The Resurrection

The New Testament Survey lesson The Resurrection, in its module on Jesus, has already set out the evidence: the early creed in 1 Corinthians 15 and its date, the four Gospel accounts and the places where they will not line up, the case for and against the empty tomb, the appearances, the alternative explanations, and the dispute about whether a historian can ever conclude that a miracle occurred. Read it before this lesson, or read it again. This lesson does not repeat it. It asks what an apologist does with that evidence: how the case is built, what the main ways of building it are, and how each of them can be tested.

Paul himself shows why the question cannot be avoided. In 1 Corinthians 15:12-19, as the inquiry had you list, he says that if Christ has not been raised, the whole faith collapses: the preaching is worthless, faith is futile, the apostles are false witnesses, and the dead in Christ are lost. No other religion rests so openly on a single checkable event in history. That is a risk, and it is also an invitation. A faith that says 'if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile' (15:17) has told the world how it could be refuted, and Christians should be the first to welcome the question rather than the last.

There are several ways of making the case, and they differ in what they assume. The two that dominate the literature are the minimal facts approach associated with Gary Habermas, and the much longer historical argument of N. T. Wright. William Lane Craig uses a version of the first in his debates, including published exchanges with the sceptic Gerd Lüdemann in Jesus' Resurrection: Fact or Figment? (2000) and with Bart Ehrman in 2006. Each approach should be understood at its strongest before it is used, and then tested as a sceptic would test it.

Gary Habermas has spent decades cataloguing scholarly publications on the resurrection, in English, French and German, since 1975. From that literature he draws a short list of facts that meet two tests: each is supported by strong historical evidence, and each is granted by the large majority of scholars who write on the subject, including sceptical ones. In The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus (2004), written with Michael Licona, the list is four facts plus one. First, Jesus died by crucifixion. Second, his disciples sincerely believed that he rose and appeared to them. Third, Paul, a persecutor of the church, was suddenly changed. Fourth, James, the brother of Jesus and formerly a sceptic, was suddenly changed. And, as the one that is widely but not so universally granted, the tomb was empty. The argument then asks which explanation best accounts for all of these together, and contends that the alternatives each fail and the resurrection succeeds.

The strength of the approach is that it meets the sceptic on his own ground. It does not ask him to accept the Gospels as inspired, or even as generally reliable. It uses only what his own scholars grant. It is also portable: a student can state the facts in a minute, which matters when the person asking has only a minute. And it forces the conversation to the real question. Since the sceptic already grants that the disciples sincerely believed they had seen Jesus, the only thing left to argue about is what caused that belief.

Now the criticisms, from both sides. From the sceptic's side, the second fact is worded carefully, and for good reason: what is granted is that the disciples had experiences they believed to be appearances of the risen Jesus, not that Jesus appeared. Every sceptic quoted in this module accepts that much and then offers a natural explanation. So the minimal facts do not themselves point to the resurrection; the whole weight of the argument falls on showing that every natural explanation fails, which is the work of the next lesson. Second, the count of scholars is not evidence. A majority can be wrong, and the counting has been criticised because for decades the full data behind Habermas' survey were not published in a form others could check, as the New Testament Survey lesson noted; he has begun to set out the material in his multi-volume On the Resurrection (from 2024). Third, the approach is only as strong as its weakest fact. If a sceptic denies that James was a sceptic before Easter, or that Paul's experience was anything like the others', the argument has to be rebuilt.

There is also criticism from inside the church, and it should be stated as its holders state it. Christians who start from the authority of Scripture, including presuppositional apologists in the tradition of Cornelius Van Til, whom Module 1 introduced, argue that the method concedes too much. It treats the resurrection as the best of several hypotheses, as though God's act had to win a vote among scholars before it could be believed, while the New Testament presents it as an event witnessed and proclaimed, which calls for repentance. Others note that the minimal facts deliberately set aside the very texts that describe the resurrection most fully, the Gospel narratives, and ask whether that makes the case artificially thin. Defenders of the method reply that it is a tool for a conversation, not a theology of faith, and that a believer may use it without thinking that faith depends on it. Both views are held by serious Christians, and you will be better at either if you understand the other.

