There are five major sets of arguments people can raise against the validity of the resurrection of Jesus Christ  One of the five possibilities is that the disciples of Jesus just made up the story to continue Jesus’ memory and for some sort of personal gain.

Why couldn’t the disciples have made up the whole story?
Blaise Pascal gives a simple, psychologically sound proof for why this is unthinkable:
“The apostles were either deceived or deceivers. Either supposition is difficult, for it is not possible to imagine that a man has risen from the dead. While Jesus was with them, he could sustain them; but afterwards, if he did not appear to them, who did make them act? The hypothesis that the Apostles were knaves is quite absurd. Follow it out to the end, and imagine these twelve men meeting after Jesus’ death and conspiring to say that he has risen from the dead. This means attacking all the powers that be. The human heart is singularly susceptible to fickleness, to change, to promises, to bribery. One of them had only to deny his story under these inducements, or still more because of possible imprisonment, tortures and death, and they would all have been lost. Follow that out.” (Pascal, Pensees 322, 310)
The “cruncher” in this argument is the historical fact that no one, weak or strong, saint or sinner, Christian or heretic, ever confessed, freely or under pressure, bribe or even torture, that the whole story of the resurrection was a fake a lie, a deliberate deception. Even when people broke under torture, denied Christ and worshiped Caesar, they never let that cat out of the bag, never revealed that the resurrection was their conspiracy. For that cat was never in that bag. No Christians believed the resurrection was a conspiracy; if they had, they wouldn’t have become Christians.  The fact is not one single person who was there at the time and claimed to have seen Jesus, ever said, for any reason, that the whole thing had been made up.  This includes all the disciples and the more than five hundred others who saw Jesus in bodily form AFTER His death had been witnessed by a large public gathering both of supporters and detractors and confirmed on the cross by professional, Roman military executioners.
Want to read a discussion of the other major objections to the resurrection? See EVIDENCE FOR THE RESURRECTION OF CHRIST: A CHALLENGE FOR SKEPTICS at: http://www.philvaz.com/apologetics/num9.htm
Adapted from a paragraph found at: http://www.philvaz.com/apologetics/num9.htm
For further study, we highly recommend reading:
The Resurrection of Jesus: An Apologetic (Baker Books, 1980)
Did Jesus Rise from the Dead? (Harper and Row, 1987) both by Dr. Gary Habermas (latter with atheist Antony Flew)
Dr. Gary Habermas teaches at Liberty University in Lynchburg, VA
First Baptist Church of Perryville is located one and a half miles east of Rt. 222.