The Credible Resurrection: The Immense Evidence to Believe that Jesus Died and Rose Again
Incredible Claim. Compelling Evidence.
Did Jesus Christ truly rise from death?
This is one of the most important questions you will ever ask.
If Jesus Christ rose again after dying, then everything changes. It means that death is defeated. It means that this life is not the end. It means that Jesus can do what no mere human could ever do. It means that everything Jesus said about Himself is true — that He is God come in the flesh.
But if Jesus did not rise from death, then His message is a lie. Death reigns undefeated.
Jesus’ Resurrected life means an open door to eternal existence, never-ending joy, reunion with our loved ones, and the glory of God shining forever more. But a lack of Resurrection life means no existence after death, no lasting joy or happiness, no reunion with our loved ones, and nothing but meaninglessness echoing in the forever emptiness.
Everything hangs on the resurrection of Jesus.
Why, then, should we believe it? Why should we believe something so outrageous as the idea that a human being didn’t stay dead? Where is the evidence for such a thing?
Let’s find out.
We could examine the evidence from multiple directions. But to find the widest possible appeal, we will focus on evidence that virtually every scholar agrees with: skeptical and religious, conservative and liberal, ancient and modern.
After all, if this is the one central truth that everything hangs on, we don’t want to limit ourselves to scholars who already believe it. But if we can verify the Resurrection by the claims even critical scholars affirm to be true, then we know this story is worthy of belief.
The New Testament places Jesus’ death and Resurrection events squarely in the arena of history. These are not secret events witnessed by a select few. Rather, they all happened publicly, with the highest leaders of the land involved in the drama. Given this, the claims of the New Testament can be tested, in the same way any historical document’s claims can.
Let’s pull out these central claims and subject them to the judgment of critical scholarship.
Five central claims comprise the case for Jesus’ Resurrection:
After multiple trials, Jesus died on a Roman Cross.
Joseph of Arimathea buried Jesus’ body in a tomb whose location the public knew.
On the Sunday following Jesus’ crucifixion, this tomb stood empty.
Immediately following this, Jesus’ disciples claimed to experience Him alive, risen from death.
These disciples carried the claim of Jesus’ Resurrection throughout the ancient world, proclaiming a consistent story, gladly sacrificing their lives to testify to its truth.
The Apostle Paul did not witness Jesus’ death or empty tomb personally, yet he demonstrates how essential these five claims were to the early church:
For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received [Claim 5]: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures [Claim 1], that he was buried[Claim 2], that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures[Claim 3], and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the Twelve [Claim 4]. (1 Corinthians 15:3–5, ESV)
The Scriptures hang the case for the Resurrection on these five claims.
What, then, do the scholars believe about them? How do these claims hold up to scrutiny?
Claim 1: After multiple trials, Jesus died on a Roman Cross.
According to the claims set forth in the Bible, Jesus endured multiple trials from both Jewish religious leaders and Roman civil leaders before being formally executed by Crucifixion. Among the sources compiled together in the New Testament, Matthew and John record the events as eye-witnesses, Mark and Luke record the testimony of eye-witnesses they knew personally, and Paul passed on the tradition he received.
Tacitus, one of the finest historians Rome ever produced, confirms that Roman soldiers executed Jesus by crucifixion under the authority of Pontius Pilate:
Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judaea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular.
Tacitus despised Christianity, yet his work as a historian confirms the claims of Christianity.
The Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 43a, confirms both that Jesus endured trials at the hands of the Jewish religious authorities and suffered execution at the hands of the Roman authorities:
Jesus was hanged on Passover Eve. Forty days previously the herald had cried, “He is being led out for stoning, because he has practiced sorcery and led Israel astray and enticed them into apostasy. Whosoever has anything to say in his defense, let him come and declare it.” As nothing was brought forward in his defense, he was hanged on Passover Eve.
This passage confirms Jesus’ trial before the Jewish authorities, as they dispatched a herald to proclaim their judgment upon Jesus to all the country. It also confirms Jesus’ death on a Cross — that Jesus was “hanged” on Passover Eve, rather than stoned, as was the typical punishment for blasphemy.
The herald proclaimed Jesus’ sentence of stoning, the typical punishment for blasphemy, yet twice it proclaims Jesus was hung instead — that is, hung on a Cross until dead. This confirms that the Jewish authorities sentenced Jesus to death, but the Roman authorities carried out the execution, exactly as the Bible records.
