Hugh Hewitt recalls an interview he did with Chuck Colson in which they talked about Colson's argument that the Watergate cover-up is a good example of how men behave when they're trying to defend a lie and that it would be helpful to keep it in mind when considering why the early disciples of Jesus were willing to suffer torture and death rather than recant their belief that Christ had risen from the dead. Here's Hewitt's summary of the interview:
On the subject of cover-ups generally, here's an exchange I had with Chuck Colson from my 1996 series for PBS, Searching For God in America:
HH: A couple of times you've commented in your writings and in your speeches that Watergate and its unraveling convinced you of the factual accuracy of the resurrection of Christ. How so?
CC: Well, it's a great analogy actually. If anybody really looks at what happened in Watergate, they would discover that Nixon did not know the full scope of the Watergate cover-up until march 21. John Dean, his counsel, paraded into his office and said "Mr. President, there's a cancer growing on your presidency." And if you look at the tapes of that day, you'll see that was when he laid out everything that had gone on and Nixon suddenly knew there was a criminal cover-up. Halderman called me a couple of days later. I did not know about that meeting, but he told me some things. And I said, "Bob, you'd better get a lawyer." I think everybody at that point knew that it was serious and that the White House was involved.
"John Dean went off to Camp David to write a report, began to think that he was in trouble. And he wrote in his own memoirs with refreshing candor that on April 4, less than three weeks later, he went to the prosecutors to make a deal, as he put it, to save his own skin. The moment he did that, Jeb Magruder went tot he prosecutors. And a whole string of guys went to the prosecutors. I took a lie detector test. Here we were, the twelve most powerful men in the world. We were surrounding the President of the United States. And we couldn't keep a lie for three weeks."
"The truth of the Gospel depends upon the fact that Jesus Christ was bodily raised from the dead. How do we know that? We have the eyewitness testimony of five hundred people, according to the Apostle Paul. We have eleven apostles who were with Him and who saw Him raised from the dead. There was Thomas, who put his finger in the wound because he doubted Jesus. And all of the apostles were with Jesus after he was bodily resurrected from the tomb. Now, if He was bodily resurrected, that is the most convincing evidence of the divinity of Jesus Christ. And there's the testimony of the apostles for forty years. And they had no power like we did in Watergate. They were persecuted. They were crucified upside down. All but one died a martyr's death. They were stoned, beaten, and not once did they deny that they had seen Christ risen from the dead."
"I believe that men will give their lives for something they believe to be true. They will never give their lives for something they know to be false. If Christ hadn't risen, the Apostle Peter would have been just like John Dean. He would have gone and turned state's evidence to save his own skin. Not one of them denied the resurrection of Christ, which to me means that they had seen the risen Christ, God in the flesh. Otherwise they would have saved their own skins, just like we did in Watergate."
Good point, but as Jesus said, even if someone rises from the dead those who don't want to believe, won't. Belief is not a matter of the reason, it's a matter of the will and of the heart.