Apologetics · Jesus

Did Jesus Really Rise From the Dead?

Everything Depends on It

St Paul did not hedge his bets: “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins” (1 Corinthians 15:17). Christianity is not mainly a set of moral teachings. It is the announcement that a man who was crucified and buried rose bodily from the dead.

If that did not happen, Christianity is false. If it did, it changes everything.

Can a historical claim like this be examined? Yes. A miracle cannot be proved in a laboratory, but historians can ask what happened after Jesus’ death, what the evidence shows, and which explanation best accounts for it.

Facts Most Historians Accept

The scholar Gary Habermas surveyed a vast body of academic writing on the Resurrection, by believers and sceptics alike. He identified a handful of facts that the great majority of scholars accept as historical, whatever they believe about the Resurrection itself. Here are the most important.

1. Jesus died by crucifixion

Jesus’ death by Roman crucifixion is one of the best-attested facts of ancient history. It is recorded in all four Gospels, in Paul, and by Tacitus and Josephus. Roman soldiers were experts at execution. The idea that Jesus merely fainted on the cross and recovered has been abandoned by serious scholars.

2. His followers believed they saw Him risen

Shortly after His death, His disciples sincerely believed that they had seen Jesus alive again, bodily, on several occasions, individually and in groups.

The earliest evidence is a summary of the faith that St Paul quotes in 1 Corinthians 15:3–8. He says he “received” it and handed it on: that Christ died, was buried, was raised on the third day, and appeared to Peter, then to the Twelve, then to more than five hundred people at once, most of whom were still alive when Paul wrote, then to James and to all the apostles. Many scholars, including sceptical ones, date this creed to within a few years of the Crucifixion.

3. Their lives were transformed

The disciples had fled when Jesus was arrested. Peter denied Him three times. Yet within weeks, they were publicly proclaiming His Resurrection in Jerusalem, the very city where He had been executed, despite imprisonment, beatings and eventually death. Several, including Peter and Paul, were executed for their faith.

People may die for a lie they believe is true. It is far harder to explain people dying for something they knew they had made up.

4. Sceptics were converted

James, the brother of Jesus, did not believe in Him during His ministry (John 7:5). Yet after the Crucifixion, he became a leader of the Jerusalem church and was martyred. Paul says the risen Jesus appeared to him.

Paul himself was a zealous persecutor of Christians. He became their greatest missionary after, he said, encountering the risen Christ.

5. The tomb was empty

Most scholars, though not all, also accept that Jesus’ tomb was found empty. Several points support this:

The Resurrection was proclaimed in Jerusalem, where the tomb could easily have been checked. Had the body been there, the movement could have been stopped by producing it.
The earliest Jewish counter-claim was that the disciples stole the body (Matthew 28:11–15). This assumes the tomb was empty.
The Gospels say the tomb was discovered by women. In that culture, women’s testimony carried little weight in court. Anyone inventing the story would have chosen male witnesses. The detail is more likely to be true precisely because it was embarrassing.

The Alternative Explanations

Over the centuries, various alternatives have been proposed. Each struggles to account for all the facts.

The swoon theory: Jesus did not really die. But Roman crucifixion was brutally effective, and a half-dead man staggering out of a tomb would hardly convince anyone that he had conquered death.

The theft theory: the disciples stole the body and lied. But this cannot explain their willingness to suffer and die for the claim, nor the conversions of James and Paul.

The wrong tomb: the women went to the wrong grave. But the authorities could simply have pointed to the right one.

Hallucinations: the disciples, grief-stricken, imagined they saw Jesus. But hallucinations are private experiences; they do not happen to groups of people in the same way, let alone to five hundred. Hallucinations would not empty a tomb, nor convince a hostile persecutor like Paul.

Legend: the story grew over time. But the early creed in 1 Corinthians 15 dates to within a few years of the events, far too early for a legend to develop and replace the facts while eyewitnesses were alive.

The Best Explanation

The Anglican scholar N. T. Wright, in his major study The Resurrection of the Son of God (2003), argued that the rise of early Christianity, with its specific and unprecedented belief in a bodily resurrection of one man before the end of history, cannot be explained without both an empty tomb and real meetings with the risen Jesus. And those, he concluded, are best explained by the Resurrection itself.

Of course, history alone cannot force anyone to believe. If someone is convinced beforehand that miracles are impossible, no evidence will persuade them. But if God exists, a resurrection is not impossible. The question becomes whether the evidence points to it. Many who have looked carefully, including some who set out to disprove it, have concluded that it does.

What It Means

If Jesus rose from the dead, then He is who He claimed to be. His death was not a defeat but a victory. Death itself has been overcome, and those who belong to Him will rise too.

That is why Christians have greeted each other on Easter morning for two thousand years with the same words: “Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!”