Note also that this passage confirms Jesus’ status as a miracle worker and teacher, even to the extent of being sinless. The Sanhedrin brought no accusations of infidelity or moral sin, but only teaching a message they disagree with and performing supernatural works they refused to see as the work of God, instead labeling them “sorcery.”
This brief sample of the evidence, yet it represents the testimony of the whole. Luke Timothy Johnson summarizes the evidence by declaring “The support for the mode of his death, its agents, and perhaps its coagents, is overwhelming: Jesus faced a trial before his death, was condemned and executed by crucifixion.”
Even the Jesus Seminar, home to some of Christianity’s greatest skeptics, agrees that Jesus’ death on a Roman cross is “one indisputable fact.”
When Christianity’s loudest opponents agree with the claims of the Bible, it’s safe to accept those claims as certain. Jesus died on a Roman cross.
But that’s only the first part of the puzzle. Everybody dies. What happened next?
Claim 2: According to the eye-witnesses, Joseph of Arimathea buried Jesus’ body in a tomb whose location the public knew.
Jesus’ burial in a known tomb may seem inconsequential today, but in the early days after Jesus’ Resurrection it was vital. If Jesus’ body laid in a mass grave or an unknown location, no one could verify that He had indeed been buried or that His body was now missing. To verify these details, the tomb had to be known to friend and enemy alike.
Cambridge University’s John A. T. Robinson concludes that Jesus’ burial in a known tomb — rather than a mass grave or unknown pit — is one of “the earliest and best-attested facts about Jesus.” Every report passed down through history, even those written by Christianity’s opponents, affirm the known location of Jesus’ burial.
These first two claims conform to ordinary life. Death and burial are commonplace.
The next three leave the ordinary behind.
Claim 3: On the Sunday following Jesus’ crucifixion, this tomb stood empty.
This claim is the key to all that follows.
If the tomb still contained Jesus’ body, then Christianity could be destroyed simply by producing the body. Any claim of Resurrection dies if Jesus’ body is still dead.
But if the tomb lost Jesus’ body, then something happened. If the tomb is empty, then the story doesn’t end at Jesus’ death.
On this point, historians of every kind agree overwhelmingly: on Sunday morning, the tomb of Jesus was empty.
Jakob Kremer, who specializes in studying the resurrection of Jesus, states clearly: “By far most exegetes hold firmly to the reliability of the biblical statements concerning the empty tomb.”
D. H. van Daalen concurs, stating: “It is extremely difficult to object to the empty tomb on historical grounds; those who deny it do so on the basis of theological or philosophical assumptions.”
John Warwick Montgomery adds his voice to the chorus: “In 56 A.D. [the apostle] Paul wrote that over 500 people had seen the risen Jesus and that most of them were still alive (1 Corinthians 15:6ff.). It passes the bounds of credibility that the early Christians could have manufactured such a tale and then preached it among those who might easily have refuted it simply by producing the body of Jesus.”
Even Jesus’ enemies found no way to deny the empty tomb. In the sixth century, skeptical voices in the Jewish community wrote a treatise called the Toledoth Yeshu, intending to disprove Jesus as the Jewish Messiah. Yet they could not deny the death of Jesus nor the empty tomb. Despite their antagonism to Jesus, their work confirmed that Jesus’ body had disappeared and no one could find it. They wrote:
On the first day of the week his bold followers came to Queen Helene with the report that he who was slain was truly the Messiah and that he was not in his grave; he had ascended to heaven as he prophesied. Diligent search was made and he was not found in the grave where he had been buried.
The Toledoth Yeshu rejected the possibility of Jesus’ Resurrection, inventing an alternate explanation for the empty tomb. They suggested:
A gardener had taken him from the grave and had brought him into his garden and buried him in the sand over which the waters flowed into the garden.
At first blush, it sounds plausible. Yet the next two claims expose its inability to explain the situation.
Claim 4: Immediately following this, Jesus’ disciples claimed to experience Him alive, risen from death.
Many who doubt the supernatural will scoff, proclaiming that no one can rise from the dead.
But even historians who scoff at the supernatural agree that the disciples claimed to experience Jesus alive after His death.
Gert Lüdemann, a staunch critic of Jesus’ Resurrection, still must admit: “It may be taken as historically certain that Peter and the disciples had experiences after Jesus’s death in which Jesus appeared to them as the risen Christ.”
