he was in a delicate political situation" "He had no interest whatever in provoking a response by the Jewish people against his rule in Jerusalem" "Had he displayed the body of Jesus or subjected the cadaver to abuse that would have violated the law of Moses" "Had Pilate done so he would have provoked a riot" "The tradition that Jesus was buried in a tomb made sense after all but for Brock there was still a loose end" "Why had archaeologists not found any more victims of crucifixion?" "As Brock studies the reports of Crucifixion from the time he discovers the reason" "Because nails were expensive most rebels were not nailed but tied to crosses" "These rebels died of asphyxiation" "Of course some victims were nailed" "But even then the odds of finding those nails are slim" "That's because the Romans removed the nails to recycle them" "The only reason why Vassilios Tzaferis found a rusty crucifixion nail in 1968 was pure luck" "The tip of the nail struck a knot and it was bent and when they wanted to extract it from the ankle it was quite impossible" "So if the body of Jesus was taken to the tomb why then was it found empty?" "The gospels claimed it was because Jesus had risen from the dead" "For Brock the time has come to examine that claim head on" "The story of the empty tomb is reported by the gospel writers " "Matthew, Mark, Luke and John" "But did they record the story faithfully decades after the event?" "Or is it just possible they made the whole thing up?" "Brock Gill is in the holy land in search of the truth about the miracle of the resurrection" "The enemies of Jesus claimed he was a magician and that the resurrection was an elaborate deception" "As a magician himself Brock knows only too well how easy it is to deceive people" "He is now in Jerusalem to find out" "Whether or not the resurrection of Jesus could have been a hoax" "The easiest deception to pull off would have been to make up the whole story of the resurrection" "The prime suspects are the gospel writers Matthew, Mark, Luke and John" "The word gospel means good news and the gospel writers main business was not to write history but to spread the good news" "We're talking about gospels that would come on the scene now around 60, 70, 80, 90" "You're talking about a community that understood that the first witnesses were now dying off only to preserve this memory" "So these gospels were not written so much to prove to unbelievers but to preserve for believers" "Since the evangelists were writing their gospels in the pagan world of the Roman empire it might be thought they borrowed the idea of resurrection from the pagan cults flourishing at the time" "But Kim Stratton historian of ancient Greece and Rome has not found any evidence that resurrection was in any way a pagan idea" "Jesus is unique, his resurrection in the physical body is unique" "And in fact from a Greek point of view especially among the philosophical set the idea of being resurrected in a body was kind of untasteful" "People weren't that interested really in the body and better to be transmuted into some sort of divine figure and leave the body behind" "Kim Stratton in fact believes the gospel writers may have borrowed the idea of resurrection straight from their own Jewish history" "There was this belief that God was going to liberate the Jews from Roman rule in a final kind of cataclysmic war in which" "God is going to resurrect the people who were good and is going to reward them" "And the people who were bad are going to be punished" "But from this apocalyptic understanding" "Jesus' resurrection is not unique, it's just the first one" "But even if the gospel writers were inspired by Jewish apocalyptic thought that still does not mean they made up the story of the resurrection for that would mean they were writers of fiction" "And yet the evidence suggests they were not" "Had the evangelists invented the story of the resurrection they would have told it through reliable eyewitnesses" "They even had a candidate." "Joseph of Aramathea" "He was the man to whom the disciples turned to for help in finding a tomb to bury Jesus" "Joseph was a wealthy Jew and a member of the Jewish senate" "But instead of upstanding men the gospel writers eyewitnesses are women I think that in a story with something as outlandish, preposterous as a resurrection you would have wanted more reliable witnesses" "Not women and especially Mary Magdalene who already had a history of being delusional before she met Jesus to now become one of the chief witnesses to his resurrection I think there's evidence that there's something there" "It's evident that evangelists like Mark were not writers of fiction" "Free to make things up but rather reporters working with memories and eye witness accounts handed down to them" "Early church sources say the gospel writers got their information from people who knew Jesus intimately" "Mark for example got it from the disciple Peter, one of many eye witnesses who claimed to have seen Jesus raised from the dead" "This poses a new challenge for Brock Gill lf the gospel writers did not make up the story of the resurrection then perhaps it was made up by the disciples" "Well we need to look at the disciples because they were the original eyewitnesses, I mean that's where the story starts." "That's the root of it" "Did they hallucinate?" "Did they, are they making this up?" "As an illusionist Brock knows all too well that appearances can be deceptive" "But is that what happened to the disciples?" "Did