Has anyone come back from the dead to prove it?

The short answer Settled

Yes. Jesus did, and God says that is the proof. God has appointed a day to judge the world by the Man He raised from the dead, and by raising Him He has given everyone proof that the judgment is coming. The One who came back is the Judge.

What Paul told Athens

In Athens Paul spoke to people who had built an altar "TO THE UNKNOWN GOD" (Acts 17:23). He ended with a command and a reason for it. God "now commands all men everywhere to repent, because He has appointed a day on which He will judge the world in righteousness by the Man whom He has ordained. He has given assurance of this to all by raising Him from the dead" (Acts 17:30-31).

The day, the Judge, and the proof are all tied to one Man. The word behind "assurance" means something given to make a thing certain: a proof, or a pledge. And it is given "to all," the same people who receive the command to repent.

Peter says the same about who the risen One is: "Him God raised up on the third day" (Acts 10:40), and the apostles were sent "to testify that it is He who was ordained by God to be Judge of the living and the dead" (Acts 10:42). Paul says He rose for this very end: "Christ died and rose and lived again, that He might be Lord of both the dead and the living" (Romans 14:9).

Shown openly to witnesses

Jesus "presented Himself alive after His suffering by many infallible proofs, being seen by them during forty days" (Acts 1:3). His witnesses "ate and drank with Him after He arose from the dead" (Acts 10:41). He "was seen by over five hundred brethren at once, of whom the greater part remain to the present" (1 Corinthians 15:6): witnesses who could still be asked. He was not shown to every person, but to witnesses who were sent to tell every person (Acts 10:41-42).

The apostles staked their word on it. Paul says that if Christ is not risen, "our preaching is empty" (1 Corinthians 15:14), and "we are found false witnesses of God" (1 Corinthians 15:15). They offered the resurrection as a fact that could be checked and could be false.

They held to it when it cost them. Before the cross, Peter denied Jesus three times: "I do not know the Man!" (Matthew 26:74). Afterward, ordered not to speak in His name, Peter and John answered, "we cannot but speak the things which we have seen and heard" (Acts 4:20). The apostles were beaten and left "rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer shame for His name" (Acts 5:41). Herod "killed James the brother of John with the sword" (Acts 12:2), and Jesus had told Peter "by what death he would glorify God" (John 21:19). Paul asks, "why do we stand in jeopardy every hour?" (1 Corinthians 15:30), if the dead do not rise. People can suffer for something false that they believe. But these were the men who ate and drank with Him after He rose, and they knew whether it had happened.

When men asked Jesus for a sign, He pointed to His own rising: "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up" (John 2:19). John explains, "He was speaking of the temple of His body" (John 2:21).

The usual objection

No one has ever come back from the dead to tell what lies beyond it, the argument goes, so a day of judgment is a threat no one can check. Asking people to believe in it is asking them to believe without evidence, and that, some say, is all the Bible means by faith.

Scripture's answer is that Someone did come back, and the One who came back is the Judge. A faith that names what would prove it false, as Paul does, is not belief without evidence. Not everyone who hears is persuaded: when Paul spoke of the resurrection in Athens, "some mocked" (Acts 17:32). What Scripture says is that the proof has been given, not that everyone accepts it.

The words behind it