Did Jesus Really Rise From The Dead?

Fact 3: On multiple occasions, and under various circumstances, different individuals and groups saw Jesus alive after his death. This fact is almost universally acknowledged among New Testament scholars for the following reasons:

1. Given its early date as well as Paul’s personal acquaintance with the people involved, the list of eyewitnesses to Jesus’s resurrection appearances that is quoted by Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:5-8 guarantees that such appearances occurred.

2. The appearance narratives in the Gospels provide multiple, independent attestations of the appearances.

Even the most skeptical critics acknowledge that the disciples had seen Jesus alive after his death.

Finally, fact 4: The original disciples suddenly and sincerely came to believe Jesus was risen from the dead, despite having every predisposition to the contrary. Consider the situation the disciples faced following Jesus’s crucifixion:

1. Their leader was dead and Jewish messianic expectations did not expect a Messiah who, instead of triumphing over Israel’s enemies, would be shamefully executed by them as a criminal.

2. According to Old Testament law, Jesus’s execution exposed him as a heretic, a man accursed by God.

3. Jewish beliefs about the afterlife precluded anyone’s rising from the dead to glory and immortality before the general resurrection of the dead at the end of the world.

Nevertheless, the original disciples suddenly came to believe so strongly that God had raised Jesus from the dead that they were willing to die for that belief.

We come now to our second concern: What is the best explanation of these four facts? In his book Justifying Historical Descriptions, historian C. B. McCullagh lists six tests historians use to determine the best explanation for a given body of historical facts. The hypothesis given by the eyewitnesses—“God raised Jesus from the dead”—passes all these tests:

1. It has great explanatory scope. It explains why the tomb was found empty, why the disciples saw postmortem appearances of Jesus, and why the Christian faith came into being.

2. It has great explanatory power. It explains why the body of Jesus was gone, why people repeatedly saw Jesus alive despite his earlier public execution, and so forth.

3. It is plausible. Given the historical context of Jesus’s unparalleled life and claims, the resurrection makes sense as the divine confirmation of those radical claims.

4. It is not ad hoc or contrived. It requires only one additional hypothesis: that God exists.

5. It is in accord with accepted beliefs. The hypothesis “God raised Jesus from the dead” does not in any way conflict with the accepted belief that people do not rise naturally from the dead. The Christian accepts that belief as wholeheartedly as he accepts the hypothesis that God raised Jesus from the dead.

6. It far outstrips any of its rival theories in meeting conditions 1 through 5. Down through history, various alternative explanations of the facts have been offered—the conspiracy theory, the apparent death theory, the hallucination theory, and so forth. Such hypotheses have been almost universally rejected by contemporary scholarship. No naturalistic hypothesis has, in fact, attracted a great number of scholars.

Therefore, the best explanation of the established facts seems to be that God raised Jesus from the dead.

We have firm historical grounds for answering our question in the affirmative. The historical route is not, however, the only avenue to a knowledge of Jesus’s resurrection. The majority of Christians, who have had neither the resources, training, nor leisure to conduct a historical inquiry into this event, have come to a knowledge of Jesus’s resurrection through a personal encounter with the living Lord (Rm 8:9-17).