The Resurrection

All four gospels report that the tomb in which Jesus was buried was found empty on the morning of the third day after his crucifixion. Each also reports subsequent appearances: to Mary Magdalene and other women at the tomb, to two disciples on the road to Emmaus, to the eleven remaining apostles gathered together, and, in Paul's account in his first letter to the Corinthians, usually dated within about twenty five years of the crucifixion itself, to more than five hundred people at one time, most of whom Paul says were still alive and could be asked directly.

Paul's list, in 1 Corinthians 15, is treated by most historians, believing and skeptical alike, as the earliest surviving testimony to the resurrection claim, older than any of the gospels as a written text even though the gospels describe events set earlier. What the sources agree on is the shape of the claim: an empty tomb, and a series of encounters afterward that the earliest Christians understood as a bodily return, not merely a vision or a continuing spiritual presence. Paul's letter itself states he is passing on what he "received," language scholars read as technical, indicating an already-fixed formula rather than his own composition, which pushes the tradition close to the events themselves, within a very few years of the crucifixion by most datings.

N.T. Wright's 2003 study, The Resurrection of the Son of God, argues that the combination of an empty tomb and appearance experiences is needed to explain the rise of a very specific and, in Wright's reading, historically unprecedented belief: no strand of contemporary Jewish thought expected a single individual to be bodily raised in the middle of history, ahead of the general resurrection expected at the end of time, so the early Christians' claim needs some real event behind it to explain why they said what they said rather than something more conventional, such as Jesus's spirit living on or his cause continuing.

Gerd Ludemann, arguing from the same historical-critical method to a different conclusion, holds that the appearances are best explained as genuine but visionary experiences, arising out of grief in Peter's case and guilt in Paul's, which the earliest communities then interpreted, collectively and over time, as encounters with a bodily risen Jesus. Both Wright and Ludemann set aside the older swoon theory, that Jesus merely survived the crucifixion, and the stolen body theory, already answered polemically inside Matthew's own gospel, as too weak medically and logistically to explain the sources; the live disagreement among historians is between a real resurrection and a visionary origin for the appearance reports, not between those two older alternatives.