A Basic Case for the Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth
“Doubting Thomas,” by Caravaggio
8 minutes
It’s a little known fact that the case for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ is uncomfortably strong. The fact that you may never have even heard it laid out is, as we shall see, a backhanded admission of this fact. My purpose below is not to mount a full-on scholarly defense of the Resurrection, but simply to lay bare the historical logic of the argument, which presents itself as the only reasonable resolution of several points that no informed person may dispute. Here are those points in long form:
Jesus of Nazareth was crucified under Procurator Pontius Pilate, during the reign of Tiberias.
The council of his peers that condemned him (and pressed for his formal execution by the Romans) – the Sanhedrin – included members who opposed the verdict, two of whom are named in the source material (Nicodemus, and Joseph of Arimathea.)
Jesus of Nazareth died on the cross, on Friday afternoon, and was buried the same evening in a tomb.
That tomb’s location was known; indeed, it belonged to one of the members of the same council that condemned him.
Jesus’ body was placed inside the tomb, with a heavy stone rolled over it, and the tomb was put under armed guard to prevent it from being stolen.
On the following Sunday morning, the tomb was empty.
For a period of forty days, starting with that same Sunday, multiple eyewitnesses separately reported seeing and touching Jesus of Nazareth, alive and in a form that was physical, and which still bore the wounds of his crucifixion.
Despite abandoning him when he was arrested, then being utterly devastated after his killing, the same witnesses underwent profound psychological and lifestyle changes, and proceeded to boldly proclaim that they saw, talked to, and touched him.
None ever recanted his or her confession of the historical claim that Christ rose physically from the dead, despite the fact that their continued proclamation of the same would lead to a life of persecution, of alienation from both Jews and Romans, and to their eventual violent murders by both Jewish and Roman authorities.
The fundamental doctrine they preached was his death and actual Resurrection, while the rest of the doctrine would be rendered nonsensical without it. That is to say, if they didn’t believe they saw and touched him, then neither their behavior nor their other beliefs would make any sense to them.
For simplicity, I will boil these ten points down to four:
Jesus died on the cross, and was buried in a tomb, under guard.
The tomb was empty three days later.
Multiple, independent, credible eyewitnesses claimed to have seen, spoken to, and touched him over an extended period of time.
The entire way of life they adopted – that is, the entire logical enterprise of faith in Christ – logically depends on his physical, historical resurrection. Nothing less than an actual belief in the above would justify the specific claims for which they lived and died.
Now the problem with simply dismissing the Resurrection is that one must offer a better explanation of the facts above. And the facts above are not in historical dispute; at least not by serious scholars. That is precisely why the term “Resurrection Event” has currency even among skeptical scholars; everyone who looks into the matter must eventually admit that something rather notable must have happened. To see why, let us pose a series of questions that must be answered, and state a number of claims that have been made by those who say that Christ did not rise from the dead. My comments appear in parenthesis:
1. Who moved the body? (The body was under armed guard, and a stone was rolled in front of the tomb.)
2. How did those who moved the body get past the guards? (If they bribed the guards, as the Pharisees later claimed, then they would know that they were lying. If so, why would they have endured lifetimes of extreme alienation from their native cultures and religions, persecution, and martyrdom? (James was stoned to death. Peter was crucified upside down, because he did not consider himself worthy to be crucified in the same manner as Jesus. These examples can easily be multiplied.)
3. Perhaps Jesus was buried in a different tomb. (That won’t work, because we have the name of the man whose tomb it was, Joseph of Arimathea, and the same person was on the council that condemned him.)
4. Perhaps Joseph wasn’t really on the council? (That won’t work, because everyone admits at least that the synoptics were composed within the first century. A specific claim about a specific individual could therefore be checked, as it was within living memory of hostile parties who kept records.)
5. Perhaps someone else who looked like Jesus claimed to be him, and his followers convinced themselves that it was him. (Even if such were possible, the body would still be in the tomb. Also, is this really reasonable over a sustained period of time?)
6. Perhaps Jesus didn’t die on the cross; but passed out, and was resuscitated. (Jesus was beaten, scourged, crowned with thorns, made to carry his cross, nailed to that cross, and stabbed in the heart with a lance to make sure he was dead. It’s not reasonable to think he survived this, let alone that he would be able to walk around a few days later as if nothing happened.)
7. Perhaps the witnesses were lying. (If they were lying, they were the best liars ever. Rather than gaining a social advantage from their lie, they suffered a lifetime of apparent loss from it. I say apparent, because they now viewed their sufferings in light of the Resurrection, in which they obviously believed.)
8. Perhaps the witnesses experienced hallucinations. (These would have to be both individual and mass hallucinations. It is hard to find examples of the latter. Several different groups of one, of two, groups of eleven, twelve, and five hundred would independently need to hallucinate the same thing. Also, Saul of Tarsus (Paul) would have had to hallucinate Christ as well, at a much later date. Also, there would have to be consistency among all these hallucinations. For example, in separate accounts Christ is shown to be physical, and able to eat and drink; yet also able to pass into locked rooms, and to vanish from sight. This unique portrayal of a physical being with spiritual properties is consistent across different accounts, and yet is never editorialized upon within the gospel accounts themselves. That’s a high level of subtlety for a hallucination, shared or otherwise.)
9. The disciples of Jesus invented the Resurrection in order to give credibility to their new form of Judaism. (See points 2 and 7. Also, if this were true, then why not make Joseph of Arimathea or Nicodemus the fake witnesses? Instead, the first recorded witness was a woman, Mary of Magdala. Women had no legal standing in court at this time, and could not serve as legal witnesses. If you’re trying to perpetuate a fraud, you don’t make your first eyewitness a person who can be so easily dismissed by cultural prejudices.)
