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WHAT IS THE RESURRECTION OF JESUS

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Resurrection by Rembrandt
Resurrection refers to the rising of Jesus Christ from the dead three days after his Crucifixion, or death on a cross. Christians believe Jesus rose from dead after he was buried as he told his followers he would.

The details of the Resurrection vary in the Gospels. According to Matthew, Jesus appeared first to Mary Magdalene and the women. According Matthew, he appeared first to Peter. Luke said the appearance of the Jesus to the Apostles occurred in Jerusalem. Matthew wrote it occurred in Galilee. In Luke the Resurrection and Ascension took place side by side. In Acts they took place 40 days apart. Mark originally contained no Resurrection story at all.

The resurrection of Jesus from the dead is the event that upon which pillars of Christianity stand. If Jesus was not raised from the dead, the Apostle Paul liked to say then his faith — Christianity — would have been in vain. The authenticity of the resurrection is disputed by many and there many different opinions on the details and episodes of the event.

Scholars refer to events like the Resurrection as post-mortem appearances. Candida Moss wrote in the Daily Beast Christian apologists sometimes claim that the resurrection of Jesus is wholly unique and substantially different from all of these other examples of post-mortem appearances. Why? Because Jesus was brought back to life in bodily form and he never died again. The supposed distinctiveness of the resurrection serves as a kind of proof that Christianity is true: No small movement could sprout so quickly and spread so far on the back of such a parochial fallacy. The problem with the claim to “uniqueness” is that there are many kinds of post-mortem existence in the ancient world. To be sure in Homer there are the kinds of ghosts or phantasms that can walk through walls and Jesus is nothing like those, but there are also much more tangible revenants or reanimated corpses.[Source: Candida Moss, Daily Beast, April 1, 2018]

Websites and Resources: Jesus and the Historical Jesus Britannica on Jesus britannica.com Jesus-Christ ; PBS Frontline From Jesus to Christ pbs.org ; Life and Ministry of Jesus Christ bible.org ; Jesus Central jesuscentral.com ; Catholic Encyclopedia: Jesus Christ newadvent.org ; Complete Works of Josephus at Christian Classics Ethereal Library (CCEL) ccel.org ; Christianity BBC on Christianity bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/christianity ; Sacred Texts website sacred-texts.com ; Candida Moss at the Daily Beast Daily Beast Christian Answers christiananswers.net ; Bible: Bible Gateway and the New International Version (NIV) of The Bible biblegateway.com ; King James Version of the Bible gutenberg.org/ebooks Biblical History: Bible History Online bible-history.com ; Biblical Archaeology Society biblicalarchaeology.org

Beliefs About the Resurrection

Jesus taught that life does not end after our bodies die. He made this startling claim: “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die like everyone else, will live again.” According to the eyewitnesses closest to him, Jesus then demonstrated his power over death by rising from the dead after being crucified and buried for three days. It is this belief that has given hope to Christians for nearly 2000 years. [Source: Y-Jesus]

If Jesus did rise from the dead then he alone would have the answers to what life is about and what is facing us after we die. On the other hand, if the resurrection account of Jesus is not true, then Christianity would be founded upon a lie. Theologian R. C. Sproul puts it this way: “The claim of resurrection is vital to Christianity. If Christ has been raised from the dead by God, then He has the credentials and certification that no other religious leader possesses. All other religious leaders are dead, but, according to Christianity, Christ is alive.”

Many Jews regard the belief that Jesus was the Messiah as wishful thinking and based on misreading of the scriptures (namely that when the Messiah does come he is supposed to usher in the end of the world).

Explanations for Resurrection of Jesus

Angel opening Christ's Tomb

The evidence for Christ's resurrection are the empty tomb and the appearances to the disciples. Some scholars claim that Jesus's may have been stolen in the night by his disciples. They also suggest that appearance to the disciples were actually dreams, visions or hallucinations brought on in part over guilt for abandoning Jesus.

