WHEN HARVARD HEARD THE GOSPEL

  By Dr. M. R. Dowler

At the age of sixty-nine, Simon Greenleaf died on the day I would be born 103 years later. He came from good stock; his maternal grandfather was a godly preacher in colonial America. Simon had an inquisitive, detail-oriented mind; he graduated from college at age sixteen and became a lawyer at age twenty-two. But the legacy of Simon Greenleaf is summed up in two sterling achievements---he was one of the founders of the Harvard Law School (1817), and more importantly, he produced one of the earliest defenses of the truth of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, entitled An Examination of the Testimony of the Evangelists by the Rules of Evidence Administered in Courts of Justice (1846).

Despite his godly heritage, Simon Greenleaf came to faith in Christ late in life. As an agnostic professor of law at Harvard, Greenleaf was challenged one day by one of his law students about the validity of the resurrection. Being no stranger to evidence, Greenleaf plunged into a passionate mission to prove once-and-for-all the ridiculous myth of Christ’s resurrection. But a funny thing happened---surrounded by thousands of pages of evidence (historical, cultural, scientific and biblical) that proved the resurrection to be absolutely true, Simon Greenleaf came to realize he was sinner in need of the Savior he was trying to disprove. Dr. Simon Greenleaf, renown legal scholar humbly bowed his head and accepted Jesus as personal Savior and Lord.

The resurrection of Christ is the very foundation of Christianity (1 Corinthians 15:1-4) that sets it apart from every other religion in the world, because no other religious founder than Jesus arose from the dead. Christ’s resurrection fulfilled the Old Testament prophecies (Psalm 16:8-11; Acts 2:24-31), the prophecies by Jesus Himself (Matthew 16:21), and is pictured in the story of Jonah (Matthew 12:40). The church itself was founded on the resurrected Messiah.

Theologically, we cannot be saved without a belief in His resurrection (Romans 10:9). Our spiritual justification is guaranteed because He arose (Romans 4:25), and our own resurrection is guaranteed because of His (2 Corinthians 4:14). The Bible is very clear that anyone who denies the truth of the bodily resurrection of Jesus denies the definitive truth of all the scriptures. For many years Simon Greenleaf unwittingly did that, but a funny thing happened on his way to disproving the resurrection. He had a personal encounter with the risen Lord and he was never the same. None of us ever are. Think about it.