(Last revised Jan. 29, 2026)
In the first century C.E. (Common Era) some people in the lands bordering the eastern Mediterranean Sea were claiming that a person named Jesus had died and was raised from the dead. These claims helped spread a growing movement which heralded Jesus not only as the Christ (the Greek term for the Jewish Messiah, or “anointed one”), but as the first of those to be resurrected in the end times, and ultimately as equal to God.
Trying to discern what actually happened to generate these claims is one of the great puzzles of history. Even so, I think it is an apt place to begin in sorting out what happened at the outset of the Christian religion. We might question everything that’s been written about Jesus, but we know with certainty that his early followers talked about his resurrection from the dead. And because that belief had an influence on almost everything else they said about him, it needs to be taken into account in assessing our sources when they recount his life and teachings.
Is there any evidence for the resurrection of Jesus? There are three types of evidence still in existence, all from early Christian sources. First, four “gospels” recounting events of Jesus’ life and death, and later canonized as scripture by the Christian church, say that a few of his disciples discovered that the tomb he had been buried in was empty two days after his body had been laid there. Second, three of those gospels and one other canonized Christian scripture, the Acts of the Apostles, describe several earthly actions of the resurrected Jesus. And third, the Christian missionary Paul wrote a letter recounting a tradition that some disciples experienced Jesus again after his death. Let’s look at each of those in turn.
The empty tomb
The earliest reference to the empty tomb that we know of is found at the end of the gospel which is traditionally attributed to “Mark,” who was thought to have been an associate of Peter, a leading figure in the early Christian community. The writing of that gospel is now usually dated to around 70 C.E., about four decades after Jesus’ execution by Roman soldiers is assumed to have taken place. (Later on this website I will have more to say about the gospel and the dating of documents and events.) The following is how the gospel ends, with the “him” in the first sentence referring to the corpse of Jesus:
When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. They had been saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?” When they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back. As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side, and they were alarmed. But he said to them, “Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.” So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. (Mark 16: 1-8, as translated from Greek in the New Revised Standard Version Updated of the Christian Bible.)
That’s it–no postmortem appearances of Jesus, just a mysterious man in the tomb announcing Jesus was raised and that his disciples will see him in the district of Galilee. Some early copies of Mark’s gospel (also referred to simply as “Mark”) contain additional material about appearances of Jesus that read like condensed versions of what is found in the other gospels, but the two earliest copies of Mark we have, both from the 4th century, and many later ones, end as above. Both Eusebius, the Church historian who lived at the end of the 3rd and beginning of the 4th century, and Jerome, the Christian Biblical scholar of a century later, knew of copies of Mark that ended as above and doubted the authenticity of the additional material found in other copies of Mark. (Segal, 2004: 446, citing Frank W. Beare, The Earliest Records of Jesus, 1962) The academic consensus is that the original version of Mark ends there, and even Wes Huff, a popular modern defender of the Christian faith, doubts the additional material was in the original manuscript.
Matthew, Luke and John, the putative authors of the other three canonical gospels, also have the story of the discovery of the empty tomb, but with variations in the details, such as how many women went there, whether one or two “angels” were at the tomb, and whether the angel(s) instructed them that Jesus would appear to the disciples in Galilee. Matthew adds extra drama to the scene with an earthquake and the angel coming down from heaven to roll the stone away in front of the women. Luke says explicitly that the women did not find the body of Jesus in the tomb. All three say the women (or woman) went back to the other disciples of Jesus to tell them what happened, unlike Mark who leaves them close-lipped about what they saw. (And leaves the reader with the puzzle of how Mark could have learned of the story.) All three follow up the story with appearances by Jesus, but for now let us stick with the story up to the point where the women leave the tomb.
