The Resurrection as the Center of Christian Practice

Whatever their theology, every historic Christian tradition places the resurrection at the center of what it affirms, stated as the rising on the third day in both the Apostles' Creed and the Nicene Creed, the two texts most Christian bodies share. Easter, not Christmas, is the oldest and highest feast of the Christian calendar, and the weekly observance of Sunday rather than the Jewish Sabbath is itself explained across traditions as a standing commemoration of the day of the resurrection. Traditions differ on the further theological weight the event carries: some read it primarily as vindication of Jesus's identity and teaching, others as the guarantee of believers' own future resurrection, a connection Paul draws explicitly in the same chapter of Corinthians that preserves the earliest appearance list.

Eastern and Western liturgies mark the day differently, from the Orthodox paschal proclamation of Christ is risen answered by the congregation, to the Easter Vigil's new fire and baptisms in the Western churches, but the claim under all the variation is the same one Paul recorded: that Jesus was raised and appeared to witnesses who were willing to say so. The dating of Easter itself became a source of division early on, with different regional churches computing the date from the Jewish Passover calendar or from the solar calendar in use at Rome, a dispute the First Council of Nicaea addressed by fixing a common method; the Eastern and Western churches still frequently keep the feast on different Sundays because they retained different underlying calendars after that ruling.