By Jason Smith

Then Jesus said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and look at My hands. Reach out your hand and put it into My side. Stop doubting and believe.” (John 20:27, BSB)

The apostle Paul made the startling claim that “if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins” (1 Corinthians 15:17). Such a statement is astonishing when you consider the implications. Everything in Christianity, Paul says, everything in the faith depends on the truth that Jesus bodily rose from the dead. If Christ didn’t truly rise from the dead, then He did not conquer death — death conquered Him!

The dark and terrifying shadow still hangs over all mankind (Isaiah 25:7-8), and we have no guarantee that we will ever escape the cords of death. That is, unless Jesus’ resurrection is true. Eternal life with God. Hope beyond the grave. Forgiveness of sins. The deity and identity of Christ. It’s all based on the resurrection of Jesus being true. No resurrection, no Christianity.

The good news is that God has left us compelling evidence that the Easter event is a solid fact of history. Here are five pieces of evidence I encourage you to consider before giving a verdict on the truth of Christ’s resurrection.

Evidence #1: Jesus’ death is an undeniable fact of history

Despite the fact that some may doubt Jesus’ death (such as many Muslims) and some radical scholars will doubt that He even existed (such as Richard Carrier),[1] Jesus’ life and death really are historically undeniable. Both Christian and non-Christian sources from the ancient world confirm that Jesus died as a victim of crucifixion.[2] Roman soldiers were highly trained in executing criminals, and they were motivated to not let a self-proclaimed king survive.

In his Gospel, the apostle John tells us He is an eyewitness of Jesus’ death on the cross.[3] In describing the event, John records something fascinating:

“But when they came to Jesus and saw that he was already dead, they did not break his legs. But one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and at once there came out blood and water.  He who saw it has borne witness—his testimony is true, and he knows that he is telling the truth—that you also may believe.” (John 19:33-35)

The fact that he reports seeing both blood and a watery fluid flowing out is powerful evidence that John really did watch Jesus die. Here’s why. Although John had no medical training to interpret what he saw, his eyewitness testimony is exactly what a medical doctor would have expected due to something called pericardial effusion, in which the membrane surrounding the heart fills with fluid as a result of heart failure.[4] John’s testimony stands as 2,000-year-old evidence that he really was an eyewitness of Christ’s death.

Even very liberal scholars, such as John Dominic Crossan, accept Jesus’ death as indisputable fact. He writes, “That [Jesus] was crucified is as sure as anything historical ever can be, since both Josephus and Tacitus … agree with the Christian accounts on at least that basic fact.”[5] Skeptical historian and biblical scholar James Tabor, who has studied the rise of early Christianity in depth, has written, “I think we need have no doubt that given Jesus’ execution by Roman crucifixion he was truly dead.”[6]

Evidence #2: On the Sunday following Jesus’ crucifixion, His tomb was empty.

All four Gospels record that Joseph of Arimathea, a secret disciple, was the one with the courage to bury Jesus. Since Joseph was a member of the Sanhedrin (Luke 23:50-51), the very council that condemned Jesus to death, it’s very unlikely that Christ’s earliest followers would make this up. We are also told that while the men were hiding from the Jewish authorities, the women followers of Jesus were the faithful ones who wanted to anoint His body in the tomb (Luke 23:55-56). Not only that, but the women are the ones who first discover the tomb is empty.

This, too, demonstrates the Gospels give an authentic record of what happened. In the first century, the testimony of women was not even admitted into court. The Jewish Talmud even says that a woman’s testimony was as valid as a criminal’s![7] To be sure, this low view of a woman’s testimony is not only politically incorrect today, it’s also not found in Scripture. Nevertheless, it was the prevailing view of the ancient world. Here’s the point: if you were making up this whole resurrection story in the first century, you wouldn’t pick women as the first eyewitnesses of the empty tomb. The apostles’ willingness to share this somewhat embarrassing fact demonstrates they were committed to faithfully sharing the truth, despite the awkward position it put them in at the time.

Additionally, history tells us that the counter claim from Christianity’s opponents was always that the disciples must have stolen the body.[8] This was an indirect admission that they knew the tomb was empty. It’s also very telling that we have no contradictory burial account whatsoever from either Christian or non-Christian sources.  The fact that the tomb was well-known, as Josephs’ tomb, rules out the possibility that the women or other disciples went to the wrong tomb. If we are not told whose tomb or any details about where Jesus was buried, we might have reason to wonder if they went to the right tomb on that first Easter morning, but there are no competing accounts of another tomb being the real tomb.

