What is the evidence for Jesus’ resurrection?

Question 60022.

The resurrection of Jesus is not one Christian belief among many. It is the claim on which everything else stands or falls, and the New Testament says so with a bluntness that always surprises people who expect religion to hedge. Paul writes that if Christ has not been raised then our preaching is empty, our faith is empty, we are still in our sins, and the Christians who have died are simply gone.

So this is not a question to be answered with a shrug about what works for you. Either a man who was executed in Jerusalem under Pontius Pilate was alive again three days later, or He was not, and there is nothing in between. What follows is the evidence as I would set it out for an honest enquirer, along with the explanations people offer instead.

The facts almost everyone accepts

Start with what is not seriously disputed by historians of the period, whatever they believe personally. Jesus of Nazareth was a real figure who was crucified by Roman authority in Judea. His followers, who had scattered in fear, very soon afterwards were publicly proclaiming that they had seen Him alive. Their movement began in Jerusalem, the one city where the body could most easily have been produced. And two men who had every reason to reject the claim, Paul the persecutor and James the sceptical brother of Jesus, both changed sides.

None of those points requires you to accept the Bible as inspired. They are the sort of thing a historian grants on ordinary grounds, and I have set out the case for the existence of Jesus separately in was Jesus a real historical person. What matters here is that any theory about the resurrection of Jesus has to account for all four of those facts at once, and most theories only manage one or two.

The earliest report we have

The most important single piece of evidence is not a Gospel narrative but a few lines in a letter. In 1 Corinthians 15 Paul hands on what he calls a tradition he himself received, that Christ died for our sins, was buried, and was raised on the third day, and then appeared to Peter, to the Twelve, to more than five hundred at once, to James, and last of all to Paul himself.

The wording is formal and rhythmic in the Greek, the sort of summary that is memorised and repeated, and it contains names and details Paul would not have invented. Scholars across the spectrum date this material extremely early, within a very few years of the crucifixion and possibly within months, which means the claim of the resurrection of Jesus was not a legend that grew slowly over generations. It was there from the start.

Notice also the aside that most of the five hundred were still alive when Paul wrote. That is not a rhetorical flourish, it is an invitation. He is writing to a real city, to people who travelled, and he is effectively saying that the witnesses can be found and asked. No one writes that if the witnesses do not exist.

The empty tomb

All four Gospels report an empty tomb, and the earliest Jewish response reported in Matthew is not a denial that the tomb was empty but an accusation that the disciples stole the body. That is significant. The opponents of the movement were already conceding the one fact that could most easily have been disproved.

Then there is the matter of who found it. In first century Judea the testimony of women carried little weight in public dispute, and every Gospel nevertheless puts women at the tomb first, named, with their fear and confusion on display. If you were fabricating a story to persuade a sceptical public, these are not the witnesses you would choose. The detail survives because it happened.

The Jerusalem location seals it. The preaching began seven weeks later in the very city where the grave was, in front of the authorities who had arranged the execution. Producing a body would have ended the whole business in an afternoon. Nobody did.

The appearances were not visions

Grief produces visions. It always has. But the accounts we have describe something stubbornly physical. He is touched. He eats a piece of broiled fish. He tells them to handle Him because a spirit does not have flesh and bones as they see that He has. He is not recognised immediately by everyone, which is itself an odd thing to invent, and He appears to groups as well as individuals, indoors and outdoors, over a period of weeks.

The Greek word used throughout is anastasis, a standing up again, and in Jewish usage it never meant a spiritual survival or an inspiring memory. It meant a body out of a grave. The disciples had a perfectly good vocabulary available for saying that Jesus lived on with God, and they refused to use it. They said the tomb was empty because the man in it had got up.

The alternatives, weighed honestly

The theft theory requires terrified men to overpower a guard, move a body, and then spend the rest of their lives being beaten and killed for something they knew to be a lie. People do die for falsehoods they believe. They do not generally die for a fraud they organised themselves, one by one, with the option of confessing at any point.

The swoon theory asks us to believe that a man scourged and crucified, whose death was confirmed by professional executioners, revived in a cold tomb without medical care, freed himself from the wrappings, moved the stone, overpowered or evaded the guard, and then convinced his friends that he was the conqueror of death rather than a man in desperate need of a doctor.

The hallucination theory struggles with the plural. Individuals hallucinate; groups do not share the same hallucination, and certainly not repeatedly, in different settings, over weeks, including a hostile sceptic like Paul on a road he was travelling for the express purpose of arresting Christians. And no hallucination empties a tomb. Legend, finally, needs time, and the creed in 1 Corinthians 15 does not leave any.

The people who changed

The most human piece of evidence is what happened to the men themselves. In the Gospels they are cowardly, slow, competitive and thoroughly ordinary. They run away. Peter denies he ever knew the man. Their leader has been executed as a criminal, which in their world meant the movement was over and the claim disproved.

A few weeks later the same men are standing in public in Jerusalem saying this Jesus God raised up, and of that we all are witnesses, and they keep saying it under flogging, imprisonment and execution. Something happened in between. The resurrection of Jesus is the only explanation any of them ever gave.

Then there is James. The Gospels record, to their own embarrassment, that Jesus’ own brothers did not believe in Him. Paul lists an appearance to James, and within a short time James is leading the church in Jerusalem and eventually dies for the confession. It takes a great deal to make a man worship his own brother.