Even scholars such as David Friedrich Strauss, who vigorously denied that Jesus could be divine, acknowledge that the disciples experienced visions of Jesus alive after His death.
In one of the earliest-written letters collected in the New Testament, Paul delineates a list of eye-witnesses who claimed to see Jesus alive in 1 Corinthians 15:
[Jesus] appeared to Cephas [Peter], then to the Twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. (1 Corinthians 15:5–8, ESV)
As historian April De Conick reflects, this account originates from the “primitive church” — the first believers. The Resurrection appearances of Jesus formed the key witness of the early Christian community:
In this regard, Paul’s own firsthand testimony cannot be emphasized enough, because it demonstrates that the first Christian Jews believed that they were recipients of ecstatic experiences both in the form of rapture events and invasions of heaven.
History therefore proves this claim decisively. The earliest Christians — the disciples of Jesus and their immediate followers — experienced what they believed to be the risen Jesus appearing to them alive days after His death.
This leads us directly to the final claim.
Claim 5: These disciples carried the claim of Jesus’ Resurrection throughout the ancient world, gladly sacrificing their lives to attest to its truth.
The disciples of Jesus willingly sacrificed their lives to testify to the reality of Jesus’ Resurrection. On this, the historical witness is prolific and unanimous.
C. F. D. Moule of Cambridge University highlights the oddity of this behavior. No previous historical influences account for this kind of behavior. No Jewish apocalyptic literature taught such a thing, nor did any Greek or pagan influences. This belief in Jesus’ bodily Resurrection to new life was entirely unique on the historical scene — unique and powerful. The disciples did not offer it to others as an option, but rather a firm conviction, so deeply believed that they willingly surrendered their lives to attest to its truth.
As Moule says, “The birth and rapid rise of the Christian Church […] remains an unsolved enigma for any historian who refuses to take seriously the only explanation offered by the Church itself.”
J.N.D. Anderson, the director of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies at the University of London, agrees, pointing out the absurdity of the disciples’ actions if they were based on a lie.
This would run totally contrary to all we know of them: their ethical teaching, the quality of their lives, their steadfastness in suffering and persecution. Nor would it begin to explain their dramatic transformation from dejected and dispirited escapists into witnesses whom no opposition could muzzle.
Consistent Agreement
The scholars quoted above represent critical, skeptical scholarship, not the work of believers. When these scholars examine each of the five claims that build the case for the Resurrection, the majority agree that each claim is true.
Critical scholarship agrees:
After multiple trials, Jesus died on a Roman Cross.
Joseph of Arimathea buried Jesus’ body in a tomb whose location the public knew.
On the Sunday following Jesus’ crucifixion, this tomb stood empty.
Immediately following this, Jesus’ disciples claimed to experience Him alive, risen from death.
These disciples carried the claim of Jesus’ Resurrection throughout the ancient world, proclaiming a consistent story, sacrificing their lives to attest to its truth.
Now these claims must be explained.
Explaining (Away) The Claims
At this point, scholarship splits.
Those who believe the Resurrection of Jesus to be possible have no trouble accepting all five claims. But those who attempt to deny the Resurrection must find a way to deny one or more of these claims.
If you want to deny the Resurrection, you must come up with an alternate explanation for these five claims. Yet no coherent explanation has put forth that encompasses all five.
Let’s explore a few of the most common alternate attempts to explain these five claims:
The Swoon Theory
This theory suggests that Jesus did not die on the Cross, but merely passed out, or swooned. In the cool rock of the tomb, Jesus revived.
The Swoon Theory denies Claim 1 above, suggesting that Jesus did not die on the Cross. Yet this is the one claim that historians agree on more than any other. Roman crucifixion was brutal by design, intending that no one should ever come off a cross alive. If anyone was crucified, you didn’t have to ask whether or not they died. Every Roman citizen knew that if a person was crucified, they did not come down until they were dead.
Additionally, this theory must deny Claim 5. The disciples witnessed a Jesus so glorious in His Resurrection appearance that He inspired them to give up everything for His mission. It is hard to imagine the disciples being thus inspired by a Jesus who had been brutalized on the Cross and hobbled out of the tomb covered in scars and bruises.
The Theft Theory
This theory suggests that Jesus died on the Cross and was buried, but the disciples (or a gardener, as the Toledoth Yeshu suggests) managed to outwit or outfight dedicated Roman soldiers to steal away Jesus’ body on Sunday morning. It therefore affirms Claims 1, 2, and 3, but must try to deny 4 and 5.
