Around the middle of the first century, Paul wrote to a troubled church in Corinth and quoted something back to them. He introduced it with two ordinary-sounding words that carry technical weight in his world. He had received something. He had delivered that something to them.

For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. (1 Corinthians 15:3-5)

Paul is not composing there. He is handing on a formula that was handed to him, and saying so. Which means the material is older than the letter that contains it, and older than all four Gospels.

The last two articles in our series asked what the Old Testament promised and why the cross was necessary. Isaiah said the Servant would be crushed, and then said His days would be prolonged. Peter stood up at Pentecost and proclaimed that God had raised Him.

Both are claims about an event, in a named city, under a named governor, at a datable time. Either the tomb was empty and men and women saw Him afterward, or it was not and they did not. That is a historical question before it is a theological one, and historical questions can be examined.

Think of it this way. Either Abraham Lincoln was shot at Ford’s Theatre in April 1865, or he was not. Nobody says, “That is your Lincoln and this is mine.” Nobody treats it as a story that happens to work for some people. And notice that this has nothing to do with how much the event matters. Lincoln’s death mattered enormously, and it is still simply either true or false.

The resurrection belongs in that category of claim, whatever else it belongs to.

What has to be explained

Start with what is not seriously in dispute.

Jesus of Nazareth was crucified under Pontius Pilate. Within a few years His followers were publicly proclaiming that He had been raised, and they were doing it in the city where He had been executed. I laid out the evidence for both points in an earlier article in this series, along with the reasons even skeptical scholars grant them.

What needs explaining is everything that follows.

Something happened to the disciples. These were men who scattered when He was arrested. One of them denied knowing Him to a servant girl in a courtyard. Within weeks the same men were standing in public in Jerusalem saying they had seen Him alive. Whatever explanation you prefer, it has to account for the change and for how fast it came.

Something happened to Saul of Tarsus. He was traveling to Damascus carrying authority to arrest Christians. He spent the rest of his life proclaiming the message he had set out to destroy, and it cost him beatings, imprisonments, and shipwreck (2 Corinthians 11:23-27). Nothing in his background or his interests points that way.

Something happened to James. John records plainly that Jesus’ own brothers did not believe in Him during His ministry (John 7:5). Yet James appears in Acts as a leader of the Jerusalem church, and Josephus records his execution as the brother of Jesus who was called Christ (Antiquities 20.200).

Something happened to the week. Devout Jews, shaped from childhood by the seventh-day Sabbath, began gathering on the first day of the week (Acts 20:7; 1 Corinthians 16:2). Something had happened on that day, and it reordered the rhythm of their common life.

Four changes, in a very short span, among people who had every social and religious incentive to stay where they were.

The rest of this is about which explanation actually accounts for them.

The creed behind the letter

Scholars across the spectrum agree that Paul is quoting here rather than composing, and the reasons are visible in the text itself.

The passage has a shape. Four clauses, each introduced by “that,” each balanced against the others: died, buried, raised, appeared. The first and third carry the same tag, in accordance with the Scriptures. That is the structure of something built to be memorized and recited aloud, not the structure of a man thinking on paper.

The vocabulary points the same way. Peter appears under his Aramaic name, Cephas. The witnesses are called “the twelve,” a phrase Paul uses nowhere else in his letters. And Paul says outright what he is doing. He received it. He handed it on. Those were the ordinary words for the careful transmission of fixed teaching, the way a rabbi passed material to a student.

Then comes the list, and it is a list of names and numbers rather than a devotional summary. Cephas. The twelve. More than five hundred brothers at one time, of whom Paul says most are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. James. All the apostles. Last of all, Paul himself.

That aside about most of them still being alive is doing something specific. Paul is writing to a church that has been arguing with him. He is telling them that the witnesses can be found and asked.

So how early is it?

Paul wrote 1 Corinthians in the mid-fifties. But the tradition he quotes was in his hands long before he wrote it down, and scholars who agree on very little else agree that it is early.

Gerd Lüdemann, an atheist New Testament scholar who spent much of his career arguing that the resurrection did not happen, dated the elements of this tradition to the first two years after the crucifixion, and not later than three.[1] Michael Goulder, also an unbeliever, thought it went back at least to what Paul was taught at his conversion, a couple of years after the cross.[2] A. J. M. Wedderburn placed it in the first half of the thirties.[3] The Oxford Companion to the Bible puts it no later than Paul’s visit to Jerusalem in AD 35.[4] James Dunn of Durham went furthest of all. This tradition, he wrote, was formulated “within months of Jesus’ death.”[5]

Notice who is saying this. These are not apologists assembling a case. Several of them are men who examined the evidence and concluded the resurrection did not happen, and who nonetheless place the formal, fixed, public confession of it within a few years of the event.