Evidence #3: Jesus’ disciples believed they saw Him alive from the dead.

We have every reason to believe that the resurrection appearances that are recorded in the Gospels are based on eyewitness testimony, not legendary accretion over time. The gospel creed that Paul passes on in 1 Corinthians 15:3-7 can be dated to within a few years of the cross, which does not allow time for legendary development. From the earliest records of Christianity, we have people claiming that they truly saw the risen Jesus. The fact that Jesus is recorded as appearing to groups as large as 500 rules out the hallucination theory, because hallucinations are individual experiences that take place in the mind.

We also see the risen Jesus eating with His disciples, cooking them a meal, and telling them to touch the scars on His hands and His side to know He is real.[9] Jesus tells them, “Why are you troubled, and why do doubts arise in your hearts? See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself. Touch me, and see. For a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have” (Luke 24:38-39). This was an undeniably real and physical Jesus. It’s also very difficult for the historian to make sense of the conversion of Jesus’ brother James, the former skeptic (John 7:5), or Paul the one-time enemy of Christianity (Acts 26:10; 1 Corinthians 15:9). Biases are very powerful and both of them formerly thought of Jesus as a false messiah. Only an appearance of the risen Jesus could have turned their world upside down and convinced them that He really was their Lord and Messiah.

Evidence #4: The apostles were willing to suffer and die for their belief in the resurrection.

We can also safely rule out any conspiracy theory that claims the apostles stole Jesus’ body, because we have numerous historical records proving that these men were willing to suffer and die for the truth of the resurrection. While people of other faiths have been willing to die for their faith, the apostles were in the unique position of knowing for sure whether or not they’d seen the risen Jesus. As Michael Licona says, “Liars make poor martyrs.”[10] Origen (c. 185-c. 254), a church father, wrote that Jesus “so thoroughly persuaded” the apostles that He’d risen that they were willing to endure countless sufferings for His name, knowing that eternal life had been guaranteed them through Christ’s resurrection.[11]

In fact, we have numerous accounts of early Christians writing about Peter, Paul, and other apostles willingly going to their death and refusing to deny that they had seen the risen Jesus in the flesh. Under Nero’s rule, Paul was beheaded and Peter was crucified upside down – his final request was that he not be killed in the same manner as his Lord.[12]

I truly want to be sympathetic to the doubting skeptic. I acknowledge that many people feel they have good reason to doubt the resurrection accounts — at least initially. After all, haven’t we been lied to by numerous public figures? And haven’t we been trained to only accept claims that are rational and scientifically supported? Therefore, we have good reason to not blindly accept what we’re told simply because it’s been believed for a long time by many people.

At the same time, we should consider what it would mean if the disciples did lie and the resurrection was just a big hoax. Ask yourself, what would they gain from lying? People generally tell lies when it benefits them in some way. Either they get something out of it, or it makes them look better. Yet, as we’ve seen, the only things assured for the disciples were persecution and martyrdom.

The evidence is so powerful that the disciples were radically transformed by some kind of experience of seeing the risen Jesus that even agnostic historians will concede that something life-changing must have occurred. Atheist and historian Gerd Lüdemann provides this astonishing admission, “It may be taken as historically certain that Peter and the disciples had experiences after Jesus’ death in which Jesus appeared to them as the risen Christ.”[13]

Evidence #5: The resurrection led the disciples to radically alter their religion.

We need to remember that the first Christians were Jews, and as faithful Jews, they had been taught to never worship a mere man[14] as if he was the transcendent God or call anyone “Creator,” “Savior,” and “Redeemer” other than Yahweh, the one true God of Israel.[15] Thus, by worshiping Jesus as God, they were also risking eternal divine condemnation for promoting blatant idolatry — that is, if they were wrong about Jesus’ resurrection.

N. T. Wright has made the case that no faithful Jew anticipated a dying, let alone rising, Messiah. In fact, the resurrection was never viewed as something that would happen to one individual in the middle of history, but rather as something that happened to everyone at the end of history.[16] The fact that Jesus’ messianic claims got Him crucified should have been the divine signal that Jesus was certainly not the Messiah, because, according to the Jewish law, a man hanged on a tree is “cursed by God” (Deuteronomy 21:23).[17] But the interesting thing is that the disciples didn’t try to muffle this passage from their law. Instead, they shouted it from the rooftops! Peter said of Jesus, “They put him to death by hanging him on a tree” (Acts 10:39, italics added). Paul explains that after Jesus died to fulfill Jewish prophecy, “they took him down from the tree and laid him in a tomb” (Acts 13:29, italics added).

