The Resurrection

Start where the documents start, which is not with a Gospel. Paul wrote 1 Corinthians in the mid-fifties, about twenty-five years after the crucifixion, and in chapter 15 he does something he rarely does: he quotes. The vocabulary of verses 3 to 5 is not his usual vocabulary. The verbs at the front, received and passed on (paralambano and paradidomi in the Greek), are the standard pair for passing on a fixed tradition. The clauses are balanced and repetitive in a way Paul's prose is not. The plural sins is less usual for Paul than the singular sin, though he uses it in Galatians 1:4. Cephas appears rather than Peter. The twelve appears, a term Paul never otherwise uses. These are the marks of a formula he inherited rather than composed.

How old is it? Paul says he passed it on to the Corinthians, which places it at the founding of that church around AD 50 or 51. He says he received it earlier still, and in Galatians 1:18-19 he reports going up to Jerusalem three years after his call and spending fifteen days with Cephas, meeting James as well. Two of the names in the formula are the two men he says he met. The common judgment is that the material dates from within a very few years of the crucifixion, and this judgment is not confined to believers. Gerd Lüdemann, who argued at length that the resurrection did not happen, dated the appearance to Peter to within the first two years after the crucifixion. On this one point there is remarkably little dispute across the spectrum.

That matters because it removes one option from the table. Whatever the disciples experienced, and however it is to be explained, the claim that Jesus had been raised was not a legend that grew over generations. It was being formulated and recited in fixed wording while the people named in it were alive and reachable. A sceptic does not need to deny this and the serious ones do not; the strong sceptical positions are about what caused the claim, not about when the claim began.

Note also what the formula does not contain, because honesty runs both ways. It does not mention the women, or the tomb, or the discovery. It does not describe any appearance. It places Paul's own experience on the Damascus road in the same list as the others, with only the phrase 'one of untimely birth' to mark it as different. Every one of those absences has been used in argument, and a student should know they are there before someone else points them out.

Lay the Gospel accounts side by side and the differences are immediate. Mark has three named women; Matthew has two; Luke has a group later named, including Joanna; John has Mary Magdalene alone, though she says we in 20:2, which may be a trace of the fuller tradition. At the tomb Mark has a young man in a white robe, Matthew an angel who has rolled the stone away, Luke two men in radiant apparel, John two angels. The message differs. Matthew and Mark point to Galilee; Luke keeps everything in and around Jerusalem and has Jesus tell them to stay in the city; John has appearances in Jerusalem in chapter 20 and in Galilee in chapter 21.

Mark is the hardest case and deserves its own paragraph. The oldest manuscripts end at 16:8, with the women, in their fear, not saying a word to anyone. The twelve verses that follow in most printed Bibles are absent from Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, Eusebius and Jerome both report that the accurate copies of their day ended at verse 8, and the passage contains vocabulary unlike Mark's. Almost all textual scholars judge it a later addition, and there is a second, shorter ending in some manuscripts as well. Whether Mark intended to end at 16:8, or whether a final page was lost, is genuinely unknown. The BSB prints the twelve verses in its text, under their own heading, with a footnote at verse 8 that reads 'Some early manuscripts end the Gospel of Mark after verse 8.' and then gives a short alternative ending, so a reader of the BSB meets both the longer ending and the evidence against it on the same page. Teach this openly; a student who discovers it from a sceptical website will feel it was kept from them.

What the accounts do agree on is a short list: that the tomb was found empty on the first day of the week, that women found it, that the disciples subsequently saw Jesus, and that they were not expecting any of it. The disagreements are around the edges of those claims.

How you read that pattern is the first genuine fork in the argument. Independent witnesses to a confusing event characteristically agree on the centre and differ at the periphery, and coordinated fabrication characteristically does the reverse. That observation carries real weight. But a tradition developing freely across four communities over decades will also produce a stable centre and a variable periphery, because the centre is what is being preached and the periphery is what gets filled in. Both explanations predict what we see, which means this feature alone cannot decide between them. Students should be told this, because the argument from peripheral variation is frequently pressed harder than it can bear.