No bones were found in the tomb. Paul went to great lengths to list specific, living witnesses to answer thoe who doubted the veracity of the accounts. Scholars then went back to the Old Testament and Jesus’s own saying and found prophecies for the events that took place. Arguably the least convincing argument for the resurrection made the Gospels was the reaction of the apostle to the reborn Christ. Some didn’t even realize they talking to Christ until he identified himself.

Some have suggested the sheer implausibility of the story is perhaps the primary reason it should be believed: no one it has been argued could make up such a story and convince people it is true unless it really took place. There was no precedent for the events that unfolded. According to Jewish beliefs the Messiah who was supposed to usher in the New Kingdom was supposed to warrior ready to fight battles against evil not a dead man who went benignly to his death and awoke from the dead.

There are also some imaginative explanations. Australian author and historian Barbara Thiering believes he was crucified near the Dead Sea where the Dead Sea scrolls were found. He was buried in a cave and only appeared to be dead after taking a poison similar that used in zombie rituals in Haiti that allow people to awake from the dead.

Many have doubts about the story. Some scholars believe that Mark made up the empty tomb episode. Stoic and Epicurean philosophers in Athens that listened to Paul said “the Resurrection was too much out of a reach for them.” The 2nd century Greek philosopher and Christian critic Celsus called the Resurrection a “cock-and bull story.”

Did Jesus Literally Rise from the Dead?

James Martin wrote in the Washington Post: “On Easter Sunday, several of the disciples discovered that the tomb in which Jesus’s body had been laid was empty. Later that same day, and in the coming days and weeks, more of the disciples encountered Jesus, who had risen from the dead. But almost immediately, others rebutted their reports. At first, stories circulated about Jesus’s body being stolen by his sneaky disciples. Later, others contended that another person was substituted for Jesus at the crucifixion — or that He was not dead, but simply drugged into a stupor and then surreptitiously revived. [Source: James Martin, Washington Post, April 18, 2014. Martin is a Jesuit priest and author of “Jesus: A Pilgrimage”]

Burial of Jesus

“Today, a different kind of myth is circulating, sometimes set forth by well-meaning Christians: Jesus didn’t literally rise from the dead, and it doesn’t matter that He didn’t. In this formulation, the “Resurrection” was nothing more than the disciples remembering what Jesus had said and done during his life, and letting those memories embolden them to carry on his mission. |~|

“But when one examines the Gospels, that hypothesis falls apart. For example, in one Gospel, the disciples are described as being so terrified after the crucifixion that they cowered behind closed doors. Why wouldn’t they? Their leader had just been executed in the most shameful way imaginable. But then, suddenly, the disciples are filled with resolve, ready to give their lives for Jesus Christ. Is it plausible that simply sitting around and remembering Jesus could account for such an astounding change? No, only something real, something dramatic and physical, something the disciples saw and experienced, could so decisively move them from abject terror to unbounded courage. And what they saw and experienced was Jesus Christ risen from the dead.” |~|

Scholarly Efforts to Verify the Resurrection

Candida Moss wrote in the Daily Beast: For the past two hundred years academics have been trying to ascertain what events of the life of Jesus are actually true. It’s a difficult task because just within the canonical New Testament there are four Gospels that contain conflicting stories, diverging timelines, and different versions of events. In order to figure out what happened scholars employ historical ‘criteria’ like the criterion of multiple attestation (an event is mentioned in multiple sources), the criterion of independent attestation (the event is mentioned in multiple sources that had no knowledge or connection to one another), or the criteria of embarrassment (an event or saying is embarrassing to those telling it so it must be true because people don’t event embarrassing stories about themselves) as tools for discerning what parts of the story are most likely to be true.[Source: Candida Moss, Daily Beast, April 1, 2018]

Not all scholars find this kind of methodology or line of inquiry compelling, but for those who do the resurrection is referred to (albeit in different and contradictory ways) in all four canonical gospels and in the writings of the Apostle Paul. In other words, it fulfills both the criterion of multiple attestation and the criterion of independent attestation.

