The resurrection of Christ

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.

The resurrection is the pivot of Christian belief, celebrated as the chief feast at Easter and confessed in every historic creed; from it the tradition draws its hope of eternal life and its proclamation that death has been overcome. It is affirmed across all the historic churches, Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant alike, even where they differ on much else.

The dating of Easter has itself been a source of division rather than unity. Eastern and Western churches generally calculate the feast differently, the West following the Gregorian calendar reform of the sixteenth century and the East largely retaining the Julian calendar for the purpose, so that the two traditions often, though not always, celebrate the resurrection on different Sundays, a visible reminder that even the church's most unifying feast carries a real historical fracture in how it is observed. As the vindication of Jesus and the ground of salvation, the resurrection is inseparable from the Trinity and the incarnation, completing the account of who Christians hold Jesus to be, and it distinguishes Christianity's central proclamation from readings of Jesus's life and death as significant only in an ethical or purely spiritual sense, a distinction the tradition itself regards as decisive for what it means to be Christian at all.