Chapter 299 of 404

Historical Support for the Resurrection Tradition?

All our early Christian sources unanimously affirm the bodily resurrection of Jesus,¹¹⁴ although 1 Cor 15 attests that Paul had to deal with some Gentile Christians who could assimilate the Palestinian Jewish doctrine only with difficulty and did not wish to accept it beyond the case of Jesus. (The sense in which resurrection was “bodily” may have also varied, as in early Judaism; we return to this subject below.) Within earliest Christianity, however, there remains no debate about the received tradition that Jesus himself rose bodily, unless one is inclined to count as proof inferences from silence offered by some modern scholars without explicit supporting evidence.

By some point in the second century, gnostics and others who found the notion of a bodily resurrection of any sort incompatible with Platonic metaphysics sought to interpret the early Christian tradition differently,¹¹⁵ but there is no clear record of detractors in the Jesus movement, even by way of attempts to answer them, in the first century. Such silence is strange when we consider the centrality of the resurrection teaching to all explicitly known forms of the early Christian movement, and how many debates they had on other issues.

Orthodox Jewish scholar Pinchas Lapide, while doubting that the resurrection proves Jesus’ messianic or divine identity (connected though this has traditionally been to the resurrection),¹¹⁶ nevertheless finds the evidence for his resurrection compelling.¹¹⁷ Many scholars doubt Jesus’ historical resurrection on philosophic or other grounds, but Ladd is generally correct that “Those scholars who are unable to believe in an actual resurrection of Jesus admit that the disciples believed it.”¹¹⁸ That is, apart from philosophic questions about what might have happened to the body, the historical evidence indicates that the early eyewitnesses were convinced that they had seen Jesus genuinely alive.

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