As covered above, most scholars agree that Jesus’ disciples experienced Him alive after His death. These visions so motivated them that they transformed the ancient world, giving everything they had to spread the news of Jesus’ triumph over death.
For the Theft Theory to be true, the disciples would have to be liars and deceivers. But this doesn’t match what we know of human nature. Liars might be able to trick others into dying for the lies they tell, but liars don’t sacrifice their own lives for things they know are lies. Yet the disciples freely gave all they had to testify to the reality of Jesus’ Resurrection. Sacrificing their lives demonstrates that the disciples believed the story they told to be true.
The Theft Theory fails to explain why not a single disciple would recant of the lie they concocted in the face of persecution. It fails to explain why not a single disciple would alter the story to justify taking a position of comfortable leadership, accumulating power, money, and privilege. Instead, every disciple submitted to persecution and death because of their refusal to recant the story.
Finally, the Theft Theory fails to account for why the disciples would concoct a story that makes them seem as unworthy of leadership as possible. Could they have been more hard-hearted and slow of understanding? The disciples refused to believe Jesus when He foretold His death and Resurrection. If they had stolen Jesus’ body and concocted a lie to explain it, why would they invent a story where they could not grasp Jesus’ clear message? Would they not instead invent a story where they alone understood Jesus, thereby justifying their positions of leadership?
The Hallucination Theory
This theory suggests that Jesus indeed died and was buried. Yet instead of Jesus rising from the dead, this theory suggests that the disciples merely hallucinated Jesus appearing to them. They desired Jesus to be alive so badly that their minds conjured up hallucinations to comfort them and assure them that all was not lost.
The Hallucination Theory affirms Claims 1, 2, and 4, yet it cannot explain 3 or 5. If the disciples were merely hallucinating a risen Christ, then His body would still lay in the tomb, available to be discovered. To dispel the power of the hallucinations, all one would need to do is produce the body of Jesus.
Finally, the Hallucination Theory cannot explain how 500 people could hallucinate Jesus appearing to them at the same time, as Paul reports. Groups do not share hallucinations. Individual people experience individual hallucinations, as each person’s mind conjures an experience from its own memories, dreams, and hopes. No two minds are the same. Two people who hallucinate at the same moment experience different hallucinations, as they’re produced by different minds. The likelihood of 500 people hallucinating the same thing at the same time is simply impossible.
The Twin Theory
This creative theory suggests that Jesus indeed died and was buried, yet three days afterward, Jesus’ previously-unknown twin arrived in Jerusalem. This twin did such a convincing portrayal of Jesus that he fooled the disciples into believing that Jesus had risen again.
This theory therefore affirms Claims 1, 2, and 4, but again fails to deal with 3 or 5. Jesus’ body would still be in the tomb for all to see, thereby disproving that this twin was the real Jesus.
Likewise, if Jesus’ body was still in the grave, we are at a loss to explain why the disciples would give up everything to further His mission. We are also at a loss to explain the effect of the visions of the Resurrected Jesus that the disciples experienced. It is hard to grasp how a mere twin could march freely through locked doors, or knock Paul off his horse, blind him with a brilliant light, and place scales over his eyes.
The Cognitive Dissonance Theory
It’s human nature: people don’t want to admit that they were wrong. The Cognitive Dissonance theory suggests that Jesus did indeed die and stay dead, but the disciples couldn’t admit that Jesus wasn’t who He claimed to be. They invented the story of Jesus’ Resurrection (perhaps subconsciously, perhaps consciously) as a way to avoid admitting they were wrong.
Like the Hallucination Theory above, the Cognitive Dissonance Theory affirms Claims 1, 2, and 4, but cannot explain 3 or 5. If the disciples simply couldn’t face reality, and invented stories to avoid being wrong, then Jesus’ body would still be in the tomb. The disciples wouldn’t want to be proven wrong, but the Pharisees and Herodians would take every opportunity to shoot down their claims, minimizing this nagging threat to their power base. Producing Jesus’ body would conclusively shut Christianity’s claims down, making it apparent to all that the disciples were no longer mentally sound. But no one could do such a thing. The body wasn’t in the tomb.
Likewise, the Cognitive Dissonance Theory fails to account for the unanimous testimony of the disciples. What are the odds that every single disciple would respond in an identical way to the trauma of Jesus’ death? Not a single one could face reality? All of their brains broke in exactly the same way? Not one of them ever re-considered in the face of persistent persecution?
