How to Be Confident in the Resurrection: Look to Its First Witnesses
Proof of the Resurrection
How can anyone be confident that the resurrection really happened? The first followers of Jesus didn’t claim their leader rose from the dead because of gullible ignorance or blind faith. They knew dead people stay dead. Especially after they began to be persecuted, they had nothing to gain by persisting in their claim that Jesus had returned to life.
Yet some of these women and men had encountered an event so momentous they were ready to die rather than deny they saw a once-dead man alive. These initial eyewitnesses declared what they experienced, and in some cases they died for what they declared. At least a few of their firsthand testimonies eventually found their way into the New Testament.
Even if you think the resurrection of Jesus and the existence of a “Flying Spaghetti Monster” are equally preposterous, the testimonies of the first generation of witnesses should not be dismissed lightly. Something upended the lives of these men and women and made them willing to die for what they believed they had seen. After decades of studying the historical aftermath of these events, I still believe the resurrection makes the best sense of the evidence.
The resurrection is an event to which we can call witnesses, and these witnesses include reports that are traceable to the people, places, and communities where sightings of a resurrected Jesus were first reported. The more closely I examine these texts, the more plausible it seems to me that the stories started with a series of experiences that the first witnesses could not fit into ordinary categories.
Did the Resurrection Really Happen?
Timothy Paul Jones
Written in a conversational tone, this concise booklet addresses the challenge of believing the story of Jesus’s resurrection, providing convincing evidence for this historical event and its impact.
One of the Earliest Recorded Creeds
One of the most important summaries of the resurrection is a creed the apostle Paul incorporated into one of his letters. A creed denotes a summation of beliefs that Christians share.
Believers in Jesus have repeated many creeds over the centuries, but one of the earliest is recorded in Paul’s first letter to the church in Corinth. Even though Paul penned this summation, he was not the one who created it. Someone had passed the creed to Paul, and Paul had repeated the summary of events and witnesses when he visited the Corinthians three or so years before he wrote this letter.1 Here’s the outline of faith Paul recalled in his letter:
. . . that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. (1 Cor. 15:3–7)
This summary includes every crucial truth Christians confess about the resurrection of Jesus. According to the creed, the body of Jesus was not abandoned in a pile of cadavers or left on a cross to be consumed by beasts and birds (“he was buried”). Jesus didn’t ascend physically into the heavens from the cross; his resurrection was a bodily transformation that took place after his death and burial (“he was raised on the third day”).2 Perhaps most important, whatever happened to Jesus was not a private occurrence. Numerous people insisted they saw him after his death, and Christians in Paul’s own day could still interview eyewitnesses who said they had seen Jesus alive.
But where and how did Paul receive this creed in the first place?
The outline Paul recorded in 1 Corinthians almost certainly came from Jerusalem, the very location where Jesus was crucified and where some of his followers later claimed they saw him alive. Not only that, but the creed can also be traced to a time when firsthand witnesses of the life and ministry of Jesus were still alive and leading the Jerusalem church.
So why can we be confident that this creed came from when and where the alleged events took place? The only individuals mentioned by name in the creed are Cephas and James. Cephas is the equivalent in the Aramaic language of Peter, and James was a brother of Jesus. These two men, both of whom knew Jesus personally, were “pillars” in the Jerusalem church in AD 30 (Gal. 2:6–9). The creed mentions their names without any modifiers or explanations, suggesting that the words took shape in a context where both were familiar faces. Taken together, everything we see in this summation of faith points to an origin in Jerusalem soon after the events took place.3
So when could Paul have heard this snippet of summarized testimony? Paul embraced Jesus as his Messiah within a couple of years of Jesus’s execution at most.4 Three years after this reorientation of his life, Paul headed to Jerusalem and spent fifteen days talking with Peter there (Gal. 1:18; see also Acts 9:26–30). Paul most likely received this outline of faith no later than those weeks he spent with Peter in Jerusalem, which means the creed reached Paul five years or less after Jesus’s death.
Of course, it is very possible Paul had heard this summation before his visit to Jerusalem, but it certainly does not seem he would have received these words any later. The next time we encounter Paul after his stopover in Jerusalem, he is already being sent out to share the message of Jesus in Cyprus and Asia Minor (Acts 13:2–14:28). In every place he visited, Paul apparently delivered the same creedal content, and he wasn’t significantly modifying what he received. Even though the Corinthians received this letter three or so years after Paul left their city, the apostle was confident the church would remember what he had told them earlier. If Paul had not been passing on the same outline of faith in every place, he could not have expected the Corinthians to recall what he had said when he was with them in person.
Stories from the Land Where Jesus Lived
And so, the content of the creed can be traced back to a time and a place where people had firsthand knowledge of Jesus—but it is not only the creed in 1 Corinthians 15:3–7 that originated when and where these witnesses were living. The resurrection stories in the Gospels can also be traced to individuals with firsthand knowledge of Jesus.