What the outside sources say

Roman and Jewish writers do not confirm the resurrection of Jesus, and I would not claim that they do. What they confirm is the surrounding frame. Tacitus records that Christus was executed under Pontius Pilate during the reign of Tiberius, and that the movement, checked for a moment, broke out again. Josephus mentions James as the brother of Jesus who was called Christ, and refers to Jesus elsewhere in a passage that most scholars regard as authentic in its core but expanded by a later Christian hand.

I mention that last point because honesty about the evidence is worth more than any advantage gained by hiding it. The outside sources tell us that Jesus lived, was executed, and had followers who very quickly worshipped Him and would not be stopped. They do not tell us why. For that we have the testimony of the people who were there, which is how we know almost everything we know about the ancient world.

What kind of certainty is available

History does not deal in laboratory proof. You cannot repeat an event in a controlled setting, and anyone demanding that standard has quietly ruled out every fact about the past that they already believe. What history offers is the best explanation of the evidence we have, and I would say the resurrection of Jesus is not only the best explanation available but the only one that accounts for all of it at once.

That said, evidence is not the same as surrender. Plenty of people have looked at this material, found it strong, and walked away, because the implication is not an interesting historical conclusion but a living Lord with a claim on their life. The resurrection of Jesus is not finally information to be assessed. It is a Person to be met, and He tends to be found by those who are willing to be found by Him.

What the first Christians did with their week

There is a piece of evidence hiding in plain sight, and it is the calendar. The earliest Christians were Jews, formed by a sabbath observance which went back to Sinai and which was one of the defining marks of their people. Within a very short time they were gathering on the first day of the week instead, and Paul organises collections around that day as though it were already established practice.

Changing the rhythm of a devout Jewish week is not a small adjustment of preference. Something had happened on a first day that reorganised time itself for these people. The same applies to the two rites the church has always practised: a meal that proclaims a death until He comes, and a baptism which pictures burial and rising. Both were in place from the beginning, and both are meaningless unless the resurrection of Jesus actually happened.

None of this proves the event on its own. What it does is show that the claim was not a later theological development bolted onto a memory of a good teacher. It was there in the practices of the first believers before a single Gospel had been written down.

What the resurrection of Jesus changes

If it happened, the consequences run in every direction. It vindicates everything Jesus said about Himself, because a man who forgives sins in His own name and predicts His own rising is either an impostor or exactly who He claimed to be, and death settled the argument in public. Paul says He was declared to be the Son of God in power by His resurrection from the dead.

It also tells us that the sacrifice was accepted. A cross without an empty tomb would leave us guessing whether the offering had been received; the resurrection of Jesus is the Father’s public receipt. That is why Paul can say He was raised for our justification, and why assurance in the New Testament is grounded in something that happened outside us rather than in the strength of our feelings.

And it sets the future. The resurrection of Jesus is called the firstfruits, which is farming language: the first sheaf of a harvest that is certainly coming. Every believer’s grave is provisional. That is not a comforting idea to help us cope, it is a claim about what will happen to bodies, and it is why Christians have always buried their dead in hope rather than cremating the whole subject in silence. I have written on whether believing in the resurrection is necessary for salvation for those who want that pressed further.

What about the differences between the accounts?

An honest reader notices that the four accounts do not line up neatly. The number of women at the tomb varies, one Gospel mentions two figures in white and another mentions one, and the order of the appearances is not identical. Sceptics present this as fatal, and some believers get nervous about it.

I would say the opposite. Four accounts agreeing word for word would suggest collusion, which is the first thing any police officer looks for in witness statements. Independent testimony to a confusing morning looks exactly like this: agreement on the substance and variation in the peripheral detail. Every account has the tomb empty, the women first, the disciples unbelieving, and Jesus alive.

There is also the matter of what nobody bothered to tidy up. If the church had felt free to smooth the record, the resurrection of Jesus is the last place it would have left loose ends. The awkwardness survived because the accounts were fixed early and were known to come from particular people, and the resurrection of Jesus was already being preached publicly before any of them were written down.

Weigh it as you would any other testimony. Where witnesses agree on the substance and differ on the incidentals, historians treat the core as solid, and the core here is not a small thing. The resurrection of Jesus is what every one of these accounts is reporting, and the resurrection of Jesus is what the men who wrote them went on to die for.

So, now what?

If you are weighing this up, do the honest thing and read a primary source rather than an argument about one. Take Luke’s Gospel and Acts and read them straight through with the questions you actually have. The evidence I have set out is worth knowing, but it exists to clear the ground so that you can hear the claim itself. I have written more on how we know the Gospels record Jesus accurately if that is your sticking point.

If you already believe, let this settle deeper than an argument you can win. The resurrection of Jesus means that the worst thing that ever happened has already been reversed, that death is now a defeated enemy with a date on its own tombstone, and that the body you are getting tired of has a future. Believers who grasp that stop being frightened of a great many things, and it shows.

But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead.

1 Corinthians 15:20 to 21 (ESV)

For Further Study

For a full treatment of the historical material, the standard works are Gary Habermas and Michael Licona on the minimal facts approach, and William Lane Craig for the philosophical questions about miracles. Among the theologians I return to, Millard Erickson’s Christian Theology handles the resurrection within a careful doctrine of the Person of Christ, and Charles Ryrie’s Basic Theology sets it in its place within the whole. Lewis Sperry Chafer treats the risen and ascended Lord at length, and for the prophetic outworking of the firstfruits imagery, J. Dwight Pentecost’s Things to Come and John Walvoord remain the clearest dispensational guides.