Did Jesus Really
Rise From the Dead?

The Reality of the
Empty Tomb

In the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 28, the women arrive at the tomb at dawn, only to find the stone rolled away and an angel who tells them: "He is not here; he has risen, just as he said. Come and see the place where he lay."

Historically speaking, the empty tomb is a remarkably solid fact. Christianity exploded into existence in the very city where Jesus was publicly executed and buried. If the tomb wasn't empty, the Roman or Jewish authorities could have simply paraded the body through the streets of Jerusalem, and the Christian movement would have ended before it began.

Furthermore, all four Gospels record that the first people to discover the empty tomb were women — specifically Mary Magdalene. In the first-century world, the testimony of a woman was not considered reliable in a court of law. If you were fabricating a myth, you would never invent the detail that women were your primary star witnesses. The only reason the Gospel writers included this embarrassing detail is because it actually happened.

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Each of the three great facts — the empty tomb, the appearances, the origin of the Christian faith — is independently established. Together they point with unwavering conviction to the same unavoidable and marvelous conclusion: Jesus actually rose from the dead.

N.T. Wright, in his monumental The Resurrection of the Son of God, adds that neither the empty tomb alone nor the appearances alone would have convinced first-century Jews that a resurrection had occurred. The empty tomb without appearances might suggest grave robbery. Appearances without an empty tomb might suggest a ghost. Only the combination of both facts explains the birth of the Christian belief.

The Post-Mortem
Appearances

An empty tomb by itself doesn't prove a resurrection. A grave robber could explain an empty tomb. That brings us to the second pillar: the post-mortem appearances of Jesus.

The Apostle Paul, writing just a couple of decades after the crucifixion, records one of the earliest creeds of the Christian faith in 1 Corinthians 15. He writes that Jesus "was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time."

Some critics argue these were hallucinations — a mass grief-induced hallucination. But psychologically, hallucinations are highly individualistic, like dreams. Five hundred people do not share the exact same hallucination at the exact same time. Furthermore, these were not spiritual visions of a ghost. Jesus ate fish with them. He told Thomas to touch his scars.

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To talk of resurrection is... to make a claim not just about life after death. Resurrection is about life after life after death. It is always about a post-death resurrection of the body to live again.

Even Dale C. Allison Jr., a critical historian who deliberately avoids apologetic conclusions and takes a more cautious view than the other scholars presented here, concedes that the disciples had genuine, profound experiences that cannot be dismissed. While his methodology does not lead him to the same confident conclusions as the other five authors, he personally writes: "I believe that the disciples saw Jesus and that he saw them."

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...the historian of whatever persuasion has no option but to affirm both the empty tomb and the 'meetings' with Jesus as 'historical events.' They took place as real events: they were significant events. They are, in the normal sense required by historians, provable events.

The Transformation
of the Disciples

On the Friday of the crucifixion, Jesus' followers were terrified. They fled. Peter, the rock, denied he even knew Jesus — to a servant girl. They were hiding behind locked doors, utterly defeated. In the first-century Jewish mindset, a crucified Messiah was a failed Messiah. End of story.

Yet, just weeks later, these same cowardly men stood in the public squares of Jerusalem, facing down the very authorities who executed Jesus. Peter boldly preached, "God has raised this Jesus to life, and we are all witnesses of it." When threatened with prison and death, they responded, "We cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard."

What caused this psychological explosion? What turned cowards into martyrs? People will die for a lie if they believe it's true. But nobody willingly dies for a lie that they know they invented. The disciples didn't just believe in a philosophy — they claimed they had physically seen, touched, and eaten with the resurrected Jesus.

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Liars make poor martyrs.

Their sudden transformation, along with the conversion of hardened skeptics like James (the brother of Jesus, who did not believe during Jesus' ministry) and Paul (who actively persecuted the church), defies any naturalistic explanation. As Craig writes, the very origin of the Christian faith cannot be plausibly explained in terms of natural causes.

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The Christian faith stands or falls on the event of the resurrection. If Jesus did not rise from the dead, then Christianity is a myth, and we may as well forget it.