Six years

Put the pieces on a line.

Jesus was crucified in AD 30, which is the most widely held date, or in AD 33, which serious scholars also defend. What follows works on either.

The appearances come first, and the preaching begins immediately. The confession hardens into fixed form within two or three years. Somewhere in that same window, a Pharisee named Saul, traveling to Damascus with warrants in his hand, stops being a persecutor. Three years after that he goes up to Jerusalem and spends a fortnight with Peter (Galatians 1:18).

Two or three years, plus three. Six years, whichever crucifixion date you take. On an AD 30 dating that puts you at roughly AD 35 or 36. On an AD 33 dating, roughly AD 38 or 39. The dates move. The interval does not.

Everything in that paragraph happens inside six years, among people who were there, in a territory small enough to walk across in a week.

Legends need room. Above all they need distance from the people who would know better. This had none.

Paul went and checked

We have already seen why the telephone game is a poor analogy for how the Christian message spread. Here is the same objection answered with a specific piece of evidence.

Galatians is one of the undisputed letters. Even scholars who reject much of the New Testament accept that Paul wrote it. And in its first two chapters Paul does something a man inventing a story does not do. He gives names, dates, and a location, and effectively invites his opponents to go and check.

Three years after his conversion he went up to Jerusalem to visit Cephas and stayed fifteen days (Galatians 1:18). While he was there he also saw James, the Lord’s brother (1:19). Later he went back, and this time laid out before them the gospel he had been preaching, in his own words, to make sure he was not running in vain (Galatians 2:2).

The outcome is the point. They added nothing to him (2:6). They shook hands on it (2:9).

Think about what that fortnight involves. Paul is in a room with the man the creed names as the first witness, and with the brother of Jesus who had not believed during the ministry. The verb Paul uses for that visit occurs nowhere else in the New Testament. The standard lexicons give it the sense of visiting in order to come to know someone or something, and some note the further idea of visiting in order to obtain information.

I would not lean on that word too hard. Paul’s whole argument in Galatians 1 is that he did not receive his gospel from men, so he is not telling us he went to be taught. But nobody spends fifteen days with an eyewitness and merely discusses the weather.

Here is the force of it. Paul had every reason to check, every opportunity to check, and access to the two men best placed to correct him. He checked. Their account and his turned out to be the same account. Years later he says so plainly to a church that was arguing with him: whether it was I or they, this is what we preach, and this is what you believed (1 Corinthians 15:11).

A chain of whispers cannot be audited. This one was.

Nobody was expecting this

There is a modern assumption worth naming here. It runs something like this: people back then were credulous, the ancient world was full of gods and wonders, and a story about somebody rising from the dead would have gone down easily.

The evidence points the other way.

Resurrection was not a vague idea in that world. It was a defined belief with a definite shape, and the shape did not fit what the Christians started saying.

Daniel had described it. Many who sleep in the dust of the earth awakening, some to everlasting life, and some to shame (Daniel 12:2). Notice the features. It is corporate, it holds out both everlasting life and everlasting shame, and it belongs to the end of history.

Watch how firmly that held. Martha’s brother has been dead four days. Jesus tells her that Lazarus will rise again, and she answers out of settled conviction: “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day” (John 11:24). She is a believer. She is standing in front of Jesus. And her mind goes straight to the end of the age, because that is what the word meant.

Then watch the disciples. Coming down the mountain after the transfiguration, Jesus tells Peter, James, and John to say nothing until the Son of Man has risen from the dead. Mark records the result. They kept the matter to themselves, “questioning what this rising from the dead might mean” (Mark 9:10). These were not men baffled by the concept. They knew the concept. What they could not do was fit one man, rising ahead of everyone else, in the middle of history, into it.

And that is inside Judaism. Not every Jew even held to resurrection. The Sadducees denied it outright, along with angels and spirits, and Paul once used that division to split a hostile council (Acts 23:6-8). Move outside Judaism and the reception is worse. Paul preached in Athens to men who listened patiently until he reached the resurrection of the dead, and at that point some of them laughed (Acts 17:32).

So here is the historical oddity. No established Jewish expectation anticipated a crucified Messiah rising bodily, alone, ahead of the general resurrection. It was not what Jews were waiting for. It was not what pagans found plausible. It was not what the disciples themselves had been able to imagine three years earlier.

Beliefs like that do not drift into existence. Something produced it.[6]

The alternatives

If the resurrection did not happen, something else did. Here are the main proposals, stated the way their defenders state them.

He did not really die.

