Most current philosophers start from the principle that miracles simply don’t happen, and that makes the claim of the resurrection impossible. However, by doubting the resurrection you end up with a huge problem on your hands when trying to explain the events that took place in the first century — namely: the cross killed someone, in the tomb there was no one, and days later people began to see someone.
So that we can be honest, I invite you to set aside your prejudices, whether they are philosophical, religious, or scientific. Set your certainties aside, and let’s be honest and analyze the historical facts; afterwards, at the end, you can draw your own conclusion.
The cross killed someone
Crucifixion was nothing new for the Romans. The practice of sentencing criminals to death and executing them on a cross was common among the Romans and very useful for any empire that wanted to assert its power over conquered peoples. Let’s not be naive, the Romans knew how to kill a person. More than that, the penalty, in case of failure in the execution process, was that those responsible would pay with their own lives.
The historical evidence for Jesus’ execution is enormous. We start with the report of some eyewitnesses: “The soldiers led Jesus to Golgotha… he was thirsty and the soldiers offered him wine to ease the pain, but he didn’t accept. Then they nailed him to the cross… it was about nine in the morning. Two other criminals were crucified with him, one to the right, the other to the left… shortly after three in the afternoon he gathered the little strength he had, gave a cry of pain, and breathed his last. The captain of the guard made sure he was no longer breathing” — accounts collected by Mark / translation from Greek to English by Eugene Peterson; English-to-Portuguese translation done by me.
Between 20 and 30 years after this event, Paul, in his letter to Philippi, a Roman colony in the mountains of northern Greece, writes “Jesus did not demand special privileges, but lived a self-denying and obedient life, having also a self-denying and obedient death — and in the worst form: crucifixion.” [1]
These are two reports from letters written while the eyewitnesses were still alive and could be consulted, but they aren’t the only ones. There are several accounts in other documents from ancient-world historians like Thallus, Josephus, Tacitus, Pliny, Mara bar Serapion, and Lucian of Samosata.
Jesus’ death is not only affirmed by ancient historians, but for the overwhelming majority of contemporary academia, it’s indisputable that Jesus really died.
“The fact that Jesus was crucified and killed is as certain as any other historical event” — written by the New Testament historian and atheist John Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography
“One of the most well-documented and true historical facts is that Jesus was crucified by order of the prefect of Judea, Pilate” — written by another New Testament historian and atheist, Bart Ehrman — The New Testament: An Historical Introduction
“Clearly, the weight of historical and medical evidence indicates that Jesus was already dead before being pierced by a spear… interpretations that Jesus did not die on the cross go against everything known by medicine today” — William D. Edwards, “On The Physical Death of Jesus Christ” — Journal of the American Medical Association, 1986, 255(11):1455-1463 — free translation [2]
In the tomb there was no one
Christianity was born after Jesus’ death. The movement that, until his death, was almost entirely formed by Jews, grew exponentially after the events of that Passover, and against all odds, in just three centuries, took over the Roman Empire. Perhaps the greatest figure responsible for this “takeover of Rome” was Paul. He took on his own shoulders the mission of taking the message of Jesus to non-Jews, and strategically he plants a church in Corinth, very probably still in the first decade.
If you needed to transport goods to Rome from anywhere in the East, you would probably pass through Greece, through the Corinth/Cenchrea bottleneck. Corinth bustled with goods and sailors. Whatever happened in Corinth would soon be talked about throughout the empire.
Approximately twenty years after the events that took place that Passover in Jerusalem, Paul writes a letter to the church in Corinth and says: “The first thing I did was present to you the Message: the Messiah died for our sins, was buried, and rose on the third day… If Christ is not risen, everything we taught you is wrong, and you have invested your life in an illusion. If Christ is not alive, then I am guilty and a liar, and everything I presented to you is nothing but deception. If Christ has not risen, and all we have from Him are teachings for a few short years of life, woe to us” — I Corinthians 15
I made a point of citing Paul, so we can grasp how central to Christianity the message of the resurrection was. It would be literally impossible to start a religion based on the idea that a man rose from the dead, if his body were still in the tomb.
It’s worth remembering that Jesus was persecuted, unjustly condemned, and killed by both Jews and Romans, the two main powers of the time. These powers, upon realizing that Jesus’ disciples started shouting from the rooftops that he had risen, could easily have gone to the tomb and shown the body. But no — what they did was “called a meeting with the leaders and devised a plan. They bribed the guards with a large sum of money so they would say: Jesus’ disciples came at night and stole the body while we were sleeping… that version, forged by the Jewish Council, is still in circulation” — Matthew’s account, ch. 28.