Luke and John add a significant detail: Peter goes back to the tomb and verifies that it is empty. In Luke the scene with Peter is a brief line, simply saying that after hearing the women Peter ran back to the tomb and looked in, seeing the burial linen laid aside but no body. He leaves wondering what was going on. (The line, Lk 24:12, is not found in all of the early manuscripts and may have been added later by a copyist to harmonize it with the story in John.) In John only one woman, Mary Magdalene, goes to the tomb and sees the stone moved, but no man or angel is present. She runs away and encounters Peter and another unnamed disciple and tells them what she saw. Those two hurry to the tomb and go in, Peter entering first, to find the body missing and the burial cloths lying there. (Lüdemann 2004: 114-117, argues that the episode with Peter and the other disciple is a later insertion to the original manuscript based on the similar scene in Luke, as it interrupts the flow of the story and creates problems in the narrative. Yes, the two theories noted within parentheses in this paragraph conflict.)
John has yet more that is different. After Peter and the other disciple depart, Mary remains sitting by the tomb crying. She takes another look into the tomb and now sees two angels, who ask her why she is crying. She tells them someone removed the body from the tomb and she doesn’t know where to find it. Mary then turns around and sees Jesus but does not recognize him at first. They speak to each other and she realizes it is Jesus, and it is he who gives her a message which she then conveys to the disciples. So although in John’s gospel Peter is the first to witness the empty tomb, Mary is the first to see the risen Jesus. (The importance of references to Peter will be explained below.)
The differences in the gospel stories indicate why one cannot make a defensible argument that they recount history with complete accuracy. It is possible there are historical events behind their stories, but we have to be cautious in taking any of what the gospels present at face value. If small details are historically inaccurate, larger parts of their narratives may be as well. (We will find even larger discrepancies between them in the next section.) The general consensus of scholars is that the authors of the gospels were not aiming to write accurate histories in line with our modern expectations. Rather, their aims were theological and evangelistic—explaining and spreading their understanding of Jesus’ significance.
Given this caveat, there are two ways of explaining the origin of the empty tomb story: that it is based on a real event or it is entirely fictional. Let’s start with the second type of explanation first.
Empty tomb stories were a common trope in Greco-Roman fictional literature in the first century. The scholar Robyn Faith Walsh says that she has identified more than one-hundred twenty stories of missing bodies and/or empty tombs (see this video at 19:50). Here is a striking passage from the novel Callirhoe:
At the crack of dawn Chaereas turned up at the tomb, ostensibly to offer wreaths and libations, but in fact with the intention of doing away with himself; he could not bear being separated from Callirhoe and thought that death was the only thing that would cure his grief. When he reached the tomb, he found that the stones had been moved and the entrance was open. He was astonished at the sight and overcome by fearful perplexity at what had happened. Rumor—a swift messenger—told the Syracusans this amazing news. They all quickly crowded round the tomb, but no one dared go inside until Hermocrates gave an order to do so. The man who was sent in reported the whole situation accurately. It seemed incredible that even the corpse was not lying there. Then Chaereas himself determined to go in, in his desire to see Callirhoe again even dead; but though he hunted through the tomb, he could find nothing. Many people could not believe it and went in after him. They were all seized by helplessness. One of those standing there said, “The funeral offerings have been carried off — it is tomb robbers who have done that; but what about the corpse — where is it?” Many different suggestions circulated in the crowd. Chaereas looked towards the heavens, stretched up his arms, and cried: “Which of the gods is it, then, who has become my rival in love and carried off Callirhoe and is now keeping her with him — against her will, constrained by a more powerful destiny? That is why she died suddenly — so that she would not realize what was happening. That is how Dionysus took Ariadne from Theseus, how Zeus took Semele. It looks as if I had a goddess for a wife without knowing it, someone above my station. (As translated by B.P. Reardon)
Note the mourner who shows up at dawn to pay proper respects, the stones moved from the entrance, the astonishment and perplexity of the witnesses, the fruitless search of the tomb, and the mourner’s conclusion that the deceased had become a goddess, taken up to live with a god. In this story the reason for the body’s disappearance is that the woman who supposedly died had recovered in the tomb and tomb robbers carried her off into slavery. But many of the elements of the scene are the same as those in Mark.