What this means is that the belief that Jesus was resurrected from the dead goes back to the earliest documentable strata of tradition. Using this methodology we have to conclude that they saw something. Now, this doesn’t mean that the resurrection happened. If you want to say that the Apostles had an imagined, hallucinated, or otherwise non-supernatural experience, that is a reasonable interpretation of events. But it’s not fair to accuse them of outright deception.

A second reason to think that the earliest followers of Jesus believed their own message, is that conversations with the dead weren’t that uncommon in the ancient world. Today, if a friend told you that they saw their dead mother you might think that they needed psychiatric help. In the ancient world, however, you’d believe them and ask what their mother said. As Meghan Henning a New Testament professor at the University of Dayton told The Daily Beast, “There are countless stories of the dead appearing to their loved ones as shades or ghosts. These shades were frightening because they represented contact with death, not because they were dangerous or uncommon in some way. The life and death boundary was not thought of as an impermeable wall, but as a river that could be traversed in the opposite direction on occasion.”

The most skeptical position on the resurrection, therefore, would have to recognize that many people in the ancient world saw their loved ones come to life after their death. It was a cultural commonplace. In this view, the Apostles weren’t liars or crazy people, they were articulating their experiences using the cultural vocabulary of their time. If you want to accuse them of lying you would also have to accuse the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Babylonians, and so on.

Evidence for the Resurrection?

In 1998, Lee Strobel, a reporter for the Chicago Tribune and a graduate of Yale Law School, published “The Case for Christ: A Journalist’s Personal Investigation of the Evidence for Jesus.” Strobel had formerly been an atheist but was compelled by his wife’s conversion to evangelical Christianity to refute the key Christian claims about Jesus — particularly te Resurrection. As one persom in the movie based on his book said: “If the resurrection of Jesus didn’t happen” the Christian faith “a house of cards.”

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Descent of the Holy Spirit, Novgorod icon
Brent Landau writes in The Conversation: Strobel “argues that the resurrection is the best explanation for the fact that Jesus’ tomb was empty on Easter morning. Some scholars would question how early the empty tomb story is. There is significant evidence that the Romans did not typically remove victims from crosses after death. Therefore, it is possible that a belief in Jesus’ resurrection emerged first, and that the empty tomb story originated only when early critics of Christianity doubted the veracity of this claim. [Source: Brent Landau, Lecturer in Religious Studies, University of Texas at Austin, The Conversation, April 7, 2017]

But even if we assume that the tomb really was empty that morning, what is there to prove that it was a miracle and not that Christ’s body was moved for uncertain reasons? Miracles are, by definition, extremely improbable events, and I see no reason to assume that one has taken place when other explanations are far more plausible.

Strobel is also selective in the scholars he uses to support his arguments. Several prominent ones including Dr. Gary Habermas, are from Liberty University where faculty members have to sign off on the following statement: “We affirm that the Bible, both Old and New Testaments, though written by men, was supernaturally inspired by God so that all its words are written true revelation of God; it is therefore inerrant in the originals and authoritative in all matters.”

In response to criticism on the this point Strobel said: As you know, there are plenty of credentialed scholars who would agree that the evidence for the resurrection is sufficient to establish its historicity. Moreover, Dr. Gary Habermas has built a persuasive “minimal facts” case for the resurrection that only uses evidence that virtually all scholars would concede. In the end, though, each person must reach his or her own verdict in the case for Christ. Many things influence how someone views the evidence — including, for instance, whether he or she has an anti-supernatural bias.

In response to Strobel, Landau writes: I would say that if he had asked scholars teaching at public universities, private colleges and universities (many of which have a religious affiliation) or denominational seminaries, he would get a much different verdict on the historicity of the resurrection. Christian apologists frequently say that the main reason that secular scholars don’t affirm the historicity of the resurrection is because they have an "anti-supernatural bias,” just as Strobel does in the quote above. In his characterization, secular scholars simply refuse to believe that miracles can happen, and that stance means that they will never accept the historicity of the resurrection, no matter how much evidence is provided. Yet apologists like Gary Habermas, I argue, are just as anti-supernaturalist when it comes to miraculous claims outside of the beginnings of Christianity, such as those involving later Catholic saints or miracles from non-Christian religious traditions.