10. Maybe people saw visions of Jesus’ spirit, and that was the Resurrection Event. (See point 8. The resurrected Jesus was specifically physical, and he interacted physically with both people and external matter. This includes eating food, and cooking fish.)
11. The whole story could be a myth that was invented over generations. (Yet the main facts listed in points 1-10, and summarized in points 1-4, are not disputed by scholars of this period, including skeptics. More importantly, they were admitted by first century opponents of Christianity, including the people who put him to death.)
12. Maybe Jesus never existed!
And with that, we’ve reached almost the final, desperate expedient of those who want to avoid the logic of the Resurrection. If Jesus didn’t exist, then all the problems go away. There are views so off the mark that it is hard to know where to begin in refuting them. How do you argue with the kind of creationist who thinks dinosaurs were a trick of the devil, implanted in the fossil record? How do you argue with people who suggest we’re all living in a simulation? Probably, it is not worth it, but I will give it a try.
First of all, the existence of Jesus, along with the other basic facts listed in points 1-4, is not disputed by any serious scholar of this period, just as it was not disputed (but rather confirmed) by Jesus’ contemporary opponents. Christianity explodes on the first century and reshapes the world over the subsequent three centuries. Roll the tape backward, and there must be something at the beginning. Christ’s existence was admitted by both Jews and Romans, and even pagan copy-cats. To deny the existence of Christ is as reasonable as denying the existence of Barack Obama. Probably, if you google the matter, you will find someone who denies Obama’s existence. All I will say about this kind of thing is to quote the words of Christ when disputing with the Pharisees, “Out of your own mouths, you will be judged.” That is to say, if you choose to apply an extreme degree of skepticism toward the basic facts of his life, death, burial, and the credibility of the alleged witnesses, then you should apply it to everything else you think you know. But such a standard would rule out almost all knowledge.
Now the case for the Resurrection is just this: the physical resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth from the dead is the only proposed explanation that accounts for all the basic facts. Other explanations require positing special conditions such as: 1) ongoing, life-changing, multiply occurring mass hallucinations of the same narrow set of data; 2) resuscitation and recovery (within a few days) of the utter decimation of a human body, and/or, some vast conspiracy between Jesus, the Romans, and a mysterious twin brother (which conspiracy succeeded in duping Christ’s own disciples); or 3) a wide-spread conspiracy among the disciples themselves for no social gain maintained by a fraudulent witnesses willing to endure a lifetime of alienation and persecution, and finally painful death for something they knew they made up.
Since these are not feasible, skeptics of the Resurrection who are apprised of the basic facts tend to dodge the question in one of two ways. First, by the aforementioned silence on the whole subject, along with a dose of generalization about how all religions have their myths, and later accretions. Second, by noting the superficial similarity between Christ’s death and Resurrection, and certain mystery religions that focused on death and rebirth.
But the former claim is just a dodge, and the latter claim is not really sustainable in light of the actual attitude of early Christians toward the slightest taint of pagan influence. Read Irenaeus of Leon’s Against Heresies if you want to see with what obsessive exactitude the early Catholic apologists met and refuted pagan attempts to co-opt elements of Christianity into their existing mystery cults. And this is only one example. As can be seen in Acts of the Apostles, the epistles, and the voluminous writings of the apostolic fathers, early Christians were extremely conservative about their basic doctrines, and at great pains to refute the slightest attempts to water them down, or mix them with paganism. The idea then that Christianity itself – which was founded by conservative Jews, and Jews who were not even sure at first if they should preach to gentiles – is actually a pagan import simply does not square with the culture of the early Church.
Of course evidence and argument alone will not convince anyone that Christ rose from the dead. Atheists and Christians sometimes argue about the truth of the saying, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” but I am willing to concede that the atheists have a point here. As the Gospels themselves make clear in several shocking examples – such as the healing of a man born blind, and the raising of Lazarus – even seeing is not believing. Would you believe in aliens if a flying saucer landed on your lawn, or would you seek every other possible explanation? Would you believe in elves if you met an elven maiden in the forest, or would you begin to doubt your own sanity? Believer though I am, I am not sure that simply seeing these things would convince me that they were true. I would need something more.
So then, while it is important to show by argument that the Resurrection is actually the most reasonable resolution to a set of facts, it is “unreasonable” to think that argument alone would persuade a skeptic. Christ himself often expressed sadness and frustration at those who needed to see signs in order to believe. This implies that signs and wonders do not themselves convince anyone, except those already willing to believe. And that, as a matter of fact, is precisely how the Church regards the matter. Faith, the knowledge of the truth of revelation, is a supernatural grace. It is infused at baptism, and, like any other living thing, must be nurtured and fed in order to grow. It can die without nurturing. And those without faith cannot believe, no matter the evidence, just as those without eyes cannot see. Yet a blind man can still be shown reasonable grounds for believing in such things as color, and light. He is not guiltless who refuses to seek truth, wherever it leads, even if doing so would mean admitting there is a kind of sight he does not have, and which he must ask for.
But the contemporary silence over the case for the Resurrection — the fact that it is never even laid out in antiseptic, and value-free terms in publications and documentaries that claim to be giving the basic facts about Christianity’s origins — should not be such a source of frustration for Christians. True, it shows a desire to avoid the truth, and risks preventing some people from finding it, but it also counts as an admission of the force of that same truth. It shows that that truth, though it appears dead in the modern world, is very much alive. And it will rise again.
© 2022 Joseph Breslin All Rights Reserved