The Resurrection of Jesus

The earliest surviving written testimony to the resurrection is not a Gospel but a fragment embedded in one of Paul's letters. In the fifteenth chapter of his first letter to the Corinthians, written around 53 to 54 CE, Paul quotes what most scholars agree is an even older creedal formula, a fixed list of resurrection appearances that he says he had himself received, which places its origin within a very few years of the crucifixion. The Gospels, written later, add the tradition of an empty tomb discovered by women followers. What can be established by ordinary historical method and what the claim itself asserts are treated separately by scholars.

Historians can examine the empty tomb tradition, the early date of the appearances list, and the transformation the early community underwent, but whether these are best explained by an actual bodily resurrection or by some other cause is a question historical method alone cannot settle, since it turns on whether a resurrection is the kind of event that can happen. The modern debate has notable defenders on each side: N.T. Wright argues at length that a bodily resurrection remains the best explanation of the combined evidence, while Bart Ehrman argues that visionary or grief-related experience among the early followers is the more parsimonious explanation. This entry states the positions and does not choose between them.

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.