All four New Testament Gospels agree that the body of Jesus was buried, that his body exited the tomb on the third day, and that witnesses saw him alive. If the other stories in the Gospels originated among people in the places where the alleged events occurred, the resurrection stories most likely did as well. 

Proof of the Resurrection

How can anyone be confident that the resurrection really happened? The first followers of Jesus didn’t claim their leader rose from the dead because of gullible ignorance or blind faith. They knew dead people stay dead. Especially after they began to be persecuted, they had nothing to gain by persisting in their claim that Jesus had returned to life.

Yet some of these women and men had encountered an event so momentous they were ready to die rather than deny they saw a once-dead man alive. These initial eyewitnesses declared what they experienced, and in some cases they died for what they declared. At least a few of their firsthand testimonies eventually found their way into the New Testament.

Even if you think the resurrection of Jesus and the existence of a “Flying Spaghetti Monster” are equally preposterous, the testimonies of the first generation of witnesses should not be dismissed lightly. Something upended the lives of these men and women and made them willing to die for what they believed they had seen. After decades of studying the historical aftermath of these events, I still believe the resurrection makes the best sense of the evidence.

The resurrection is an event to which we can call witnesses, and these witnesses include reports that are traceable to the people, places, and communities where sightings of a resurrected Jesus were first reported. The more closely I examine these texts, the more plausible it seems to me that the stories started with a series of experiences that the first witnesses could not fit into ordinary categories.

One of the Earliest Recorded Creeds

One of the most important summaries of the resurrection is a creed the apostle Paul incorporated into one of his letters. A creed denotes a summation of beliefs that Christians share.

Believers in Jesus have repeated many creeds over the centuries, but one of the earliest is recorded in Paul’s first letter to the church in Corinth. Even though Paul penned this summation, he was not the one who created it. Someone had passed the creed to Paul, and Paul had repeated the summary of events and witnesses when he visited the Corinthians three or so years before he wrote this letter.¹ Here’s the outline of faith Paul recalled in his letter:

…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. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles.
(1 Cor. 15:3–7)

This summary includes every crucial truth Christians confess about the resurrection of Jesus. According to the creed, the body of Jesus was not abandoned in a pile of cadavers or left on a cross to be consumed by beasts and birds (“he was buried”). Jesus didn’t ascend physically into the heavens from the cross; his resurrection was a bodily transformation that took place after his death and burial (“he was raised on the third day”).² Perhaps most important, whatever happened to Jesus was not a private occurrence. Numerous people insisted they saw him after his death, and Christians in Paul’s own day could still interview eyewitnesses who said they had seen Jesus alive.

But where and how did Paul receive this creed in the first place?

The outline Paul recorded in 1 Corinthians almost certainly came from Jerusalem, the very location where Jesus was crucified and where some of his followers later claimed they saw him alive. Not only that, but the creed can also be traced to a time when firsthand witnesses of the life and ministry of Jesus were still alive and leading the Jerusalem church.

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