Eyewitnesses of the Resurrection?

Brent Landau writes in The Conversation: One key “piece of evidence” comes from the New Testament writing known as First Corinthians, written by the Apostle Paul to a group of Christians in Corinth to address controversies that had arisen in their community. Paul is thought to have written this letter around the year 52, about 20 years after Jesus’ death. In 1 Corinthians 15:3-8, Paul gives a list of people to whom the risen Jesus appeared. [Source: Brent Landau, Lecturer in Religious Studies, University of Texas at Austin, The Conversation, April 7, 2017]

These witnesses to the resurrected Jesus include the Apostle Peter, James the brother of Jesus, and, most intriguingly, a group of more than 500 people at the same time. Many scholars believe that Paul here is quoting from a much earlier Christian creed, which perhaps originated only a few years after Jesus’ death.

This passage helps to demonstrate that the belief that Jesus was raised from the dead originated extremely early in the history of Christianity. Indeed, many New Testament scholars would not dispute that some of Jesus’ followers believed they had seen him alive only weeks or months after his death. For example, Bart Ehrman, a prominent New Testament scholar who is outspoken about his agnosticism, states: “What is certain is that the earliest followers of Jesus believed that Jesus had come back to life, in the body, and that this was a body that had real bodily characteristics: It could be seen and touched, and it had a voice that could be heard.”

This does not, however, in any way prove that Jesus was resurrected. It is not unusual for people to see loved ones who have died: In a study of nearly 20,000 people, 13 percent reported seeing the dead. There are a range of explanations for this phenomenon, running the gamut from the physical and emotional exhaustion caused by the death of a loved one all the way to the belief that some aspects of human personality are capable of surviving bodily death.

But what of the 500 people who saw the risen Jesus at the same time? First of all, biblical scholars have no idea what event Paul is referring to here. Some have suggested that it is a reference to the “day of Pentecost” (Acts 2:1), when the Holy Spirit gave the Christian community in Jerusalem a supernatural ability to speak in languages that were unknown to them. But one leading scholar has suggested that this event was added to the list of resurrection appearances by Paul, and that its origins are uncertain. Second, even if Paul is reporting accurately, it is no different from large groups of people claiming to see an apparition of the Virgin Mary or a UFO. Although the precise mechanisms for such group hallucinations remain uncertain, I very much doubt that” people “would regard all such instances as factual.

Disagreements Among Christians About the Resurrection

Candida Moss wrote in the Daily Beast: Even if Christians generally agreed that Jesus escaped death and now lived in the heavenly transcendent realm, this does not mean that they agreed on what that meant either for Jesus or for the eventual resurrection of everyone else. The Apostle’s Creed spoken in churches the world over may say, “I believe in the resurrection of the body” but many ancient Christians did not agree. [Source: Candida Moss, Daily Beast, April 1, 2018]

In the first place there were those Christians, broadly known as Docetics, who thought that Christ only seemed to be a human being in the first place or only seemed to die. Some Christians thought that while Jesus the man died on the cross, Christ (which was previously a part of Jesus) abandoned him to a sad and lonely death.. Obviously for these Christians Jesus was never resurrected with a physical material body. To them the orthodox story of the resurrected Jesus sounded like a horror movie.

The question of what kind of body (or not) Jesus had and what kind of resurrection everyone else would have in the future were hotly debated in the early Church. As Finnish scholar Outi Lehtipuu has shown in her seminal book Debates over the Resurrection of the Dead, many believed that what you thought about the resurrection determined whether or not you were actually a Christian. It was a litmus test for orthodoxy.

The current widespread Christian doctrine is that when Jesus was resurrected he ascended into heaven in bodily form. In other words, he wasn’t a ghost. The body that he occupied was the body in which he died, in fact it still had the marks of the crucifixion on it (John 20:24-31). But this still doesn’t mean that all of Jesus’ body ascended into heaven.