Jesus’ death, the apostles proclaimed, fulfilled God’s promise to put away man’s sin through His substitutionary death. Jesus died in our place, they explained. We must remember, however, that the disciples didn’t come to this conclusion until after they saw the resurrected Christ. In a very real sense, the resurrection gave the disciples permission to worship the man Jesus as God.

In addition to worshiping Jesus as God, the first Christians came to understand that the one true God existed as three distinct persons. They also moved their day of worship from Saturday to Sunday, the day the resurrection took place. They stopped sacrificing animals because they saw Jesus as the final and ultimate Lamb of God. In lieu of the Jewish Passover, they began observing the Lord’s Supper, which remembers not Jesus’ life but His death. For the faithful Jew to suddenly trade in all these long held and treasured religious practices in exchange for new ones has to be explained by the historian. My argument is that it can only be explained by the resurrection of Jesus.

I have been discussing the most important, unique, and defining event in all of history. In a remarkable display of grace and self-sacrifice, Jesus allowed Himself to be swallowed by death for us. But having done so, Jesus then broke the jaws of death from the inside and came forth. As a result, sin and Satan have no claim on the believer, and we no longer need to fear death. We have seen that there are indeed good reasons and evidence for taking the resurrection seriously. If true, we not only have hope for life after death, but for bodily life after death, because Jesus Himself rose bodily from the grave and promises to raise us in like manner.[18] Therefore, you can have a real and solid hope — something you can confidently stake your life on. Jesus’ tomb is empty, and He is alive! Now, what will your response be?

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[1] Richard Carrier, On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2014). Even the skeptical historian Bart Ehrman writes, “Jesus existed, and those vocal persons who deny it do so not because they have considered the evidence with the dispassionate eye of the historian, but because they have some other agenda that this denial serves.” Bart Ehrman, Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2012).

[2] Josephus, Antiquities 18.64. Josephus in Ten Volumes, vol. 9, Jewish Antiquities, Loeb Classical Library, Louis H. Feldman, trans. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981); Tacitus, Annals 15.44 (c. AD 115).

[3] John repeatedly emphasizes the importance of his personally witnessing the events of Jesus’ life in his writings: John 19:35; 20:30-31; 21:24-25; 1 John 1:1-5.

[4] Strobel, The Case for Christ, 195-198.

[5] John Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1994), 163.

[6] James D. Tabor, The Jesus Dynasty: The Hidden History of Jesus, His Royal Family, and the Birth of Christianity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), 230.

[7] “Any evidence which a woman [gives] is not valid (to offer), also they are not valid to offer. This is equivalent to saying that one who is Rabbinically accounted a robber is qualified to give the same evidence as a woman” (Talmud, Rosh Hashannah 1.8). The first century Jewish historian Josephus similarly writes, “But let not the testimony of women be admitted, on account of the levity and boldness of their sex, nor let servants be admitted to give testimony on account of the ignobility of their soul; since it is probable that they may not speak truth, either out of hope of gain, or fear of punishment.” (Josephus, Antiquities 4.8.15)

[8] Not only is this the story being spread by the guards and high priests according to Matthew 28:11-15, Justin Martyr writes in his Dialogue with Trypho, written in AD 150-155, that this was still the story being propagated by opponents of Christianity.

[9] See Luke 24:36-42; John 20:19-27; 21:4-14.

[10] Michael Licona, quoted in Lee Strobel, The Case for the Real Jesus (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2007) Location 2203 on Kindle edition.

[11] Origen, Contra Celsum, 2.56 in Roberts, Donaldson, and Coxe, eds. and trans., The Ante-Nicene Fathers.

[12] 1 Clement 5:2-7; 42:3; Polycarp, To the Philippians 9:2, Cited and translated in Gary Habermas and Michael Licona, The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus, 54. Also see Scorpiace, 15, in Roberts, Donaldson, and Coxe, eds. And trans., The Ante-Nicene Fathers.

[13] Gerd Lüdemann, What Really Happened to Jesus? Trans. John Bowden (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1995), 80.

[14] Numbers 23:19 says, “God is not man, that he should lie, or a son of man, that he should change his mind.” Also see 1 Samuel 15:29; 1 Kings 8:27; Psalm 139:7; Jeremiah 23:24.

[15] See Isaiah 41:14; 43:1-3, 10-15; 44:6-8, 24; 45:14-23; 46:8-9, 12-13; 47:4; 48:17-20; 54:5; Jeremiah 31:11; 50:34.

[16] N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope, 33.

[17] See Deuteronomy 21:22-23 for full passage.

[18] Philippians 3:21