The story told by the disciples has another “problem.” According to all the accounts we have access to, the first witnesses of the empty tomb were women, who weren’t accepted as credible witnesses at that time. This detail would, at the very least, weaken the credibility of the account, and if the empty tomb were a legend, then surely the male disciples would be reported as those who discovered the scene. [3]
In the last two centuries the hypothesis was raised that Jesus had not been placed in the tomb, but that all the crucified criminals were buried in a common grave. Well, that was the case until 1968, when the remains of Jehohanan were found. What was initially taken as a strong argument against the resurrection — with some saying that “Jesus had been found” — soon became more evidence in favor of the resurrection, because the fact that a man killed by crucifixion in first-century Jerusalem was buried, confirms the account that Jesus was also buried. [4]
People began to see someone
Paul, in his famous letter to the church in Corinth, cites a poem/creed that he says he received and passed on to the Corinthians. To better understand the power of a Poem or Creed in the first century, just think about how we teach our children to memorize something. There are songs to memorize the alphabet, the vowels, the multiplication table, the books of the Bible. Teachers of the famous “third-year” prep classes use and abuse mnemonics to help students memorize math formulas. In a time when access to physical forms of note-taking was infinitely inferior to what we have today, it was common for songs and poems to be used to pass knowledge along.
So, Paul, writing to the Corinthians, says: “The first thing I did was present to you the Message I received: The Messiah died for our sins… was buried and rose from the dead on the third day… I told you that he appeared alive to Peter, then to his closest followers and later to more than five hundred followers at the same time — many of them are still around, then he spent some time with James and with the rest of those he called, and finally, he appeared alive to me.” — I Corinthians 15
Paul not only mentions the creed, but he also names names. As written above, it was perfectly possible for someone from Corinth to go to Jerusalem and check the facts for himself. And that’s what Paul invites people to do. He recites the poem with the three main points — death, burial, and resurrection — but he doesn’t stop there. He reports who the witnesses were, how it happened, and even mentions that many of them are still alive, that is, you could go there and talk to them.
Now let’s look at the list of witnesses. It begins with Peter, then the closest followers and another five hundred followers. Any skeptic can argue that these people had “reasons” to tell the story that they saw Jesus. But what stands out from a historical point of view is not what they say, but how they act. The accounts in the gospels are embarrassing for any of the disciples. On any page of the gospels you’ll find disciples arguing about which of them was best at something, failing to perform miracles, doubting Jesus, running scared from the Roman soldiers, and so on. Until Jesus dies, and they, instead of acting as they always had — afraid, fleeing, hiding, forgetting it all — after all, their leader had been executed in a public square, literally — decide to stand up and keep carrying the message, which (and this should never be forgotten) was not a message of territorial conquest or climbing to power, but a message of servanthood and care for the poor and widows. These twelve men, and many others, were threatened, imprisoned, beaten, and finally killed for one simple reason: they said that Jesus had risen.
If that weren’t enough, the list includes a skeptic and an enemy of the Christians.
James, Jesus’ brother, never followed Jesus during his lifetime. Some witness reports say that James and the other brothers even provoked Jesus to go to Jerusalem and use his powers to climb to power, instead of walking around with fishermen in Galilee, “His brothers said: ‘Why don’t you go to the festival, so your disciples can see the works you do? Whoever wants to be known can’t stay hidden in a corner. If you take seriously what you do, show yourself to the world.’ His brothers pressured him because they did not believe in him.” — John 7
According to Paul, Jesus appeared to James, after his death, and according to the same Paul, in his letter to the church in Galatia, when Paul went to Jerusalem to visit the leaders of the church, James was one of them! Luke, in his account of the acts of the apostles after Jesus’ resurrection, says that, years later, when he and Paul went to Jerusalem for another visit, there was James again, working as a leader of the church. Not only that, but according to the historian Josephus, this same James, a skeptic during the years he lived close to Jesus, was condemned to stoning in Jerusalem, and died as a martyr. All because he saw his brother resurrected.
Last on the list, but no less important, is Paul. Paul grew up in a pagan city, whose inhabitants induced the Jews to detach themselves from their traditions and to live like the rest of the peoples. Paul’s family resisted that pressure. They didn’t even sit at the same table as non-Jews and sent their son to Jerusalem to be educated in a “Jewish college,” not yet contaminated by worldly ideas.
In the same account by Luke cited above, but a few pages (and years) earlier, he tells about the persecution of Christians in Jerusalem: “Shouting and booing, the crowd rushed at Stephen like a stampede of cattle. They dragged him out of the city and stoned him. The leaders asked a young man named Paul to take care of their robes… Paul showed himself very cruel, devastating the church, invading homes, taking men and women to jail. Forcing the followers of Jesus to leave their homes and live as refugees. During all this time, Paul promoted a tireless persecution of the disciples, eager to exterminate them.” — Acts 8 and 9
This same Paul, after, according to his own testimony, having met Jesus alive, drops everything he had invested his entire life to achieve and joins the group he was persecuting: “Paul spent some days with the disciples in Damascus, but quickly got to work, without wasting time, preaching in the synagogues that Jesus was the Son of God” — Acts 9
Paul gives only one explanation for this radical change in his life: He appeared to me!