Why Isn't Jesus Considered a Zombie

Candida Moss wrote in the Daily Beast: There was a whole host of ancient supernatural and ghostly figures in the ancient world. What if Jesus was just one of them? You can sense the anxiety about this in the Gospels of Luke and John. In Luke 24:39 Jesus displays his “hands and feet” to the disciples as proof that he isn’t a “spirit” or ghost. John uses Thomas to linger over the contours of the resurrected body. Thomas was evidently missing at the earlier appearance and famously declares, according to the NRSV translation, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe” (John 20:25). The ambiguity of the language yields a variety of possible interpretations. What do the “marks of the nails” look like? The dominant interpretation of this scene is one in which Jesus is still openly wounded and Thomas demands to insert his finger into Jesus’s hand and side.[Source: Candida Moss, Daily Beast, April 19, 2019]

In my book, Divine Bodies: Resurrecting Perfection in the New Testament and Early Christianity, I investigate what the Bible actually says about the resurrected body of Jesus. Reading this passage in John it’s clear that Thomas expects to touch the body of Jesus and see if it yields to his hand (although we never find out if he actually does), but nothing about the Greek text here insists that his touch will be penetrative rather than probative.

To my knowledge there are actually no instances in which it is used to describe a “through and through” puncture. When Thomas says he wants to place his finger into the marks of the nails, he might actually mean that he wants to place his finger on or in the creases of a healing or scarred wound, rather than into open holes. Interestingly, if we look at ancient medical writers, it’s clear that they also think that bodies start to — forgive me — scab over after several days. The way we have imagined this scene is mistaken.

Why does it matter if he is bleeding or scarred? Well, scars communicate something important about the very nature of Jesus’s resurrected body. Some scholars, like Bishop N. T. Wright, claim that the presence of wounds and the tangible physicality of Jesus’s body demonstrate that he is a live person and not a kind of ghost. And that, moreover, he is the first person to be permanently resurrected in human history. The problem is, as Professor Gregory Riley has written in Resurrection Reconsidered, this isn’t strictly speaking true. To be sure, there are kinds of ghosts — like that of Odysseus’s mother in Homer’s Odyssey — whose soul or “psyche” slips through his hands “like vapor,” but there were other kinds of supernatural entities who could easily be touched.

In fact, they might even like it. It’s not fatuous to suggest that Jesus was a zombie; reanimated corpses were a common phenomenon in the ancient world. In Phlegon’s second century Book of Marvels, a young girl, Philinnion, emerges at night from her family tomb in order to liaise with a male house guest. During her periods of reanimation, which last anywhere from minutes to days, she eats, drinks, and has sexual intercourse. Imagine how he felt when he found out. Just as we would not suggest that the Night King resurrects people so much as reanimates corpses, we wouldn’t say that Philinnion is actually alive. Intangibility might be a proof of ghostliness, but the ability to touch a person is no assurance that he or she is actually alive.

More biblically, in the Gospel of Matthew there’s an event that can reasonably be described as a “zombie apocalypse” in which the graves open and the holy dead leave their tombs and wander around Jerusalem (Matt 27:52:53). As Gregory Riley and Adela Collins have written, many ancient heroes were believed to have come back to life never to die again. Henning added that there are plenty of stories in which Asclepius, the Greek God of healing, resurrects the dead.

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons

Text Sources: Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Christian Origins sourcebooks.fordham.edu “World Religions” edited by Geoffrey Parrinder (Facts on File); “ Encyclopedia of the World’s Religions” edited by R.C. Zaehner (Barnes & Noble Books, 1959); King James Version of the Bible, gutenberg.org; New International Version (NIV) of The Bible, biblegateway.com; Christian Classics Ethereal Library (CCEL) ccel.org , Frontline, PBS, “Encyclopedia of the World Cultures” edited by David Levinson (G.K. Hall & Company, 1994); Wikipedia, BBC, National Geographic, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian magazine, The New Yorker, Time, Live Science, Encyclopedia.com, Archaeology magazine, Reuters, Associated Press, Business Insider, AFP, Library of Congress, Lonely Planet Guides, Compton’s Encyclopedia and various books and other publications.

Last updated March 2024