INTRODUCTION
The Christian faith is predicated upon the remarkable claim that a historical person, Jesus of Nazareth, rose from the dead and therefore was, as he claimed, God’s Son in a unique sense. But how credible is the claim of Jesus’ resurrection? We will investigate that question historically.
Now one doesn’t come to a study of Jesus’ resurrection in a vacuum. Every investigator brings with him certain assumptions, which he presupposes in his inquiry and which, if challenged, might themselves become the subject of investigation and justification. Permit me, then, to state very clearly two presuppositions with which I approach our question.
First, I presuppose the existence of God, as demonstrated by the arguments of natural theology, such as the cosmological, teleological, and axiological arguments. This is the approach taken by classical defenders of the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection such as Hugo Grotius, Samuel Clarke, and William Paley, as well as by such contemporary scholars as Wolfhart Pannenberg, Richard Swinburne, and Stephen Davis.
Now I realize that many people today don’t share this presupposition; atheists and agnostics don’t acknowledge the existence of a transcendent Creator and Designer of the universe. This is a huge difference in one’s worldview that will, of course, radically affect how one assesses competing explanations of the facts. But our space and topic are limited, so if one is interested in the justification for belief in God’s existence, one may consult my forthcoming book in this same series on that subject.1
Second, I presuppose that our background knowledge includes a good deal of information about the historical Jesus, including his radical personal claims, his teaching, and his crucifixion. In so doing, I stand squarely in the mainstream of New Testament scholarship concerning the historical Jesus. Again, I realize that radical critics don’t share this presupposition. But the majority of New Testament scholars today agree that the historical Jesus possessed an unparalleled sense of authority, the authority to stand and speak in the place of God Himself. He claimed that in himself the Kingdom of God had come, and he carried out a ministry of miracle-working and exorcisms as signs of that fact. According to the German theologian Horst George Pohlmann:
Today there is virtually a consensus... that Jesus came on the scene with an unheard of authority, with the claim of the authority to stand in God’s place and speak to us and bring us to salvation. With regard to Jesus there are only two possible modes of behavior: either to believe that in him God encounters us or to nail him to the cross as a blasphemer. Tertium non datur. [There is no third way.]2
So I’m also very safely situated with respect to my second presupposition.
An investigation of the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus will involve two steps: First, one must establish what facts are to be explained and, second, one must ask whether Jesus’ resurrection is the best explanation of those facts. There are basically three main purported facts at issue:
1. the discovery of Jesus’ empty tomb by a group of
his female followers on the Sunday morning after his
crucifixion;
2. various individuals and groups’ experiencing
appearances of Jesus alive after his death; and
3. the origin of the earliest disciples’ belief that God had
raised Jesus from the dead.
If these three facts can be established as historical, the question will then be whether they are best explained by what I’ll call the “Resurrection Hypothesis”—namely, that God raised Jesus from the dead, or by some other explanation.
All historians recognize that Jesus of Nazareth met his untimely death by Roman crucifixion at the time of the Jewish Passover feast in Jerusalem. We therefore take that historical fact as given. The question then facing the historian is, What happened following Jesus’ crucifixion? This book looks first at the facts to be explained, and then at competing explanations of these facts.