No one knows for certain where the New Testament Gospels were written, but it is possible to reconstruct certain aspects of where the stories originated. Here is what seems clear based on information inside and outside the Gospels: The stories that were eventually woven into the Gospels originated in locations where the alleged events happened. So why can we be confident when it comes to the regions where these stories originated? The Gospel narratives repeatedly describe very specific topographical trivia that could only have come from people with firsthand knowledge of the regions where the events took place.
The author of Mark’s Gospel knew it was possible, for example, to proceed directly from the Sea of Galilee into the Galilean hill country—a detail that, while accurate, would have been virtually unknown outside that region (Mark 3:7, 13; see also Matt. 14:22–23; 15:29). John’s Gospel records an even more obscure fact, correctly describing the path from Cana to Capernaum as downhill (John 2:12). All four Gospels repeatedly reference the fact that a journey to Jerusalem required going uphill (Matt. 20:17–18; Mark 10:32–33; Luke 2:4, 42; Luke 10:30–31; Luke 18:31; Luke 19:28; John 2:13; 5:1; 7:8–14; 11:55; 12:20). These are only a tiny sample from hundreds of examples that reveal intimate knowledge of the regional topography as well as typical names of people who resided in these locations.5 No one could have known such minutiae without either trekking the terrain in person or writing down detailed testimonies recounted by witnesses who lived in these lands. No maps in this era showed elevations, inclines, or obscure links between locations, and no detailed geographic descriptions of Judea or Galilee survive in any first-century texts.
If second-century accounts of the authorship of the Gospels are correct, these details make sense. Early Christian sources describe the author of Mark’s Gospel as the “follower and translator” of Peter who recorded Peter’s retellings of the stories of Jesus after years of hearing them. The Gospels according to Matthew and Luke borrowed much of Mark’s material, but Luke was also a companion of Paul who added information from “eyewitnesses and ministers of the word” to his Gospel (Luke 1:2), while Matthew’s Gospel includes recollections from the apostle Matthew and perhaps other sources as well. Second-century Christian writings repeatedly mention that the Gospel of John originated with a firsthand follower of Jesus whose name was John.6 If the New Testament Gospels do indeed preserve the words of Peter, John, and others who walked these regions, it is no wonder the texts get so many topographical details correct.
The New Testament Gospels may have been composed in Ephesus or Rome or any number of other cities, but those locations were not where the stories started. The testimonies that have been twined together in the Gospels originated among persons with firsthand knowledge of Judea and Galilee. What’s more, their stories were retold so carefully that seemingly trivial details were safeguarded as the testimonies spread. Whatever happened to Jesus happened—in the words of C.S. Lewis—“at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences,” and early Christians preserved the details of these places as they repeated the stories.7
These details have profound implications for the question of whether or not the resurrection happened. All four New Testament Gospels agree that the body of Jesus was buried, that his body exited the tomb on the third day, and that witnesses saw him alive. If the other stories in the Gospels originated among people in the places where the alleged events occurred, the resurrection stories most likely did as well. Reports of the risen Jesus were not fabricated decades after his death among people who never knew him. The reports can be traced instead to firsthand experiences in and around the city where Jesus was crucified.
Notes:
- Gordon D. Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014), 5–7, 20–23, 802.
- Simon Gathercole, The Gospel and the Gospels: Christian Proclamation and Early Jesus Books (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2022), 44, 117. Vanishing into the realm of the gods was not unknown in Roman narratives. See, e.g., Livy, History of Rome: Books 1–2, trans. B. O. Foster (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1919), 1.16; Diodorus Siculus, Library of History: Books 2.35–4.58, trans. C. H. Oldfather (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1935), 4.38.
- Larry W. Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005), 168–76, 215–16.
- Hurtado, 83.
- Some portions are adapted from Jones, Why Should I Trust the Bible?, 68–69. For further references, see Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2017), 39–92, and Peter J. Williams, Can We Trust the Gospels? (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2018), 51–86.
- On the authorship of the Gospels, see Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History: Books 1–5, trans. Kirsopp Lake (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926), 5.8.2–4; Irenaeus of Lyon, Libros Quinque Adversus Haereses, vol. 2, ed. W. W. Harvey (1857; repr., Rochester, NY: St. Irenaeus, 2013), 3.1.1–2; Tertullian, Adversus Marcionem: Books 4–5, ed. and trans. Ernest Evans (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1972), 4.2. See also Charles E. Hill, “What Papias Said about John (and Luke),” Journal of Theological Studies 49 (1998): 582–629.
- C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1970), 58–60. See also Lewis, Surprised by Joy (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1955), 228, 274.
This article is adapted from Did the Resurrection Really Happen? by Timothy Paul Jones.
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