The case for the empty tomb as a historical datum runs roughly as follows. The burial by Joseph of Arimathea is in all four Gospels and names a member of the council, an oddly specific and checkable detail. The discovery is credited to women in all four, which is a strange choice for an invented story in a setting where Josephus could write that the testimony of women was not to be accepted on account of their levity; the argument is often overstated, since women did give evidence in some circumstances, but the point retains some force because no writer inventing a legitimating story would put them first. The claim was proclaimed in Jerusalem within a few years, in the city where the tomb was, and the counter-story recorded in Matthew 28:11-15, that the disciples stole the body, presupposes as common ground that the body was gone. Mark's account is notably restrained, with no description of the rising itself, unlike the second-century Gospel of Peter, which describes Jesus emerging with two angels and a walking, talking cross. Gary Habermas has surveyed the literature and reports that roughly three quarters of scholars writing on the subject accept the empty tomb as historical; the survey is widely cited and has also been criticised, because the underlying data have not been published in full and the selection of works counted is not transparent. Cite it with that qualification or not at all.

The case against is serious and should be given its own paragraph rather than a rebuttal clause. Rome crucified as a deterrent, and part of the deterrent was the denial of burial; bodies were frequently left on the cross or thrown into common graves. John Dominic Crossan argued on this basis that Jesus was most likely buried, if at all, in a shallow grave, and Bart Ehrman has argued that the Joseph of Arimathea story is a later Christian development that makes a Jewish councillor do what the Romans would not. If there was no known tomb, there was no tomb to find empty, and the story of the discovery becomes the narrative form of a prior belief. Paul, who is the earliest witness, never mentions a tomb or a discovery. And the four accounts of the discovery differ more than accounts of a remembered event usually do.

The replies to that case are also serious. Josephus states in the Jewish War that the Jews took down and buried the crucified before sunset, Philo records bodies being released to relatives at festival time in Egypt, and the Digest of Justinian preserves a ruling of Ulpian that the bodies of the executed were to be given to any who asked for burial. Deuteronomy 21:22-23 required burial the same day, and the Roman prefect had reason not to provoke Jerusalem at Passover on exactly this point. And in 1968 the bones of a crucified man called Yehohanan were found in an ossuary at Giv'at ha-Mivtar in Jerusalem, with the nail still in the heel: physical proof that a crucifixion victim in this city could be given a family burial. None of this shows that Jesus was buried in a rock tomb. It shows that the objection from Roman practice is not decisive. The sceptic has a reply to that in turn, and it is a fair one: Josephus, Philo and Ulpian are each describing a concession, a festival permission or a right to petition, and a concession is evidence that the default ran the other way. A prefect who had just executed a man under a placard reading king of the Jews was handling a sedition case, which is precisely the category in which Rome was least inclined to grant the favour, and Yehohanan's ossuary shows that a crucified man could receive a family burial without showing how often one did.

Where does that leave a student? With a genuinely contested historical question on which a majority of working scholars, including many non-believers, lean one way, and on which a substantial and articulate minority leans the other. That is a truthful description, and it is more useful than a verdict.

Almost nobody now argues that the disciples lied. The evidence that they believed what they said is about as strong as this kind of evidence gets: they said it early, they said it in the city where it could be tested, some of them were killed for it, and one of the named witnesses, James, is described in John 7:5 as having not believed in his brother during his lifetime. Paul, who is our earliest source, had been persecuting the movement. So the real question is not sincerity. It is what caused the conviction.

The strongest naturalistic proposal is the visionary one, and it should not be caricatured as saying they hallucinated in the cheap sense. Gerd Lüdemann and Michael Goulder developed it carefully. The bereavement literature documents that a large proportion of the recently bereaved report sensing, hearing or seeing the person who has died, and these experiences are vivid, unbidden and not signs of mental illness. Peter had denied him and was carrying guilt; Paul may have been carrying conflict of his own. In this setting a visionary experience interpreted through scripture could yield the conviction that God had vindicated him. The verb in the creed, ophthe, is the verb used of divine appearances in the Greek Old Testament and does not settle the mode of the seeing. Dale Allison, who has engaged this literature more seriously than any defender of the tradition, concludes in his 2021 book that the evidence does not permit a confident verdict either way, and he says so as someone who continues to believe.

The objections to the visionary proposal are equally substantial. Bereavement apparitions typically reassure the bereaved that the dead are at peace; they do not generate the claim that a corpse has been bodily raised in the middle of history, which no Jew expected and which had no available category. The creed reports group appearances, including one to more than five hundred, and shared visionary experience is much rarer than individual experience. Paul was not bereaved but hostile. And an experience of Jesus alive in heaven would naturally produce the language of exaltation or vindication, which Judaism had ready, rather than the language of resurrection, which it did not have ready for one man in advance of everyone else. N. T. Wright has built a long argument on exactly this point: Jewish resurrection belief mutated in specific and unprecedented ways in this movement and something has to account for the mutation. The sceptical reply is that documented collective religious experiences do exist, that the five hundred are otherwise unverifiable, and that a novel claim needs only one community to generate it.

