The resurrection of Jesus has, for the last two or three centuries, been a favorite argument of Christian apologists.  It was the subject of an entire apologetic book as early as the 1740s.  Two centuries later, in the 1940s, the skeptical British advertising agent Albert Henry Ross (whose pen name was “Frank Morrison”) set out to disprove the resurrection and write a historical exposé of what he considered a legend or a hoax.  Instead, after doing an exhaustive study of the evidence from the New Testament, he came to the conclusion that the resurrection must have happened, a declaration that he supported with systematic historical reasoning in his widely distributed book, Who Moved the Stone?  In recent years, the evidence for the resurrection has received extensive treatment in the work of popular apologists such as Lee Strobel, Josh McDowell, and, above all, Gary Habermas, who wrote a doctoral dissertation on the historical evidence for the resurrection and has devoted his entire career to painstakingly examining every argument presented for or against the resurrection.

When I was questioning my faith, I knew about the vast amount of apologetic writing on the resurrection, but like other skeptics who have dismissed this evidence, I argued that since there were seemingly irreconcilable contradictions between the resurrection accounts in the gospels – and since the later accounts were more elaborate (and, in my view, more fantastic and legendary) than the early ones – the evidence seemed to suggest that the resurrection was a legend that quickly grew over time.  But I now think that that critical dismissal was premature and naïve.  The evidence for the resurrection is very difficult to explain away, which is why relatively few skeptics have made a serious attempt to do so.

What is the historical evidence in favor of the resurrection?  The best place to start is to look at 1 Corinthians 15:1-8, where Paul described the resurrection appearances of Jesus.  This passage, according to all scholars (whether conservative Christians, liberal Christians, atheists, agnostics, or other), was written only about twenty-five years after Jesus’s crucifixion, but it contains a formulaic phrase (“I delivered . . . what I received”) that indicates that Paul was repeating a much earlier tradition – a tradition that many scholars think he received during his visit to Jerusalem in the early-to-mid 30s.  Based on Paul’s testimony in Galatians 1:11-2:10, we know that Paul was personally acquainted with several of the eyewitnesses of the resurrection, and that he talked with them about what they had seen.  He knew some of the five hundred witnesses of the resurrection personally (well enough to know that a few had died, though most were still alive at the time that he wrote 1 Corinthians).  And he himself claimed to have seen the risen Lord.

In the Enlightenment era, some deistic skeptics were willing to dismiss the purported eyewitness testimony of the resurrection as fraudulent, and perhaps some skeptics are still willing to do that today.  But most skeptics don’t go that far.  Paul, after all, died for the faith, as did Peter.  It’s difficult to imagine that they would have faced execution so readily if they had known that the basis that they claimed for their hope – the resurrection of Jesus – was a lie.  Instead, skeptics today generally concede that Paul was sincere, but they say that he had a mystical temperament and was prone to visions, and that the early purported eyewitnesses of the resurrection might have experienced hallucinations.  But beyond the technical difficulties associated with this theory – that is, it’s difficult to imagine how five hundred people could have had a mass simultaneous hallucination of a resurrection appearance – there is another difficulty with this idea: the idea of an individual bodily resurrection ran contrary to the beliefs of both Jews and Greco-Roman pagans in the first century, so it would be difficult to imagine why any person (let alone hundreds of people) would imagine that they saw evidence of such a phenomenon if, in fact, they did not.  There are numerous examples of people imagining reappearances of their dead loved ones, but all of these reappearances correspond to expected cultural norms.  Jesus’s resurrection appearances did not meet the cultural expectations of his time and place.

As N. T. Wright demonstrated in The Resurrection of the Son of God, no group of people in the first-century Mediterranean world would have expected Jesus to experience a bodily resurrection from the dead.  First-century Greek philosophy tended to value the soul over the body; the goal of neo-Platonists was to experience liberation from the body, not experience a bodily resurrection.  And while first-century Jews did expect a future resurrection of the dead, they were not looking for an individual resurrection.  Jesus’s bodily resurrection did not correspond to the cultural expectations that his followers would have likely had.  One might imagine them declaring, after Jesus’s death, that he had been vindicated in heaven.  One might even imagine them saying that Jesus would return at some point in the future – as many Jews thought that Elijah would return.  There were even a few Old Testament stories of bodily resuscitation that might have inspired him.  But no one had ever before come up with a story of a dead man who experienced a resurrection in a glorified body (it is clear from 1 Corinthians 15:35-58 that this is what Paul had in mind), and who would be the “first fruits” of the resurrection until he returned to raise all people from the dead.  This was a unique, unprecedented story.  In my view, it is extremely difficult to imagine that this story could have been based on a hallucination.

1 Corinthians 15 may be the earliest account that we have of Jesus’s resurrection, but it is certainly not the only one.  We also have lengthy discussions of the resurrection in all four gospels, along with the book of Acts.  And it is referenced in numerous New Testament letters.  It was the cornerstone of the early Christian faith, as both Paul’s letters and the book of Acts attest.

No other world religion claims as its foundation such an important miracle.  And this miracle, though astonishing, is based on multiple early accounts.  No other reported wonder of the ancient world was so countercultural, and yet is evidenced by so much early testimony.

Faced with this evidence, most skeptics tend not to say very much about the resurrection of Jesus, other than to point out alleged discrepancies in the New Testament accounts of the resurrection.  But the evidence cannot be explained away so easily. These alleged discrepancies may actually be a clue that we are looking at multiple independent witnesses of the resurrection event, each describing the event from a slightly different perspective.  In other words, the differences between the accounts may actually make the testimony more credible, not less.  But regardless of that, skeptics should probably focus on an even more central question: If Jesus did not rise from the dead, why did the early disciples claim that he did?  That’s a question that ultimately, I decided that I could not answer.  The evidence for the resurrection was simply too compelling.