So this is what we have on our hands. The historical facts we have are that Jesus was killed and then was buried on Friday night. His tomb was empty on Sunday morning, and hundreds of people, in the very same city where these events happened, started saying they saw him, ate with him, talked to him. It was not a supernatural appearance. Their account is that they saw, talked, drank, and ate with Jesus himself in flesh and blood. Not only that, but there was a radical change in the behavior of these people, to the point that most of them preferred to be killed rather than deny the story they were telling.
So, what explanations can we give?
1) He wasn’t dead
This explanation isn’t taken very seriously in academia, but it’s worth mentioning. The idea is that the Romans failed in trying to kill Jesus, and he was placed in the tomb still alive. This theory starts to weaken when we think that a 30-year-old man, after being tortured for an entire night, going more than 30 hours without eating, hanging on a cross with arms and feet nailed and the puncture of a spear that tore through one of his lungs, survived. But not only did he survive, he survived, opened the tomb from the inside, slipped past several Roman soldiers (whether through violence or by being very quiet), and appeared to his disciples.
Even if all that were possible, no one would say he had risen. The disciples would help him and medicate him, not kneel and call him God.
2) The disciples stole the body
See, great liars don’t make great martyrs. People generally don’t die for what they know is a lie.
The most common argument I hear when this topic comes up is that fanatical religious people can hijack planes and blow up buildings full of people. But let me make something very clear: These people aren’t martyrs, they’re murderers. The witnesses of the risen Jesus were killed for what they believed; they didn’t kill anyone.
If they stole the body, they knew the resurrection story was a lie, and there is no other event in history where such a large number of people, knowing something to be a lie, accepted dying for that lie. Look — I’m not talking about someone who “believes” Jesus rose. These men and women knew whether the story they were telling was true or not.
3) Mass hallucination
This theory suggests that people wanted it so badly to be true that Jesus had risen that they began to see him and firmly believe in it. The bigger problem with this theory is that, although it’s even common to talk to wives who say they’ve seen their late husbands, or to parents who saw the children they lost to death, this is not the same kind of report we have about the events that happened after Jesus’ death.
In one of the reports, Jesus appears among the disciples, eats and drinks with them. These are physical evidences that something happened. If it had only been a vision, the question remains: where did the bread that was on the table go, and who emptied the cup of water? At the end of his account, John tells that one day when they were coming back from fishing, Jesus was on the beach grilling fish and waiting for them for the meal. That is something physical, not metaphorical or supernatural.
Beyond that, there is no scientific evidence or historical record of the possibility of mass hallucinations. Even in the case of contamination of a group of people, whether by drugs or by disease, hallucinations are individual, not collective.
4) Jesus rose from the dead.
If you still don’t believe, I understand. It’s really hard to change your mind from one day to the next. Doubting is normal — I’d say even good. But, at some point, you’ll have to present, even if only to yourself, an explanation for this radical change of opinion in the minds of these first-century people, for the hundreds of eyewitnesses, and for the countless other details of the historical facts reported here.
As Pascal wrote, “I believe those witnesses whose neck is cut off.” Almost all the apostles and the first Christian leaders died for their faith, and it’s hard to believe that this kind of self-sacrifice was made just to support a rumor.
Science cannot prove that miracles don’t happen, just as science cannot prove or measure many other things. There’s no way to scientifically prove that something is good or bad, or that a sunset is ugly or beautiful, or that a Mozart composition is beautiful. Science cannot prove mathematics, for example; on the contrary, it presupposes mathematics.
To embrace the world from a purely natural point of view is to give up who we are. Naturally and scientifically, we can’t even prove the past or our memories.
Paul, Jesus, and so many authors who wrote these accounts don’t invite us to have a “blind faith.” If that were the case, they would have written only one sentence: “Jesus is God, bow your knees” — or they wouldn’t have bothered to cite so many witnesses by name (as Luke does, for example), or to cite dates, events, names of prefects, kings, religious leaders. No, their invitation is not to a blind faith or a leap in the dark.
John ends his account by saying: “There are many other things that Jesus did. If they were all written, each one of them, one by one, I cannot imagine a world large enough to hold such a library. But I, a disciple and eyewitness of all things, wrote these here, so that you may know that the account is reliable and accurate.” — John 21
Luke, at the beginning of his book, writes: “Several people have taken the trouble to put in writing the extraordinary facts that have taken place among us. They based their accounts on eyewitnesses who dedicated their own lives to this message. I carefully investigated these accounts, getting acquainted with the story from the beginning, and decided to write everything down so that there will be no doubt about the reliability of all that you have heard” — Luke 1
The invitation is for you to take an attitude of trust based on evidence. Jesus said: “forget for a moment what I have said about myself and consider the simple evidence of the actions that are before your eyes. Maybe then things will become clear.” — John 10
Sources:
[1] It’s not appropriate here to discuss the reliability of the letters that today we call the New Testament as historical documents; I should return to the subject in the future, but for those who wish to dig deeper into the topic, I recommend the book, in English, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses by Richard Bauckham.
[2] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/403315