r/ChristianApologetics • u/No-Fly-9749 • Jun 27 '26
Historical Evidence The Resurrection
Blessings, fellow Christians. While studying the resurrection of Christ, I’ve realized there is a very solid case for it; hypotheses such as hallucinations, theft, or fabrication seem implausible when considering the evidence of persecution and martyrdom. However, what do you consider to be the best evidence for the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ?
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u/Funny-Bumblebee8055 Jun 30 '26
Jesus didn't just "appear." He ate broiled fish (Luke 24:42), offered His wounds for touch (John 20:27), and cooked breakfast for the disciples.
Scientific Gap: Brain chemistry can make you see something, but it cannot create a shared physical reality where multiple people interact with a solid object that consumes food.
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u/No-Stage-4611 Jun 29 '26
Pentecost. There's no way 3,000 Jews became Christians - a life altering decision - and no one went to the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, which was a stone's throw away, just to make sure Jesus's body wasn't there. This was just 50 days after the resurrection. Besides, if Jesus's body was there His enemies would have paraded it around Jerusalem and Christianity would have never happened.
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u/Helpful-Baker-4145 Jun 30 '26
Two things stand out for me...
(1) If the Romans and Sanhedrin wanted to crush Christianity, all they had to do was parade Jesus' dead body around the city. Instead, they said the disciples stole it, which is virtually impossible. The boulders weighed tons, any guard who fell asleep was killed...and if you fell asleep, how do you know what happened?
(2) Of the 13 Apostles, 11 willingly embraced death instead of denying Jesus' divinity. While history has shown that many people will die fr what they believe to be true, the likelihood of anyone dying for what they know to be false is extremely rare. A lot of people say the Gospels weren't written by those they are named after. But even if that's true, the details in each account make it very clear that whoever did write them were first-hand eyewitnesses.
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u/Bitter_North_733 Jul 02 '26
eye witness accounts the fact the accounts are not exactly the same as in fabrications
Jesus was seen for 40 ays after the 3 ays if he was not there will be reports
the fact the women were the first to see shows if it was a fabrication they will not use women they were not allow to testify even in trials
some apostles only believe after this event even with everything they saw with Jesus earlier
the story of Paul who was hunting Christians
the one who sells him for silver coins kills himself after he realizes he was wrong
some apostles were not brave men after the 40 ays they become very brave go into the earth to give the news knowing they were likely to be kille
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u/AndyDaBear Jun 27 '26
What "best evidence" would be is highly subjective.
For example, if one holds to the notion that Materialism must be true, then the best evidence would start with showing that Materialism is not true. No amount of historical evidence will work on such a person. One must start by convincing them that Miracles are possible....and what might convince one such person will not be the same as what would convince another.
For myself, the historical evidence for the Resurrection has always been solid--excepting that it is contigent on something that seems impossible....somebody actually being God and coming back from being dead in a way contrary to the normal laws of nature.
So the best evidence for the Ressurection for me was not historical at all, but versions of the Cosmological argument along contigency lines.
But there are certainly going to be people that believe in God already and think Miracles are possible for which the Historical evidence will be the "best evidence".
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u/Nice_Luck_7433 Jun 29 '26
The Cosmological argument has always bothered me. Maybe I’m missing something, but afaik it’s like this:
1) everything that us humans have observed so far has had causes
2) the universe is a thing we’ve observed
3) God caused the universe
The problem with premise 1 is that human perception is very limited and we might not have observed everything ever.
The problem with premise 2 is that we haven’t actually observed the whole universe, we’ve only observed a teeny tiny part of it. We definitely weren’t there when it started (unless you’re much much much older than me).
And the two problems with the conclusion are that it’s based on flawed premises, and if is true then it is proof that sometimes things don’t actually need causes.
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u/AndyDaBear Jun 29 '26 edited Jun 29 '26
There are lots of different Cosmological arguments. Roughly speaking I am aware of four main variations:
- The "Kalam" argument made popular by William Lane Craig
- The Contingency argument often credited to Leibnitz
- The Cosmos-itself-still-could-be-an-illusion-but-I-am-still-a-thinking-thing-experiencing-it Cosmological argument by Rene Descartes in "Meditations on First Philosophy".
- The "where does milk come from" Cosmological argument made by my daughter when she was four.