Jesus after his death really appear to them?" "Or did they imagine that Jesus had appeared to them?" "Brock Gill has been weighing up the evidence for the most remarkable miracle of all time " "Jesus' resurrection from the dead" "He's found little evidence that the story of the resurrection was made up by the gospel writers" "The evangelists got their stories from eyewitnesses" "Brock now wants to see if the story of the resurrection could have been made up by the eyewitnesses themselves" "Well we have to look at the disciples because that's where the story starts I mean they were the original eyewitnesses I mean something happened that changed their entire life so what was it - did they hallucinate, did they just decide to lie?" "The main source for the evangelist Mark was the disciple Peter" "The two had travelled together across the Roman empire and had ended up in Rome" "Towards the end of his life Peter was in prison and according to church sources" "Peter told Mark everything he knew about Jesus" "So is it possible that the disciples imagined they had seen Jesus alive?" "Some social psychologists have suggested that the disciples came to believe that Jesus was alive as a way of coming to terms with the shock of his death" "30 days after the crucifixion the gospels say that some of his followers went back to Jerusalem to remember Jesus" "Today Christians celebrate that moment as the feast of Pentecost" "The disciples, Mary mother of Jesus and Mary Magdalene were grieving the loss of Jesus" "How did they cope?" "Apparently something extraordinary happened" "The gospels say that they all experienced the power of the Holy Spirit" "Whatever it was, what's certain is that they were all able to face life with a new sense of purpose" "And so scientists have wondered whether that wasn't the moment when the disciples finally came to terms with Jesus' death" "By imagining that he was alive after all" "It's a powerful phenomenon in explaining why many people hold to religious faiths today in the light of evidence to the contrary" "It's certainly something that social Psychologist" "Dr Archie Hart is familiar with" "One emotionally invests oneself in a particular position" "And the last thing you want to do is to surrender that" "One of the best examples of this phenomenon took place in America in the 1950s" "A religious cult in Chicago issued a prophecy that the world would come to an end and they would be rescued by alien spacecraft" "And then of course the date and time came and nothing happened" "And when they looked at these, the belief systems of these people afterwards they found that rather than disillusioning them, rather than them saying, you know what this was hocus pocus I'm going to quit" "A few did, a few did" "The majority actually increased their faith or their belief in the system" "Rationalise it and you know there were reasons why and we were given another opportunity or a second chance but they did not give up on their faith" "It's a theory that could be applied to the disciples" "Here was a bunch of people who had left everything behind including their families and their possessions and given their lives over to Jesus" "The site of their dying leader must have been a crushing blow" "How could they possibly resume their old lives?" "Perhaps the only way to come to terms with Jesus' death was to believe that he had been raised from the dead lt's a powerful theory, then again there's a big difference between the experience of the disciples" "and that of other cults" "Religious cults rarely last for long and they certainly don't leave a legacy" "Jesus' followers on the other hand held together for years winning more and more converts" "Then Peter and the other disciples began to travel around the Roman Empire converting people to the new faith by the thousands" "Psychological explanations don't work for explaining away the disciples experience because we have other examples of charismatic leaders, prophets, people who promised things" "And then when they're killed their movements in" "We think of Judas, a contemporary of Jesus who promised that he would be able to divide the Jordan river" "The Romans attacked him, killed him, scattered his following, and his following came to an end" "Never regrouped, we never hear another thing about Judas" "But that is not what happened to Jesus and his following" "And unlike cults generations of disciples and followers were prepared to put their lives on the line for their cause" "Peter was only one of thousands of early Christians who died as martyrs" "Had they simply come to terms with the fact of Jesus' death" "They could have gone back to Galilee," "Farmed their land, lived with their Families and remembered themselves and Jesus as the hero of the faith without any reference to his resurrection" "And yet they were willing to be persecuted for their faith" "For someone to think that the disciples fabricated this whole story I think they would have to think about one thing they died for it" "That means that they would have to die for a lie which I think is impossible;" "I don't think you can have a cause big enough to make a complete story, a lie about it" "And then base your life on it because what good does it do at that point?" "But if the belief in the resurrection did not emerge at Pentecost then when else did it?" "There's only one remaining possibility" "The very moment when eyewitnesses thought they saw Jesus alive again" "The first people to become aware of the resurrection are