The other alternatives should each be given room rather than dismissed in a clause. The cognitive dissonance model draws on Leon Festinger's study of what happens to a group when its central expectation fails. Such a group does not usually disband; it reinterprets, and it often proselytises harder afterwards. Applied here, the mechanism is the scripture-searching visible on every page of the New Testament: a movement whose leader had been executed went back to the texts and found there a suffering and vindicated figure, and the appearance stories are the narrative form that reinterpretation eventually took. The objection is that the model explains the movement's survival well and the particular content of its claim poorly, since dissonance theory predicts renewed conviction but does not predict the specific and unprecedented assertion that one man has been bodily raised ahead of everyone else. The wrong tomb proposal, argued by Kirsopp Lake in 1907, holds that the women came in the half-light to a grave that was not the right one, and that a young man's remark to them was later heard as an angelic announcement. Its difficulty is that the owner of the tomb was a named member of the council and the authorities had every reason to correct the mistake within a day.

Removal of the body is the oldest alternative on record, since Matthew 28:13 already reports the charge that the disciples took it. In its modern form it is usually offered without the accusation of fraud: Joseph of Arimathea, having placed the body in a convenient tomb before the Sabbath, may simply have moved it afterwards to a permanent grave, leaving the women to find an empty chamber. This is hard to disprove, and that is both its strength and its weakness, because a hypothesis that cannot be tested also cannot be confirmed; and in every version it still needs a separate account of the appearances. The swoon theory, that Jesus was taken down alive and revived, has essentially no scholarly defenders, and the decisive objection came from someone with no stake in defending the resurrection: David Friedrich Strauss, in his second life of Jesus in 1864, observed that a man who crept half dead out of a tomb, in need of bandaging and care, could not possibly have given his disciples the impression that he was the conqueror of death. Legendary development, finally, is ruled out in its simple form by the date of the creed in 1 Corinthians 15, though a sceptic can reasonably reply that the early date of a claim is not the same thing as an early and correct interpretation of what produced it.

Set out what is granted by nearly everyone who works on this, whatever they believe. Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilate and died. His followers, who had scattered, came within a short time to believe and to proclaim that God had raised him. At least some of them said they had seen him, and they said it in a fixed form of words within a few years. James, who had not believed, became a leader of the movement in Jerusalem. Paul, who had persecuted it, changed sides after what he described as an appearance. The movement began in Jerusalem, at Passover season, and did not disperse. These are historical statements, and they are about as secure as most things we claim to know about the first century.

Then set out the disputed points, in order of how disputed they are. Whether the burial in a known tomb happened: contested, majority in favour. Whether the tomb was found empty: contested, majority in favour but with a serious minority against. Whether the appearances were of a publicly present body: contested down the middle. Whether God raised him: not the kind of question a majority can settle.

That last line is where the argument really lives, and both sides know it. Bart Ehrman has stated the methodological objection clearly: historians work by establishing what probably happened, probability is assessed against what usually happens, and a miracle is by definition the least probable thing in any set of options, so the historian as historian can never conclude that one occurred. Ernst Troeltsch made the same point earlier through the principle of analogy. The reply, pressed by Richard Swinburne and others working in probability, is that the improbability of the event has to be set against the improbability of the evidence turning out this way if the event did not occur, and that the relevant background knowledge includes whether there is a God who might act. Notice what that exchange is about. It is not about a piece of missing evidence. It is about what the evidence has to overcome before it counts, and that is fixed before anyone opens a Gospel.

So the honest thing to tell your students is this. The historical work narrows the field considerably and rules out several popular stories in both directions. It cannot deliver the conclusion by itself, and the people who claim it can, on either side, are importing something they have not declared. A student who understands that will not be shaken by the next confident video, and will also not go into a conversation carrying arguments heavier than the evidence they rest on.

One more thing should be said, because a course that stops at the historical argument has misdescribed what is going on in the texts. The New Testament does not present the resurrection as a proof to be examined. It presents it as an event with consequences: the beginning of the new creation, the vindication of the crucified, the ground of the hope that the dead are not lost. Paul does not argue in 1 Corinthians 15 that the resurrection is well attested and therefore true. He argues that if it is not true, then nothing else he has said is worth anything, and he lets that stand. There is an unusual kind of honesty in that, and it is worth pointing out to students who have only ever met the resurrection as a debating position.