Christians affirm the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ, that after his crucifixion and burial he was raised to life on the third day, appeared to his followers, and lives forever. The four Gospels narrate the empty tomb and the appearances, and Paul, writing earlier, transmits it as tradition he received rather than composed, a formula in his first letter to the Corinthians that many New Testament scholars, across a wide range of theological positions, date to a period remarkably close to the events themselves, treating it as very early testimony regardless of what historical weight they assign it. The resurrection is understood not as resuscitation, a return to ordinary mortal life of the kind reported for Lazarus, but as entry into a transformed, deathless mode of bodily existence, described as the firstfruits of a general resurrection Christians expect for all the dead.
Not every strand of modern Christian theology reads the claim the same way. Alongside the traditional affirmation of a historical, bodily event, some twentieth-century theologians, Rudolf Bultmann most influentially, proposed reading resurrection language as expressing the abiding significance of Jesus's death for faith rather than reporting a literal historical occurrence, a demythologizing approach most churches and mainstream biblical scholarship have not adopted but which remains part of the modern theological conversation about the claim.