The strongest version of this is not foolish. Crucifixion killed slowly, and victims sometimes lingered for days. Jesus was on the cross a matter of hours, and Mark records that Pilate was surprised to hear He was already dead (Mark 15:44). Josephus tells us he once recognized three crucified acquaintances and asked Titus to have them taken down. They were given medical care, and one of them survived.[7]

So a man could come off a cross alive. Now look at what the theory has to carry. He must survive a Roman flogging and a spear thrust, lie unattended in a sealed tomb for a day and a half without food, water, or treatment, shift the stone from the inside, get past whatever guard was posted, and then present Himself to His followers in a condition that convinced them He had conquered death.

David Strauss, who did not believe in the resurrection and had no motive to defend it, stated the objection better than any Christian has.[8] A man who crept half dead out of a tomb, weak and ill, needing bandaging and care, could not have given the disciples the impression that he was “a Conqueror over death and the grave, the Prince of Life.”

Such a man needs a physician. He does not get worshipped.

The disciples stole the body.

This is the oldest counter-explanation on record, which is a point in its favor. Matthew presents it as the explanation circulating in Jerusalem from the beginning (Matthew 28:11-15).

It has one crippling weakness. It explains an empty tomb and nothing else. It does not explain why men who knew perfectly well where the body was went on to spend their lives proclaiming the opposite, and it does not touch Paul or James.

The martyrdom argument needs stating carefully here, because it is often stated badly. Plenty of people die for things that are false, sincerely believing them. The September 11 hijackers did. The force of the point is narrower. These particular men were in a position to know whether it was false. Luke records the execution of James the son of Zebedee (Acts 12:2). John records Jesus predicting the manner of Peter’s death (John 21:18-19), and 1 Clement, written from Rome around the end of the first century, reports that Peter died under persecution.[9] Men do not go to execution defending a body they buried themselves.

They went to the wrong tomb.

Grief, half-light, unfamiliar ground. It is not impossible.

But the tomb belonged to Joseph of Arimathea, who could have pointed to it. The authorities had every motive to produce the right one and end the matter in an afternoon stroll. And an empty tomb of any kind still does not produce appearances.

Few scholars defend this now, which is itself informative.

They hallucinated.

This is the serious modern proposal and it deserves a serious answer. Bereaved people do report seeing the dead. Grief and guilt are powerful things, and after a courtyard and a rooster Peter had a great deal of both.

Three problems.

Hallucinations are individual. They do not pass from one mind into another. So a group appearance needs a second mechanism bolted on: suggestion, expectation, contagion. The earliest tradition reports appearances to groups, including the twelve and a gathering of more than five hundred, and each addition to the theory makes it heavier. None of them empties a tomb.

Second, it does not reach Paul or James. Neither of them was grieving for a lost teacher. Paul was hostile and occupied. James had not believed.

Third, and here the previous section pays off, a vision of a dead friend does not generate the sentence “He has been raised.” It generates “he is with God,” or “he lives on.” Those categories were available. Resurrection in the middle of history was not.

And a hallucination, however vivid, leaves a body in a tomb.

A word here about what is actually being claimed. Some readers will have met the idea that the resurrection was “spiritual,” meaning not bodily. That is not what Paul says. He does speak of a spiritual body (1 Corinthians 15:44), but as Ken Gentry has argued, a spiritual body is no more made of spirit than a Coca-Cola bottle is made of Coca-Cola.[10] The word describes what animates the body, not what it is made of. Paul uses the same word for a spiritual Christian, who is not thereby made of spirit (1 Corinthians 2:15). The claim on the table is the one a Roman governor summarized without any theological interest at all: a certain Jesus, who was dead, but whom Paul asserted to be alive (Acts 25:19).

The story grew over time.

Legends do form. Details swell, modest claims become large ones, and the process is well documented.

But this explanation needs the one thing the evidence will not give it. The confession is fixed, public, and circulating within a few years, in the city where the execution happened, while the witnesses were alive and could be found. Legend requires distance from the event and distance from the people who would know better. It had neither.

There is a further difficulty with the mechanism. Legendary growth would have to inflate the center of the story while leaving the incidental details accurate. What mechanism does that?

They could not face the failure.

This is the most sophisticated version. Groups heavily invested in a leader do sometimes reinterpret his failure rather than admit it.

Acts preserves the comparison in a speech by Gamaliel, a Pharisee who was certainly no Christian, describing the normal pattern to his own council. Theudas rose up and was killed, and his followers were dispersed. Judas the Galilean rose up and perished, and his followers were scattered (Acts 5:36-37).

That is what happened when a messianic movement lost its messiah. The followers went home, or found another leader. Not one of them announced that the dead man had been raised and then walked into the city that killed him to say so.

What follows if He was raised

Suppose the case holds. Suppose the tomb was empty and the appearances happened. What follows?

Considerably more than a happy ending.

The previous article set out why the cross was necessary. The guilt of sinners laid on a substitute. Justice satisfied rather than waived. But a payment offered is not yet a payment accepted. A man can hand over everything he owes and still be turned away.