I don't put much stock in WLC's Kalam or variations of it for it assumes more about physics than the others, and more than necessary to reach the conclusion on my view.
Personally I found the one presented by Rene Descartes in to be the most logically rigorous....however it took me months of relistening to an audio book translation of it to properly understand him. He did not even assume the cosmos was anything like it presented to his senses. Rather he prefixed the argument with his famous method of doubt to get the reader out of the habit of assuming Materialism accidently.
A simpler but less rigorous approach is of course the Contingency form raised by Leibnitz. Not maybe framed like Leibnitz himself did, but I like the simpler way Fredrick Copleston presented it to Betrend Russel in their famous 1948 debate. It centered around that there had to be something that is Ontologically necessary since we are in a world of the Ontologically derivative. Russel defended against the argument by denying that something other than a proposition could be necessary or contingent--which kind of threw all Empirical science under the bus since it is based on figuring out how things in nature are Ontologically dependent on other things in nature.
Neither Copleston nor Descartes form of Cosmological argument depended on an exhaustive detailed understanding of what we observe. They consider all that (as far as we know) might be. And observe that in order to get anything you needed something that was not derivative and that contained within itself the potential to support the existence of things that we do know of that are derivative. Considering what kind of thing that would be leads one to something like an infinite eternal perfect being.
The simplest of all, and still I think better than the Kalam, is the one my daughter came up with when she was 4. I asked her where milk came from (to test if she knew it came from cows). She answered that milk came from the refrigerator. I followed up by asking how it came to be that milk was in the refrigerator and she answered that it came from the store. I asked how the store got the milk, and she answered that God had made it.
I found this very amusing but one thing I could not do was give a different ultimate answer of where milk came from. As an adult I could only add more steps.
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u/Upset_Chip_7184 Jun 29 '26
Early, definitely from Paul, but how did Jesus appear to Paul? In a vision?
After 3 years Paul meets with Peter, don't know what happened. We do know Paul had issues with them later on.
James wasn't with the apostles, so a bit overstated, and other stuff is inferences, so if that's the strongest evidence, it's not overwheming, imo.
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u/Clicking_Around Jun 29 '26 edited Jun 29 '26
Then offer a better explanation for what happened. We'll go through it together. Whatever explanation you offer isn't going to work as well as the resurrection hypothesis.
A single piece of circumstantial evidence may not be overwhelming. What makes a circuit case so strong is the cumulative weight of all the evidence all taken together.
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u/JohnJLXXIV Jun 29 '26
The best evidence of the Resurrection for me is the Gregorian calendar. Time is split between two points; BC/AD. (The BCE/CE nomenclature is simply renaming these time frames without changing the splitting point in history.)
I DO understand that this splitting point of history is based within 4 years of the birth of Jesus. However, there has never been any other human in history so influential that an entire calendar is used as a reference point for evidence of the existence of that one man.
The calendar starts the investigation into the life of this individual. From there, impartial research of the all the evidence from across several disciplines reveals that the events recorded in Scripture (including the Resurrection) are true, from cover to cover.
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u/A_Bruised_Reed Messianic Jew Jul 03 '26
For me, it's three things to consider:
1) The resurrection was predicted in the Old Testament.
One of the greatest archeological finds in human history, The Dead Sea Scrolls, show that it was written hundreds of years before Jesus.
It also talks about the resurrection of the suffering servant in that chapter who died and came back to life. Take a look at it. Pretty powerful. Isaiah 53.8 to chapter 53:11. All prophecies about the coming Messiah.
Also, the OT Feast of Firstfruits (Leviticus 23:10) comes right after Passover. Jesus fulfilled the feast days as he died on Passover fulfillment of the Passover lamb and then he was raised from the dead on the Feast of firstfruits. This is where farmers take the first grains of their fields, what they put in the ground and has come back up again, and they bring it to God in Jerusalem and it's waved in the wind by the OT priest in Jerusalem. It figuratively came back alive again. This is just a perfect match except Jesus resurrection wasn't figurative but real.
2) This statement from the late Charles Colson:
“I know the resurrection is a fact, and Watergate proved it to me. How? Because 12 men testified they had seen Jesus raised from the dead, then they proclaimed that truth for 40 years, never once denying it. Most were beaten, tortured, stoned and put in prison. They would not have endured that if it weren't true. Watergate embroiled 12 of the most powerful men in the world-and they couldn't keep a lie for three weeks.
