Is there historical evidence for the resurrection?

The oldest evidence: a list in a letter

The earliest written account of the resurrection is not in a Gospel. It is in a letter Paul wrote to the church at Corinth around AD 55, and he says he is handing on something he was given.

For I delivered to you first of all that which I also received: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.

“Delivered” and “received” are the words teachers used for passing on fixed tradition, and the lines read like a formula to be memorized. Paul then adds more than five hundred at once, “most of whom remain until now,” then James, then all the apostles, and last of all himself (1 Corinthians 15:6–8). He had spent fifteen days with Peter in Jerusalem and met James there, three years after his own turn (Galatians 1:18–19). So scholars of very different convictions date the formula to within a few years of the crucifixion.

The empty tomb

The Gospels, written from about AD 70 on, tell the story of the tomb. They differ in the details, a young man, an angel or two men, and which women came, but agree on the core: women went at dawn on the first day of the week and found it empty. Historians notice the choice of witnesses. In that world a woman’s testimony counted for little, and Josephus says women should not testify at all (Antiquities 4.219). A tale made up to persuade would hardly lean on them. Who they were is the subject of Who found the empty tomb?

Matthew also preserves an early counter-story, which he blames on the chief priests.

Say that his disciples came by night and stole him away while we slept.

The saying, Matthew adds, was still told “until today” (Matthew 28:15). On that reading, opponents argued about where the body went, not whether the grave was empty; other scholars see the guard story as Matthew’s answer to a later rumor. Paul’s list never mentions the tomb, and some historians doubt that a crucified man got a proper burial at all. Others point to Jehohanan, a crucified man whose heel bone, the nail still in it, was found in a Jerusalem family tomb in 1968.

The early belief

What no serious historian disputes is that the belief came fast and changed people. Paul had hunted the believers before he joined them. James, the brother who did not believe during Jesus’s life (John 7:5), became the leader of the Jerusalem community and died for it in AD 62. By the time Paul wrote, the same claim was being made in Jerusalem and in Corinth: “Whether then it is I or they, so we preach, and so you believed” (1 Corinthians 15:11). Roman writers noticed the movement only later, as Is Jesus mentioned outside the Bible? shows.

What historians can and can’t say

A historian weighs probabilities about ordinary events, and a resurrection is by nature not an ordinary event. So scholars divide less over the facts than over how to explain them.

• A real resurrection. N. T. Wright argues that only a bodily rising, with real meetings afterward, accounts for both the empty tomb and the appearances, as the churches believe.
• Visions. Gerd Lüdemann and others think grief and shock produced experiences that Peter, the others and later Paul took for meetings with the risen Jesus.
• Stories that grew. Bart Ehrman holds that some followers did have visions, and that the tomb stories and their details grew as the story was retold.

E. P. Sanders, a historian who made no case for the miracle, called the followers’ resurrection experiences a fact, and said he did not know what reality caused them. That is roughly where history stops. Herald tells it the way the texts do; what happened in the tomb is a matter of faith.