This is what Paul means in one of the most compressed sentences he ever wrote. Jesus “was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification” (Romans 4:25).

The resurrection is the receipt. It is the Father’s public declaration that the offering of the Son was accepted, that the debt was actually discharged, and that everyone united to Him by faith stands acquitted. Paul says the same thing from the other side, and he does not say we would merely be left uncertain. He says that if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins (1 Corinthians 15:17). Without the resurrection there is no acquittal to be had.

But the same event carries something else, and it is not comfortable.

Paul told the philosophers in Athens that God “has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead” (Acts 17:31).

Read that slowly. The resurrection is offered as the guarantee of a coming judgment. The day is fixed. The Judge is appointed. And the evidence God gives that He means it is that He raised the man in question from the dead.

So one event does two things at once. To the sinner who takes refuge in Christ, the empty tomb is the receipt for a debt paid in full. To the man who will not, it is notice that a date has been set, a Judge installed, and the appointment will be kept.

One word of care about what we are saying here. When Christians confess that the Son of God died and rose, we are speaking of one Person, truly God and truly man, who suffered and died in the human nature He took to Himself. God as God cannot die. The Son, having become man, could and did. And it is that same Person, in that same body, now glorified, who was raised and who reigns.

Follow Paul a little further, because he has not finished.

He calls the risen Christ the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep (1 Corinthians 15:20). Firstfruits is harvest language. The first sheaf is not a different crop from the rest. It is the same crop, arriving early, and its arrival is the promise that the field is coming.

Notice who Paul is speaking about. Those who have fallen asleep in Christ (15:18). That qualifier carries everything. Scripture is plain that all the dead will be raised, and Paul says so himself, a resurrection of both the just and the unjust (Acts 24:15). Daniel had already said it, and we saw his two destinies earlier. Everyone will rise. Not everyone will rise to life.

For those who are in Christ, hear what the denial would cost. If Christ has not been raised, then those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. Not merely dead. Perished. If your father died trusting Christ, he is gone for good. Your mother. Your child. And every word of hope spoken at that graveside was a kindly lie.

Because He has been raised, they have not perished. They sleep. They will be raised.

And if you are in Christ, so will you.

Which is why Paul ends the chapter where he does. Be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain (1 Corinthians 15:58). And not your labor only, as R. C. Sproul once put it.[11] Your grief is not in vain. Your cancer is not in vain.

A closing word about evidence

I have argued a historical case in this article, and I believe it holds. But I want to be honest about what a case like this can and cannot do.

It can remove excuses. It cannot create faith.

Peter Williams of Cambridge puts it about as well as it can be put.[12] God reveals Himself, and God also hides Himself, and both are true, because evidence is morally structured. Two men can stand under the same cross. One sees the Lord of glory. The other sees a failed teacher executed by Rome, and takes the execution as proof of the failure.

We have already seen this in Scripture itself. When Peter confessed Jesus as the Christ, our Lord did not congratulate him on his reasoning. He said that flesh and blood had not revealed it, but the Father in heaven (Matthew 16:17).

So I do not set these arguments before you as a machine for producing belief. I set them out because they are true, and because the God who raised His Son is pleased to work through what is true.

If you find yourself resisting, the question worth asking is not whether the evidence is sufficient. It is what in you is doing the resisting.

He is risen. Come and see.

Notes

1. Gerd Lüdemann, The Resurrection of Jesus, trans. John Bowden (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994), 38.

2. Michael Goulder, “The Baseless Fabric of a Vision,” in Gavin D’Costa, ed., Resurrection Reconsidered (Oxford: Oneworld, 1996), 48.

3. A. J. M. Wedderburn, Beyond Resurrection (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1999).

4. The Oxford Companion to the Bible, eds. Bruce M. Metzger and Michael D. Coogan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 647.

5. James D. G. Dunn, Jesus Remembered (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003).

6. On the shape of Second Temple resurrection belief and the scale of the change in early Christian conviction, the fullest scholarly treatment is N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Fortress, 2003). I have argued against Wright’s account of justification elsewhere on this blog and do not follow him there. His historical work on this question stands independently of that disagreement.

7. Josephus, Life 420-421.

8. David Strauss, A New Life of Jesus, English edition (London: Williams and Norgate, 1879), 1:412.

9. 1 Clement 5.

10. Kenneth L. Gentry Jr., “Stand Firm in the Resurrection Hope (6),” Postmillennial Worldview, PMW 2025-038.

11. R. C. Sproul, “Witnesses of the Resurrection: The Apostolic Message,” Ligonier West Coast Conference, Session 4, 26 September 2009.

12. Peter J. Williams in conversation with Gavin Matthews for Solas: solas-cpc.org/can-we-trust-the-gospels-in-conversation-with-peter-j-williams