B.P. Reardon, a noted scholar of ancient Greco-Roman novels, placed the author of Callirhoe in about the middle of the first century, the same time Mark is thought to have written his gospel. I haven’t seen any detailed argument that one drew directly from the other, although there is speculation about the possibility. (Wright, 2003: 72, suggests the authors of such fictional stories may have heard the Christian story of the empty tomb after it began to spread. He dismisses the opposite possibility, writing that for Mark to invent his story based on “a plot-twist in a romantic novel is patently absurd.” He does not explain why he thinks it absurd.) The general view of experts seems to be that both are examples of a type of story told in different ways about different figures that had common elements various storytellers drew from.
Mark’s purpose in writing his account of the discovery of the empty tomb, as I see it, is to offer a final scene in his story of Jesus indicating both that Jesus was resurrected two days after his death (on “the third day” in that culture’s manner of counting Friday to Sunday), and that it involved a transformation of his corpse; that is, it was not simply that his disembodied spirit had survived death and appeared to people. The aforementioned scholar Robyn Faith Walsh has said in an interview that a reader of that time and place would have interpreted Mark’s empty tomb story as indicating Jesus “was a god.” These are all theological points Mark would have wanted to convey. The “third day” reference links Jesus’ resurrection to a prophecy of Hosea (6:2) in the Jewish scriptures, the transformation of his corpse ties the resurrection to Jewish expectations of the end times, and the indication of divinity is obviously theological.
So was Mark’s story about the empty tomb fictional? Perhaps not entirely. There is the possibility that some real event was the foundation for Mark’s story which he (and the other gospel authors) then embellished with elements drawn from the empty tomb trope.
Here I turn to arguments that there is a historical basis for the story. Of course, one is that women actually did discover an empty tomb because Jesus’s body had been resurrected. I don’t rule that out on metaphysical grounds, but any even-handed assessment has to allow that it would be less likely than a naturalistic explanation, especially if the latter was not too strained.
One common naturalistic argument is that the disciples stole Jesus’ body in the middle of the night and then claimed he had been resurrected. A corpse removal strikes me as a difficult and risky endeavor, for one reason because after the crucifixion of Jesus his disciples would have reason to fear the same fate if they were apprehended. I also find it hard to square their reasons for following Jesus, presumably a belief in him and his mission, with any plausible motives for perpetuating a fraud. Other arguments include the swoon hypothesis, the lost body hypothesis, and the substitution hypothesis, none of which I find any more plausible than a stolen body. A commenter on one of my blog posts notes two other theories that are more plausible. One is that Joseph of Arimathea, who according to the gospels provided the tomb and had Jesus’ body laid there, moved the body before the women showed up. The other is that the women were confused and returned to the wrong tomb.
None of the above theories attempt to explain the man in the robe at the tomb. This is not true of a recent variation of the stolen body argument put forward by Freeman (2009: 32-34). Freeman speculates that the Jewish high priest Caiaphas had the body removed and posted junior priests, who as a custom wore white robes, to tell anyone coming to the tomb that Jesus rose and to return to Galilee. Caiaphas’ motive would be to get Jesus’ disciples out of Jerusalem and Judea, that is, out of his hair. I question whether Caiaphas would have gone to the trouble of removing Jesus’ body, when he could simply post a junior priest and have him tell any disciples who showed up to go back to Galilee. The women’s report then could have been embellished by Mark, or by someone retelling the story before it reached Mark, to include the man’s message about Jesus being raised.
