Five minutes isn’t very long, and certainly that’s not long enough for me to make much of an argument, but I’m going to try to.
I had a reason for asking Mr. Horner if the body of Jesus had experienced rigor mortis, or if it experienced decay. Remember when Jesus was at the tomb of Lazarus, and Martha realized that he was going to raise him from the dead, as he was… well, I think it was before he gave the command to roll away the stone, according to the New Testament story Martha said, "He’s been dead four days; he stinks." And she was saying something there that we all realize: that if a body is dead for that period of time, then it’s going to experience decay. And so I’m trying to find out from him [Horner] what, what kind of death was this that the man Jesus allegedly experienced.
Well, he couldn’t have experienced corruption or else the Apostle Paul and the Apostle Peter lied in the sermons that the writer, Luke, attributed to them in the book of Acts, because they said in quoting from Psalm 16 that he had seen no corruption. So, if there was no corruption seen, and Jesus really did die and he was buried in the tomb, and then he came out again on the third day, how could we really be sure that he was resurrected, I mean that he was dead in the first place?
And let’s take an appearance that Jesus made to his disciples on the night of the Resurrection according to Luke’s twenty-fourth chapter and also [John], the twentieth chapter: Jesus appeared to his disciples, and Thomas wasn’t there according to the version that’s recorded in the twentieth chapter of John, and eight days later Jesus appeared to the disciples again and Thomas was there. If you’ll read that story, it will say that Jesus challenged Thomas to put his hand into his side and see if it, if it wasn’t really the Jesus that had died on the cross and whose side had been pierced by the Roman soldier.
Well, I had an operation just eleven days ago; I had abdominal surgery. And on Friday, I went to the surgeon to have the surgical staples removed. And I asked him, "What would have happened if you’d just dismissed me without putting those staples in?" He looked at me kind of funny and said, "Well we’d never do that." And I said, "Well, if you had, what would’ve happened?" He said, "We wouldn’t do it." But if you had… I then told him what I was digging for, and he, by the way, was a Hindu surgeon and he said he didn’t know very much about the story of the Resurrection but he thinks that he had vaguely heard that [stpry]. And so he told me, "I will tell you this. If his side was pierced, then he had to go around like that [Till clasped his side with both hands], holding his side to keep the internal organs from gushing out, because when a wound like that is opened into the cavity, then there’s pressure from inside to push the organs out."
As I was studying for the debate, I read that story again in the book of John and I thought, well what kind of death was this? The man still had his side open enough, eight days after his resurrection, to invite Thomas to put his side, his hand into his side. He could pass through doors, because the doors were closed when he made that first appearance on the night of his resurrection. And the Apostle Paul said, and I’d be interested in hearing your rebuttal here, Mr. Horner, I say that Paul was insisting that this was a spiritual resurrection. Later on, though, it became a literal, physical resurrection.