Did Jesus rise from the dead?

We mean specifically to ask, did God raise Jesus from the dead? If the resurrection of Jesus Christ is true, then it would seem to divinely authenticate the central message of Jesus brought to the apostles. It was the message that the apostles devoted their lives to proclaiming: the gospel. For early Christians, this divine vindication was the significance of Jesus's resurrection. On the other hand,...

• The Apostle Paul: “if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is vain, your faith also is vain. Moreover we are even found to be false witnesses of God… If we have hoped in Christ in this life only, we are of all men most to be pitied.” (1 Corinthians 15:14-15, 19; cf. 1 Pet 1:3)

The truth of Christianity does not depend on whether the Bible has errors or not. Instead, it is the resurrection of Jesus from the dead which is the litmus test for the Christian faith. It is the resurrection which is the appropriate target for seekers interested in assessing whether at least some kind of bare Christianity is true.

Can a decent secular historical case for Jesus' resurrection really be made?

• It is a miraculous event.
• It allegedly occurred two thousand years ago.
• It seems to depend on sources written by Christians.

Wow! But skeptics with just these worries, after investigating, can confess:

• Jeff Lowder (Public debater promoting atheism, co-founder of infidels.org): “I remember thinking to myself that if I took the time to investigate the resurrection, I could make anyone who believed it look like a fool. Or so I thought. …I was about to discard [it as] ‘another illogical religious belief,’ …[yet] I found extremely difficult to deal with as a critic.”¹
• Antony Flew (Renowned promoter of atheism, professor at Oxford [d. 2010]): “The evidence for the resurrection is better than for claimed miracles in any other religion. It's outstandingly different in quality and quantity.”²

In a famous televised debate between two specialists, one of the judges labeled the debate a draw while the four others (all philosophy professors) declared the pro case victorious. The judge declaring it a draw confessed, “I would think it was time I began to take the resurrection seriously.”³

Pinchas Lapide was a prominent Israeli historian, publishing over 35 books. He became so convinced by the historical evidence that God raised Jesus that, before dying a staunch Jew, he published a book on the evidence titled The Resurrection of Jesus: A Jewish Perspective (1977). Critics like Lapide, Lowder, and Flew often admit the evidence is strong, even if underlying philosophical objections related to God and nature prevent them from believing it or its implications. Many other critics, however, have found the evidence compelling enough even to overturn their philosophy.⁴

To quickly illustrate its force, consider this. To explain away even just the appearance evidence, do you know what the most popular naturalistic explanation is reduced to? A specialist who catalogues academic trends surveyed over 1,400 academic source on the topic, and notes that,

“At the end of the Nineteenth Century, hallucination and related subjective approaches are again the most popular among critics”⁵

For the vast majority of specialist historians who reject the supernatural and Biblical reliability, certain facts are historically secure enough so as to require the awkward belief that the apostles had group hallucinations of Jesus! By contrast, one atheism promoting debater did his doctoral dissertation on this topic and felt that, given even some basic Biblical reliability, the unknown twin-brother hypothesis is more likely than hallucinations. Wow! Why not explore the case for Jesus's resurrection yourself to see if it really requires such desperate moves. Can you do better?