N. T. Wright's The Resurrection of the Son of God (2003) runs to over seven hundred pages, and its argument is different in kind. It does not begin with a list of granted facts. It begins with a question about the history of an idea. What did resurrection mean in the ancient world, and why did the earliest Christians mean something slightly but decisively different by it?

Wright shows first that in both the pagan and the Jewish world, resurrection meant a new bodily life after death, not the survival of a soul and not a ghost. Pagans knew the idea and rejected it; Wright often cites the line in Aeschylus' Eumenides, spoken by the god Apollo, that once a man has died and the dust has soaked up his blood there is no rising again. Among Jews, as the inquiry found, some believed in resurrection and some did not, and those who did, like the Pharisees, expected it for all the righteous together at the end of the age. Then Wright shows that the earliest Christians, across every strand of the New Testament and the next century, held a version of this Jewish belief with several mutations. There was almost no spectrum of opinion among them, as there was among Jews: they all affirmed it. It moved from the edge of belief to the centre. The raised body was not simply restored but transformed, imperishable (1 Corinthians 15:42). The single event at the end was split into two, the Messiah first and then everyone else, which is what the word firstfruits says. And it was attached to the Messiah, when no Jewish group expected the Messiah to die, let alone rise.

Something has to explain these mutations, and they appear very early, in a movement that otherwise held to its Jewish inheritance. The early Christians themselves gave the explanation: the tomb was empty and they met Jesus alive. Wright then argues that neither of these alone would have been enough. An empty tomb by itself would have suggested theft, which is exactly what Matthew 28 says was suggested. Appearances by themselves would have been read as visions of the dead, which Jews and pagans alike knew about: the disciples thought they had seen a spirit (Luke 24:37), and believers told that Peter was at the door said, 'It must be his angel' (Acts 12:15). An empty tomb together with meetings with a living, bodily Jesus would explain the belief. Wright argues that this combination is sufficient, and that no other proposed explanation is, so that it is also, for the historian, necessary; and that the best explanation of the empty tomb and the meetings is that Jesus was in fact bodily raised.

The criticisms are serious. Dale Allison, in Resurrecting Jesus (2005) and The Resurrection of Jesus (2021), agrees with much of Wright's history but argues that Jewish belief about the afterlife was more varied than Wright allows, including texts that speak of the soul's immortality and Josephus' description of the Pharisees' belief in terms a Greek reader would recognise as reincarnation. Others point to Mark 6:14-16, where people say that John the Baptist has risen from the dead, as evidence that an individual could be thought to have been raised before the end. Bart Ehrman argues that the mutations are explained by visions within an apocalyptic framework: if the disciples expected the end very soon and then had visions of Jesus vindicated, it would be natural to say that the resurrection of the dead had begun with him. And philosophers question whether a historian can ever show that one explanation is necessary, rather than the best of those so far proposed. Wright's defenders reply in turn: Herod's guess about John concerns a figure returning with miraculous powers, not the beginning of the new creation, and visions of a vindicated righteous man would naturally be described as exaltation to heaven, a category Judaism already had, rather than as resurrection. The exchange is at a high level, and a student should know both sides of it before quoting either.

A third kind of evidence is not a fact about Easter morning but about what came after it. The earliest Christians were Jews who kept the Sabbath, yet within a generation they were gathering on the first day of the week (Acts 20:7, 1 Corinthians 16:2), which John calls the Lord's day (Revelation 1:10). They baptised into the name of a man who had been executed. They repeated a meal in remembrance of his death, and they called on him in prayer as Lord, which the last lesson of this module will examine. Their opponents in Jerusalem were disturbed that they were 'proclaiming in Jesus the resurrection of the dead' (Acts 4:2), in the city where he had been buried. The movement did not grow from the memory of a teacher, as other Jewish movements of the time did, but from a claim about what had happened to him.

Then there is the suffering of the witnesses, and here an apologist must be exact, because this argument is often overstated. It is sometimes said that all the apostles died as martyrs for their testimony. Sean McDowell examined the evidence for each apostle in The Fate of the Apostles (2015) and concluded that it is strong for Peter, Paul, James the son of Zebedee (Acts 12:2) and James the brother of Jesus, whose death Josephus records, and much weaker for most of the others, whose deaths are known only from later traditions; for John, the tradition is that he died old. So say what can be shown: that several of the leading witnesses died for their testimony, and that the apostles as a group suffered for it and were willing to die for it.