However, in a recent video interview Dr. Dennis MacDonald contended that the detail of the man in the robe is itself connected to a Greco-Roman literary trope of a man who dies in a story first recounted by the ancient Greek poet Homer. MacDonald links the man at the tomb to Mark’s earlier story of a young man who loses his garment when fleeing at Jesus’ arrest. In Homer’s Odyssey a young man “flees” his body after falling off a roof and goes down among the dead in Hades. MacDonald argues that the two young men who bracket Jesus’ passion story, one at his arrest and the other at the empty tomb, mirror the ritual of shedding one’s garment before baptism into the Christian community, reenacting Jesus’ descent into death, and the donning of a white robe after baptism, reenacting Jesus’ resurrection in a glorified body.
Given the literary tropes and ritual connotation that can be connected to the empty tomb and the man in the robe, I find the explanation of Mark’s story as a literary creation making theological points more compelling than the arguments for a historical basis to the story. Mark’s gospel fits the genre of the ancient “bios,” an account of the life and death of some famous person which often relied on creative writing to entertain and instruct. That the women do not tell anyone what they saw is a suspicious sign that Mark is trying to address in advance any question as to why no one had heard of the empty tomb before he wrote his gospel. My opinion is that Mark invented the empty tomb story as a dramatic way to end his gospel and affirm at least four theological points about Jesus’ resurrection: it was predicted in the scriptures, it heralded the end times, it showed Jesus was now divine, and one can participate in Jesus’ death and resurrection ritually through baptism. I’ll have more on Mark’s intentions when I write a future page on the composition of his gospel.
In asserting that Mark’s story is a literary creation I don’t mean that Mark invented the claim that Jesus was resurrected. We will see below in the section about Paul that the resurrection claim was much earlier. The authors of the other gospels appropriated the empty tomb story from Mark and added the appearances of Jesus which I will discuss in the next section. Either Mark did not know of the appearances recounted in the other gospels or chose not to use them for some reason. I think both possibilities are plausible. If the latter was the case, I suspect he did not know the stories in the developed forms the other gospel authors presented them but knew only some of the information about the resurrection that they relied on to create their accounts. He may have chosen not to use that information because he felt it unnecessary and/or insufficient to make the points he wanted to make.
The resurrection appearances in the gospels and the Acts of the Apostles
Although Mark ends without any appearances of the risen Jesus, Matthew, Luke and John go on to describe several of them. However, their stories differ in significant ways.
In Matthew Jesus intercepts the women on their way to convey the angel’s message to the disciples. They grasp his feet in worship and he repeats the message to tell “my brothers” to go to Galilee where he will meet them. Matthew then interjects a story of soldiers who were posted at the tomb, a detail which is only in this gospel and was set up earlier, just after Jesus’ burial, with the high priests persuading the Roman governor Pilate to post the guards. After the soldiers witness the descent of the angel and his removal of the stone at the entrance (but apparently witness nothing of the resurrected Jesus during the entire time), they report to the high priests and are paid to tell people the disciples stole the body. Clearly the stolen body hypothesis was in circulation by the time Matthew wrote his gospel and he is trying to address it. Matthew then jumps to Galilee with the eleven “disciples” (presumably the twelve apostles appointed by Jesus earlier in the gospel minus his betrayer Judas) at “the mountain to which Jesus directed them.” Jesus appears and they worship him, “but some doubted.” Jesus commissions them to “make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” and to teach them to obey the commandments he gave them. He then promises to be with them “always,” until “the close of the age.”
Several points are worth mentioning. The first people to see the risen Jesus are Mary Magdalene and “the other Mary,” who not only see Jesus but grasp his feet, a sign of his physicality. The “eleven disciples” do not see Jesus until they are in Galilee, which is about eighty miles from Jerusalem, so this event must be at least a few days after the women report Jesus’ instructions to the disciples. Jesus appears on a mountain and reminds the disciples of his commandments, a scene reminiscent of Moses delivering God’s commandments to the Jewish people on Mount Sinai. Some of the disciples who see Jesus doubt, an odd response given the circumstances. There are only two appearances of Jesus, and the gospel ends with Jesus giving the disciples his instructions.