the women who went to see the tomb of Jesus on the third day" "So what exactly did they see that so transformed them?" "As a magician Brock is skilled at creating illusions " "Persuading people to see things that aren't real" "He wants to know what the women, by all accounts the first witnesses saw" "Did they really see something, or did they imagine they had?" "illusionist Brock Gill has been travelling through Israel in search of the secret of Jesus' miracle of miracles - the resurrection" "He's examined every possibility" "For Jesus' body to be stolen from the tomb by the disciples" "He's investigated a radical new theory that says that Jesus' body was never placed in the tomb" "He's even studied the possibility of the gospel writers or the disciples made the whole story up" "Not one of these theories stands up to scrutiny" "But Brock knows there is one more avenue to explore" "The possibility that the eyewitnesses to the resurrection were hallucinating" "As a magician Brock knows all about creating illusions" "One of his more popular tricks is levitation" "Some of the most impressive tricks a lot of times are the simple ones" "For example the levitation I learned how to do it in an afternoon, you know ln levitation people are fooled into believing the impossible" "So were Jesus' followers the victims of hallucination?" "The very first witness to the resurrection was Mary Magdalene" "That is a viable explanation I think if someone is looking into a dark tomb, dark corner" "the cues are not clear, you read into them I have done so myself on many occasions" "And it's quite possible that she could have thought she saw an angel or Jesus or anything else" "There is some support for this theory in the gospel of Mark, the earliest of all four gospels" "The conventional wisdom is that the women go into the tomb, inspect it, find the grave clothes and then see the angel" "That's certainly what the gospels of Matthew, Luke and John say" "But Mark's version of events is quite different ln his gospel the women don't enter the tomb" "They never even see the grave clothes, rather they see the angel the moment they cross the threshold" "ln his recent book on the life of Mary Magdalene," "Bruce Chilton argues that this maybe how the belief in the resurrection first emerged" "ln the gospel according to Mark" "The announcement of the resurrection comes to pass as a result of a vision of an angelic figure" "Not as a result of any proof that the tomb was in fact empty" "The mystery is why would Mary Magdalene suddenly experience a vision of an angel?" "Bruce Chilton argues that Jesus trained Mary Magdalene to see angels as a revelation of God lt was the custom in Judaism, holy men practised it through disciplined meditation" "The vision of an angel may have been a sign to Mary Magdalene that Jesus was alive" "Maybe Mary Magdalene did experience such a vision and told the disciples all about it" "But it wouldn't explain why Mary mother of Jesus also saw something" "Or the fact that some of the disciples saw Jesus alive after his death on the road to mass" "According to social psychologists this vision too is difficult to dismiss as an hallucination lt is absolutely impossible for more than one person to have the identical hallucination going on at the same time" "For two people walking on the road to Amayass, to have Jesus alongside them physically, telling them what they think is not how a vision works lt's not how a hallucination works" "It might be argued that Jesus trained all his disciples to have visions" "But then that wouldn't account for the most baffling vision of all, that of St Paul" "He was charged by the Jewish Authorities with the task of persecuting the early followers of Jesus" "Paul fulfilled his mission assiduously" "He would have seen the stoning of the first Christian martyr Stephen" "Here was someone directly opposed to what Jesus stood for " "Paul had never met Jesus and yet in his letters" "Paul tells of a remarkable experience" "He was on the way to Damascus to persecute the Christians who had settled there when something happened" "Paul says in his letters that he had a very clear vision of Jesus raised from the dead" "Some of those who knew him had raised again from the dead, had not even met Jesus personally when he was alive" "The best example of that is St Paul and yet despite not having known Jesus they were willing to be persecuted for their faith" "After 2,000 years the miracle of Miracles remains an enigma" "Attempts by magicians and scientists to find a rational explanation for the resurrection continue to flounder" "Why would anyone bother to die for a trick of magic?" "You know there are a lot of illusions in this world" "Performed by magicians that look absolutely real, that people believe are real" "They're blown away by it, but it doesn't change their life" "Whatever happened in Jesus' tomb, three days after his death, changed the lives of and the faith of 12 disciples who may never know whether the resurrection was an illusion or a miracle" "But whatever it was it drew the biggest audience ever" "What Jesus did in his final days was huge" "He did something that created religions that spread across the entire world and he created the biggest fan base in history" "His fan base has grown to like a billion people now so he did something and it was spectacular" "Three hundred years after his death that faith became the official religion of the Roman Empire" "Two thousand years on it's the biggest religion in the world"