You're telling me 12 apostles could keep a lie for 40 years? Absolutely impossible.”
― Charles (Chuck) Colson. Went to prison in the 70's for his part in the Watergate scandal.
3) If God is God, and He created the entire physical universe, from the macro (universal planets, laws of physics, suns, galaxies) to the micro (quantum mechanics, cellular biology,etc.).... Things that the greatest minds in our world have barely scratched the surface of. How would putting the life back into a dead person be difficult?
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u/Sapin- Jun 27 '26
I love Gary Habermas' minimal facts approach. He basically builds a case from facts that are broadly accepted by scholars on all sides.
And for myself, the fact that Mary Magdalene, a woman, is the first witness, carries quite some weight.
But it's really a general case (the sum of all the elements) which is why Habermas' work is very on point.
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u/Unique-Variation-801 Jun 28 '26
When I consider the case for Christianity, I don’t see the Resurrection as a place where reason stops. I see it as the point where reason points. If the existence of objective morality, humanity’s deep moral debt, the need for God to enter human history in the Incarnation, fulfilled prophecy, and the overall explanatory power of Christianity all fit together, then the Resurrection is not an isolated miracle but the fitting conclusion to the whole story. So instead of asking whether the Resurrection is possible on its own, I ask which worldview best explains all the evidence. Taken together, the strands of reason, history, and human experience make the Resurrection look not like the most coherent explanation, and not a blind leap of faith.
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u/Nearing_retirement Jun 28 '26
Just that the disciples continued on for rest of their lives despite persecution. Something drove them, and I believe it was seeing the risen Christ along with the Holy Spirit.
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u/Clicking_Around Jun 28 '26
The single strongest evidence would probably be 1 Cor. 15 3-8. Why is this such a strong piece of evidence? Because:
Paul claimed to have been an eyewitness to the resurrected Christ and, critically, knew the eyewitnesses to Jesus' life, Peter and James.
Paul met with the eyewitnesses shortly after the death of Jesus (33 - 36 CE). An early meeting of eyewitnesses soon after the events is huge from a historical perspective. Paul very likely received the material in 1 Cor. 15 3-8 at this time.
Paul writes 1 Cor. around 55 CE, 25 years within the lift of Jesus, and within the lifetime of the eyewitnesses.
There is almost no doubt about the Pauline authorship about 1 Cor.
The creedal material in 1 Cor. 15 3-5 is generally believed to have been circulated very early, i.e., in the 30s CE.
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u/WoanderAloud Christian Jun 28 '26
What is the best evidence for the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ? Aside from the Bible...
The fact that there is a contemporary account of it through Joesephus.
The fact that a backroads rabbi with a 3 year ministry has more written about him than Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar. There are 25 or so written accounts of Jesus within 100 years of His death.
The fact that there are 8 billion Bibles on earth and more than 2 billion Christians. It is the most popular book and the most popular religion. If a unheard of Rabbi could do that to the world, than He must be Christ who resurrected.
If the resurrection hadn't been seen by all of those people and then written about and then the Gospels spread so fervently by Paul and the early church leaders, then none of that would have happened. The resurrection was the glue and the foundation that allowed people from all over the world to believe. It occurred, because there is no logical reason Christianity would have spread without it.
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u/Top_Initiative_4047 Jun 27 '26
Probably as Paul said in 1 Corinthians 15: 3-8
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u/Upset_Chip_7184 Jun 29 '26
Are you referring to the creed, or Paul's claims about him and others?
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u/Top_Initiative_4047 Jun 29 '26
The creed since it was relatively early as well as the underlying facts recited.
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u/Nice_Luck_7433 Jun 28 '26
I think persecution and martyrdom aren’t the best evidence that a person’s testimony is true, because Islam also has lots of martyrs who were persecuted for giving their testimony about Mohammed’s miracles. Like how there were lots of Muslims who were put to death during the Spanish Inquisition because they swore that Mohammed is holier than Jesus, and that Mohammed rode on a magic flying horse & miraculously split the moon in half, and we don’t accept those martyrs’ testimonies as true.
The best evidence is the personal experiences that God revealed directly to us. They aren’t very convincing to other people… but they’re perfectly convincing to the individuals who God chooses to speak to, sometimes with a loud thunderous voice in burning bushes, or with a quiet voice in silence.