Say too what martyrdom proves, which is less than it is often made to prove. People die for false beliefs in every century. Martyrdom shows sincerity, not truth. The force of the argument lies elsewhere: the apostles were not dying for something they had been told by others, as later martyrs did, but for something they claimed to have seen themselves. A man may die for a lie he believes, but it is much harder to explain why he would die for one he knows he invented. That rules out fraud, which almost no sceptic now proposes anyway. It does not rule out a sincere mistake, and that is where the next lesson must go.

An argument for the resurrection is an inference to the best explanation, and what counts as best depends on what a person already believes is possible. The New Testament Survey lesson described the methodological dispute between those who say a historian can never conclude a miracle occurred and those who reply that this depends on whether there is a God who might act. Module 2 of this track gave the arguments for God's existence. The two belong together. For someone who already thinks there may be a God, the resurrection is a strong argument that this God has acted in Jesus. For a convinced naturalist, any natural explanation, however strained, will seem better than a miracle, and he must first be shown that his naturalism is a belief, not a finding. Say what the argument shows: that the historical evidence is well explained by the resurrection, and poorly explained by every natural rival so far proposed. Do not say it proves the resurrection to anyone regardless of what he believes. It does not, and nothing in history does.

Now notice how the same evidence lands differently in different places. In a secular Western classroom, the problem is that miracles are thought impossible, and the argument has to meet that directly. For a Muslim friend, the problem is not miracles, which the Qur'an affirms, or the existence of Jesus, but whether he died on the cross at all, since the Qur'an at 4:157 says that he was not killed or crucified, though it appeared so; the Module 5 lesson Talking With Muslim Friends takes up that conversation. And in many African and Asian communities, the problem is the opposite of the Western one. Appearances of the dead are not doubted; people say that a parent or an elder has visited them in a dream or been seen at the edge of the compound. To such a hearer, the news that the disciples saw Jesus after his death proves only that Jesus has become an ancestor, perhaps a powerful one.

This is where Wright's argument becomes a pastoral tool and not only a scholarly one. The disciples had those categories too. They thought they had seen a spirit, and they said a man at the door must be his angel. Their claim about Jesus was not that he had appeared as the dead appear, but that he had been raised, bodily, into a new kind of life, as the firstfruits of the harvest of the dead (1 Corinthians 15:20). He did not join the ancestors; he went ahead of them, and his rising is the promise that death itself will be undone. That is a claim about the defeat of death, not about the survival of the dead, and it is good news in a way that an apparition never is. An apologist who explains that distinction has not only answered an objection; he has preached the gospel. Module 5 returns to the spirit world in its lesson Spirits, Ancestors and the Powers.

One last thing should be said about tone. Paul's own claim in Acts 17:31 is that God 'has given proof of this to everyone by raising Him from the dead', and when the Athenians heard it, some mocked and others wanted to hear more (17:32). That is still the range of responses. Your task is not to make the evidence compel. It is to state it accurately, test it honestly, and leave the person able to see why you believe what you believe, and what it would mean if it were true.

Add the fourth paragraph to your page headed My defence: Jesus. This one is longer than the others, and it answers the question: why do you believe Jesus rose from the dead?

Write it in five short steps, a sentence or two each. First, the facts nearly everyone grants, with the reference for the creed in 1 Corinthians 15. Second, the one sentence that names the real question, which is what caused the disciples' belief. Third, why an empty tomb and appearances together explain that belief, in your own words, using Luke 24:37 or Acts 12:15. Fourth, one honest sentence on what the argument does not show by itself. Fifth, one sentence on what the resurrection means, for the dead and for the person you are speaking to.

Then rewrite the third step for the hearer you named in the inquiry, the one for whom appearances of the dead are ordinary. Explain the difference between an appearance and a resurrection in words a grandmother in your church would understand. Read both versions to a believer you trust and ask which one they could repeat to someone else tomorrow. Keep the one they can repeat.