The Divine Jesus

In the section of chapter one entitled "Going Back to the Beginning" Lee Strobel's expert, Blomberg, explains that

To find the earliest information, one goes to Paul's epistles and then asks, 'Are there signs that even earlier sources were used in writing them?'

Blomberg uses Paul for the existence of early evidence for

1. the divinity of Jesus
2. the death of Christ for our sins
3. the resurrection of Jesus
4. sightings of Jesus after his death

Blomberg makes his point that

That's not later mythology from forty or more years down the road, as Armstrong suggested. A good case can be made for saying that Christian belief in the Resurrection, through not yet written down, can be dated to within two years of that very event.

Lee Strobel ends the chapter with his own view of the significance of the evidence:

It certainly seemed to take the wind out of the charge that the Resurection--which is cited by Christians as the crowning confirmation of Jesus' divinity--was merely a mythological concept that developed over long periods of time as legends corrupted the eyewitness accounts of Christ's life. For me, this struck especially close to home--as a skeptic, that was one of my biggest objections to Christianity.

Let us assume that the letters of Paul are as old as Blomberg claims they are, are not invented, and that they accurately portray the beliefs of their author, Paul. To trust Paul's belief in the resurrection as fact, one has to accept that there were multiple witnesses to a supernatural event. This is my personal greatest objection-- not the disputed authorship of the bible, the potential interference of personal religious idealism on supposed facts, nor the weakness of Blomberg's comparison arguments. Those are all objections, but not the greatest objection. To be clear my greatest objection is a belief in events that are proven impossible by science. In the case of the resurrection: someone who has died a violent death and whose corpse has been laid up for three days, does not gain back all of the blood they lost, heal dead muscle tissue so that blood can flow, establish a pulse, resume brain activity, push a stone aside, walk, and start talking to people.

Supernatural belief is not unique to Christianity, but is common to most religion. If the supernatural is not possible, then Jesus could not have risen from the dead, and no matter how fervent the testimony of Paul, it just didn't happen. Perhaps people (more than 500) "saw" Jesus as a mirage in the distance, or a reflection in a pool, and the later Gospels made the story to be a more credible one. Although we will never know how the legend was established, if you don't accept the supernatural then Paul is wrong, no matter how honest and fervent his beliefs are.

Is it really so impossible that legends about the supernatural Jesus were created a few years after Christ's death, or for that matter while he was still alive (which I personally think is more likely)? I believe that such legends can be created in a short amount of time. I hope that Strobel and those he interviews will shed more light as to why they made the rational choice to accept the irrational as fact. In my opinion this is where the faith of the believer has a significant role to play, a topic that Lee Strobel has to mention, and the discussion of which I look forward to. But what do you the Christian reader think? If supernatural evidence was presented in a courtroom, which after all is the analogy that Strobel uses in The Case for Christ, would you entertain it as probable? Why or why not?