In Luke the women at the tomb are told by “two men” in gleaming robes that Jesus has risen, but they are not instructed to have the disciples go to Galilee. Unlike in Matthew, the women do not see Jesus before reporting to the disciples about the empty tomb. The latter dismiss their story as nonsense, although Peter, as mentioned in the previous section, is said to have gone to the tomb and verified that it was empty. We then find two of the disciples walking to Emmaus, a village seven miles away, discussing the recent events. Jesus joins them but they do not recognize him. He asks what they were talking about and they tell him the story of Jesus’ execution, their hope he was the Messiah, the women’s discovery of the empty tomb, and that some of the disciples went back and verified the empty tomb. Jesus chides them and explains how all this happened to fulfill the scriptures. When they reach the village they prevail upon him to stay for dinner. Jesus stays and, when he blesses and breaks the bread, they recognize him and he disappears. They go back to Jerusalem to tell the eleven apostles, who tell the two that “The Lord has risen indeed, and has appeared to Simon!” presumably meaning Peter, whose name was originally Simon. The two disciples then tell their story, and when they reach the part about recognizing Jesus in his breaking of the bread, Jesus suddenly appears in the room with all of them. Those gathered react with fear, supposing they saw “a spirit” (Greek: pneuma). Jesus reassures them by inviting them to touch his body and by eating a piece of fish. He again explains how the recent events are a fulfillment of scripture and instructs them to stay in the city until “you are clothed with power from on high.” He then leads them out to Bethany a couple miles away, blesses them, and is carried up into heaven. They return to Jerusalem, where they are “continually in the Temple blessing God.”
Again note several points. The women are not the first to see the risen Jesus; initially it seems the honor goes to the two disciples walking to Emmaus, but then the author unexpectedly indicates “Simon” has already seen Jesus. Jesus appears not in Jerusalem to the women on their way from the tomb and then to the disciples back in Galilee, as in Matthew, but to Simon, presumably in Jerusalem, then on the road to Emmaus a few miles away. The two travelers do not recognize Jesus until much later, in the breaking of the bread. The apostles are able to touch him and he eats food before them. Unlike in Matthew, who ends the story with Jesus talking to the disciples at the mountain in Galilee, Luke has Jesus ascend into heaven from Bethany.
Aside from all the apostles gathered together seeing Jesus at some point, and both authors emphasizing Jesus’ physicality, the narratives of Matthew and Luke are very different.
Luke does have a bit more to say in the Acts of the Apostles, a narrative of the Christian community in the years immediately following the resurrection of Jesus. The broad consensus of Biblical scholars is that it was written by the same author as the one who wrote what we call the Gospel of Luke. It starts with a brief reference to Luke’s gospel and notes that after Jesus’ death “he presented himself alive to [the apostles] by many convincing proofs, appearing to them during forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God.” Luke repeats that Jesus told them to stay in Jerusalem and wait to be “baptized with the Holy Spirit.” The disciples ask if it is the time he will restore the kingdom to Israel, and he tells them that is not for them to know. He informs them they are to be his witnesses “to the ends of the earth” and is lifted up (again?) and a cloud takes him from their sight. Two men in white robes appear beside them to tell them Jesus will return the same way he left.
Here we learn that Jesus remained with his disciples for forty days (a symbolic number in Jewish tradition for a period of formation) before ascending into heaven, unlike in Matthew where he promises to be with them always, “to the end of the age.” In Acts Luke also has angels tell the disciples that Jesus will return the same way, coming down from heaven, a detail not found in any other gospel.
Now let’s turn to John. As we saw, in John Mary Magdalene is the first to see Jesus, but unlike in Matthew she is alone and sees him at the tomb rather than on the way to the disciples. She does not recognize him until he says her name. He tells her not to hold him, for he has “not yet ascended to the Father,” thus discouraging any physical touching. He then sends her to the disciples. That evening he appears before the disciples in a closed room. He invites them to examine his wounds and breathes on them, transmitting to them the Holy Spirit, and gives them the power to forgive sins.
