Why Do Christians Believe in the Resurrection?

The Bible includes evidence for the resurrection of Jesus that was obtained from eyewitnesses, and today’s Christians experience his living presence now.

Image by Pisit Hing, provided by Unsplash via Wix.

Throughout history, everyone who has died has stayed dead.  If someone told you they knew a person who died and was buried but came back to life and is alive today, you would probably be skeptical.

There is only one exception: Jesus of Nazareth.  Perhaps as many as two billion people believe he died and was buried, and came back to life, and is still alive today.

Why?  Why do Christians believe in the Resurrection?

Do we believe just because we’ve been taught to believe?

When I used to teach a class on knowledge (how we know what we know), every year I asked my students this question:

I heard a DJ on the radio say, “With God you are not alone, not stuck, not powerless, not unloved.”  How does she know that?

One year, the uniform answer from almost the entire class was that she knew it only because someone must have told her: a priest, a parent, or someone else.  In other years, some students would suggest that she might have experienced it herself.  But not this class.  They thought if a person “knew” this, it could only be because someone told them.

The problem is, as I often said to my students, “Just because someone says something, doesn’t mean it’s so.”  We need to examine the evidence for the claims people make, or experience it ourselves.

None of us were present when Jesus rose from the dead.  We didn’t see the empty tomb.  We didn’t see the resurrected body.  So what is the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus? Why do Christians believe it?

We begin with the evidence.

What is the first evidence for the resurrection of Jesus?

Since our faith goes back 2,000 years, some people worry that our beliefs are based on a 2,000-year-long version of the telephone game, where a message is whispered from person to person around a circle and is usually quite garbled by the time it reaches the last person.

When it comes to the Resurrection of Christ, how many layers of potential distortion are there between the original source and us?  The answer is: Surprisingly few.

The first written record we have of the Resurrection of Christ is in the apostle Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, where he says:

“For I handed on 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; that he appeared to Cephas [Peter], then to the Twelve.  After that, he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at once, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep.” (1 Cor. 15:3-6, NABRE)

The Christian faith in the resurrection is not based on one person’s alleged receipt of private revelations from God or from an angel.  Paul identifies a large number of people who saw the resurrected Jesus, some of whom he had talked with.  (And there are others he does not mention – including the women who saw the empty tomb in Matthew 28, Luke 24, and John 20.)

Can we trust this letter?  There is a consensus among historians and scholars that Paul did in fact write this letter and that it was written around AD 54-56, which would be only around 25 years after Jesus died and rose from the dead.

When Paul says, “I handed on . . . what I also received,” he isn’t just talking about a chain people each telling the next one.  We know he spoke personally with people who experienced the risen Christ, including some of the apostles.  So that doesn’t leave much room for distortion.  The chain of communication from the eyewitnesses to us is actually very short:

• Eyewitnesses saw the risen Christ.

• Some of those eyewitnesses told Paul, and they also told others who told Paul.

• Paul wrote it in a letter, to share it with others, and we have the letter.

It’s just 3 steps from the eyewitnesses to Paul to us.  Two thousand years sounds like a long time, but, because we have Paul’s letter, the chain of evidence is very direct.  It’s roughly the same as believing a book published today about events in the year 2000 (25 years ago) that includes eyewitness reports from people the author interviewed.  That’s what Paul’s letter offers: a summary of what the eyewitnesses saw, passed on from the eyewitnesses to the author to us, written just 25 years after the events happened.

Is the evidence tainted?

I should briefly address two other points.  Atheists like to suggest that the Resurrection story was deliberately fabricated.  That idea fails for multiple reasons.  Here are two:

• If Paul and/or the apostles fabricated reports of Jesus’s resurrection, there were people alive at the time who could and would have refuted it.

• If Paul and/or the apostles fabricated it, they chose to submit to hideously torturous deaths to defend a lie they made up, when they could escape by ending the lie.  That is harder to believe than the claim that God came to Earth, died, and, in one unique instance, rose back to life.

Another suggestion is that the letter might have been distorted over time.  Again, evidence is useful:

• Paul’s letter is briefly described in a letter written by Clement, the fourth bishop of Rome, around AD 96.

• Manuscript copyists were meticulous.

• The oldest copy of Paul’s letter that we still have today dates to the late 2nd or early 3rd century.  That is an excellent provenance for a document like this.

This means it is highly likely that the words we have reflect accurately what Paul wrote.  And that is just one piece of the written record.

Personal experience offers additional evidence

People also have evidence that Jesus rose from the dead because they have experienced his living presence in their lives.  Millions upon millions of Christians of every stripe – Catholics, Orthodox, Protestant, Evangelical, Pentecostal, Messianic Jew, and more – can testify that they have experienced the living Jesus.

If you want to check this out, try an experiment.  Find a quiet moment with someone who is actively trying to live a Christian life, and ask them: How have you experienced Jesus’s living presence in your life?

You will hear an amazing range of answers: People who have experienced strength in times of trouble, calm amidst turmoil, an ability to love someone they did not think they could love, forgiveness beyond hoping for, grace that filled their heart, God’s presence when they felt alone, empowerment to do what seemed like an impossible task.

Every person’s story is different.  That DJ I told my students about said, based on her own experience, “With God you are not alone, not stuck, not powerless, not unloved.”

For me, it began with a peace that gradually grounded everything I did, after I asked Jesus to show me that he had risen from the dead and was alive today.

All of this is possible because God chose to come to Earth, live as one of us, teach us how to live, sacrifice himself in an excruciating death, overcome sin and death by his resurrection, and empower us through his Spirit to learn to be like him.

Both the eyewitness testimony from the past and our own eyewitness testimony of Jesus’s work in our lives today tell us that the Resurrection is real.  And that is why we celebrate Easter.

Note: If you would like to explore further the evidence for the truth of the New Testament as a whole, two thoughtful analyses I have found are Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony by Richard Bauckham (Eerdmans, 2006) and The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism by Timothy Keller (Penguin Books, 2008).