The Resurrection

Paul makes the resurrection the point on which the claim stands or falls: if Christ has not been raised, the faith is worthless and those preaching it are liars (1 Corinthians 15:14-17).

This page sets out what the earliest sources say, where the later accounts differ, and how the traditions changed over time.

Disagreement between accounts does not by itself settle anything — real witnesses to real events disagree constantly, and a perfectly harmonized set of accounts would be more suspicious rather than less. What follows tracks the direction of the differences rather than counting them.

The earliest source#

The earliest surviving reference is not in a Gospel. Writing around 55 CE, some twenty-five years after the crucifixion, Paul quotes what is generally taken to be an existing creed — "what I also received" signals transmitted tradition rather than his own composition.

For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive... Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.

Many scholars date the underlying tradition to within a few years of the crucifixion. It is considerably earlier than any Gospel.

What it contains is a list of recipients. What it does not contain:

• No empty tomb
• No women discovering it
• No description of any appearance — no place, no time, no account of what occurred
• No named witness among the five hundred

The appearance to five hundred is frequently presented as decisive. Paul was not present and is reporting what he received. No Gospel mentions the event, and no other early Christian writer refers to it, though a mass appearance would be the most striking item in the tradition.

The clause that most are "still alive" is often read as an invitation to verify. A reader in Corinth had no names, no location, and several hundred miles between them and anyone who might qualify.

Where the Gospel accounts differ#

The narrative accounts were written between roughly 70 and 100 CE.

Paul's creed gives a fifth answer to the last question: Cephas, that is Peter (1 Corinthians 15:5).

Two further conflicts:

• Location. Matthew sends the disciples to Galilee, seventy miles north, and stages the appearance there (28:16). Luke and John place the appearances in Jerusalem on the same day.
• The ascension. Luke 24:51 has it on the day of the resurrection. Acts 1:3, by the same author, gives forty days.

How the accounts develop#

Arranged by date, the differences run in one direction.

The earliest Gospel contains no resurrection appearance. Its familiar longer ending is a later addition, covered in Interpolations.

The progression runs from an empty tomb and fear, to appearances, to physical demonstrations answering specific objections — that the body was stolen, that the figure was a ghost.

Outside sources#

No non-Christian source records the resurrection.

Tacitus, writing around 116, confirms that Christ was executed under Pilate and that the movement persisted. That is useful evidence for the crucifixion and says nothing about the resurrection.

Josephus mentions Jesus, but the passage as it survives contains statements no non-Christian Jew would have written and is widely regarded as altered.

Absence of outside attestation is weak evidence on its own — an executed provincial preacher was not of interest to Roman historians. It does mean the case rests entirely on Christian sources.

Common objections#

"The minimal facts are accepted by most historians and are best explained by a resurrection"

Associated with Gary Habermas and Michael Licona, this argument does not depend on the accounts agreeing, and argues from a small set of claims accepted by most scholars regardless of belief: Jesus was crucified; his followers sincerely believed they saw him afterward; Paul converted from persecuting the movement; James, a skeptic, became a leader in it.

The argument is that no natural explanation covers all four. Hallucination struggles with group experiences and with converting hostile outsiders. Deliberate fraud struggles with people accepting hardship for a claim they knew to be false.

The facts are well supported.

Its difficulty is the gap between the facts and the conclusion. That people sincerely believed they experienced something is established. That the experience was a bodily resurrection is an inference, competing with grief experiences, visionary states in a culture that expected them, and a tradition that demonstrably grew in the retelling.

The claim also has to clear a high prior. A set of facts about what people believed does not distinguish between a resurrection and a sincere conviction produced some other way.

"Witnesses always disagree — the differences show independence, not invention"

Correct in principle, and it explains most of the table above. Different names listed, different numbers of figures at the tomb, different women — none of that is surprising in independent testimony.

Two things limit it. Matthew and Luke used Mark as a source, as set out in The Gospels, so these are not independent reports and their agreement carries less weight than it appears to.

And the differences are not randomly distributed. They run consistently toward more detail, more physical demonstration, and more answers to objections, in order of composition. Random variation between witnesses does not have a direction.

"Women as the first witnesses shows the account is authentic"

The criterion of embarrassment: women's testimony carried little weight in the period, so inventing women as the discoverers would be counterproductive. This is a genuine and frequently persuasive argument.

Two qualifications. Paul's creed — the earliest source — does not mention women at all, listing Cephas first. If the women's discovery were the anchoring detail, its absence from the earliest tradition is unexpected.

And the argument establishes that the empty tomb tradition is early, not that the resurrection occurred. An empty tomb is compatible with several explanations.

"The tomb was guarded, so the body could not have been taken"

The guards appear only in Matthew 27:62-66 and 28:11-15, the second of the four Gospels written, and in no other source.

The passage is also structured as a response: it explains that the authorities bribed the guards to say the body was stolen, "and this story has been spread among the Jews to this day." Matthew is answering a circulating counter-claim, which indicates the theft explanation was already being offered when he wrote.

That does not make the guards fictional. It does mean the detail appears at the point where it becomes apologetically useful, and is absent from the earlier account.

What the evidence supports#

The earliest source is a creed listing recipients, without narrative, empty tomb, or description of any appearance. The narratives come forty to seventy years later, disagree on nearly every checkable detail, and develop in a consistent direction — toward more physical demonstration answering more specific objections. No source outside the Christian tradition records the event.

None of this establishes that the resurrection did not occur. A genuine event reported by frightened people and written down decades later could produce a record of this kind.

What the evidence does not do is carry the claim. The sources are later and more interdependent than the strongest presentations suggest, and the earliest of them contains far less than the later ones.

The related argument from the apostles' deaths is examined in Apostle Martyrdoms.