Finally, the Cognitive Dissonance Theory fails to account for the consistent story that the disciples spread. Cognitive dissonance occurs when a person can’t admit being wrong. Instead of adjusting their beliefs to conform to the evidence around them, they hallucinate a reason why the evidence doesn’t mean they were wrong. Instead, they insist there’s still a way they can be right, and their brains will hallucinate reasons why, if needed. The last thing a person suffering cognitive dissonance can do is admit they were wrong.
Yet the disciples told a story in which they were consistently, constantly wrong.
They did not believe Jesus when He said He would die. No one waited outside the tomb on the third day, the day on which Jesus said He would rise. When they heard the women’s testimony that Jesus was alive, the disciples did not believe. When they ran to the tomb and found it empty, they did not believe. When they saw Jesus, they could not believe until He proved He wasn’t a ghost. Even during Jesus’ years of ministry before the Cross, every Gospel records consistent failure on the part of the disciples, where they are wrong more often than right. Acts continues the testimony, recording Peter being wrong to exclude Gentiles, among other failures.
If a person is committed to being right so much that their brain hallucinates false narratives to protect them from being wrong, it predicts certain behaviors. It predicts that when they tell a story, they’re going to tell it in such a way that they’re right.
The disciples didn’t. They were wrong, over and over and over again, in their own telling of the story. The disciples highlighted their failures, rather than justify them or paint over them. That reflects mental health, a comfortability with acknowledging their own mistakes, and a lack of defensiveness.
Those trapped in cognitive dissonance, who can’t tolerate any thought other than I’m right, go to any lengths to protect that idea. They don’t codify and disseminate dozens of examples where they were wrong about the most important things they could possibly be wrong about.
An Honest Conclusion
Every alternate explanation above must deny at least two of the claims that the majority of scholars certify.
There is only one explanation that accepts all five claims certified by scholarship: that Jesus indeed rose from death.
Many skeptics accuse Christianity of dealing loosely with history, as though we set aside what everyone knows to be true in order to believe what we want to believe.
But Christianity is the only belief that deals honestly with the history surrounding Jesus’ death. There is no explanation that can deal honestly with all five historically-certain claims other than Jesus rising from death to new life.
The evidence is so compelling that legions of brilliant minds have embarked on the quest to disprove the Resurrection of Jesus, only to end up believing in it on the strength of the evidence. These include J.D. Anderon, Abdu Murray, William Ramsay, Lee Strobel, Josh McDowell, Gilbert West, and Frank Morison. Even Pinchas Lapide, a leading Jewish theologian, declared that he is now convinced by the strength of the evidence that the God of Israel, the same God he has worshiped his whole life as a faithful Jew, indeed rose Jesus Christ from the grave.
Simon Greenleaf, Royal Professor of Law at Harvard University, is another who chose to follow Jesus after exploring the evidence for the Resurrection. He concluded: “A person who rejects Christ may choose to say that, ‘I do not accept it.’ He may not choose to say, ‘There is not enough evidence.’”
Abdu Murray, an intellectual who followed the evidence from Islam to Christianity, explained his difficulty with the claims of the Resurrection.
I didn’t want to believe the evidence for the resurrection because if I did, it would change who I was. Everything about me would change, and I wanted to have no part of that. I wasn’t ready for that. So I had intellectually assented to these truths, but I hadn’t embraced them as true.
I often put it this way: The reason it took me nine years is not that the answers were hard to find. I actually found them fairly early. I wrestled with them for years. The answers aren’t hard to find, but they are hard to accept. And I think that’s true not just of Muslims. I think it’s true of anybody, quite frankly.
Explain the Resurrection, Explain the World
There is other evidence we could consider — evidence from archaeology, from ancient historians, from philosophy, and so forth.
But even if we limit ourselves only to the few claims that skeptical scholars agree with, we can still build a compelling case that Jesus Christ died on a Roman cross and rose from death three days later.
And if this story is indeed true — as the evidence above indicates — it changes everything.
P.S. The footnotes did not survive posting on Substack. You can find the full version with every quote cited in my book Hope You’re Curious: Real Answers to Honest Questions
Also, hallucinations most commonly affect only one sense. Many of the experiences of Jesus involved more senses, with some even involving three senses (vision, hearing, and touch).