So far John presents a mashup of altered elements from both Matthew and Luke, particularly the latter. Mary Magdalene is the first to see Jesus, as Mary and the other Mary are the first in Matthew. She does not recognize him at first, just as the disciples on the way to Emmaus did not recognize him in Luke. Contra Luke, John omits any mention of the disciples disbelieving Mary. As in Luke he appears to the disciples when they are gathered together in Jerusalem, but rather than promising the baptism of the Holy Spirit he breathes the Holy Spirit into them. In Luke Jesus ascends to heaven, while in John Jesus indicates he will ascend.
Continuing his narrative, John says the disciples later told their story to their fellow disciple Thomas, who was not there when Jesus appeared to them. Thomas does not believe them. Jesus reappears eight days later when Thomas is present with the others and persuades Thomas by asking him to touch his wounds. This mirrors Luke’s description of Jesus asking the disciples to touch his wounds to prove he is not a spirit, but contradicts John’s earlier account of Jesus discouraging of Mary Magdalene from touching him. The author then remarks that Jesus did many other “signs” before the disciples and that he wrote to convince his readers Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God.
This seems like an ending, but there follows yet another scene, in which Jesus appears on the shore while the disciples are fishing on the Sea of Galilee. This brings the story to Galilee, which is where Matthew has Jesus appear to the collected disciples on a mountain. In John’s story the disciples don’t recognize Jesus until he tells them to drop their nets and they catch a huge haul of fish, again recalling Luke’s theme of delayed recognition. Peter jumps in the water and swims to Jesus. They all have breakfast together, similar to when Luke has Jesus eat a fish in front of the disciples. John notes this seaside scene is the third time Jesus appeared to the disciples.
John ends this final scene with Jesus telling Peter three times to feed his sheep and predicts his hands will be bound against his will when he is older. They have an exchange about another disciple, who the author notes is bearing witness to these events. The author also remarks that Jesus did innumerable other things, similar to Luke’s description of Jesus presenting himself alive to them “by many convincing proofs.” John has no scene of Jesus ascending into heaven, and no apparent terminus to his time spent with the disciples.
The stories of appearances of the risen Jesus in the three gospels are hard to reconcile with each other. Where did Jesus first appear and to whom? How many times did he appear and how long did he stay around? What exactly were his instructions to the disciples? Did the disciples stay in Jerusalem or go back to Galilee? The answers to these questions do not fit together. They read as though each author decided Mark needed an ending depicting Jesus appearing to the disciples after his death, and so each created their own version in line with their own literary objectives. Given their significant divergences and extraordinary character, I don’t think it is possible to draw any secure inferences about historical events from the gospel accounts of Jesus’ resurrection. As I discuss below, I think there may be hints in them, but I am not very confident in that judgment.
Before moving on to the letter written by Paul, I want to add one more bit of information from the Acts of the Apostles. Paul plays a large part in the second half of the book, which describes his life from being a persecutor of Christians, through his conversion, to his missionary journeys. The Acts of the Apostles features three separate accounts of the “appearance” of Jesus that caused Paul’s conversion. All three, with slight variations, say that a “light from heaven” flashed around Paul and he heard the voice of Jesus speaking to him. Paul did not know Jesus during the latter’s earthly life, so he attributes the voice to Jesus because that is what the voice tells him. The accounts differ on what the men with Paul experience: either they hear “the sound” but cannot understand it and see nothing, or they see the light but don’t hear the voice, or they get knocked to the ground by the light along with Paul.
We don’t have any indication of how Luke knew this story. Luke does not seem to have known Paul. He is estimated to have written Acts about three decades after Paul wrote the letters we have from him, and the theology in Paul’s speeches in Acts does not match Paul’s theology in his letters very well. (Ehrman, 2012: 171-172) Luke does attach enough importance to the story to recount it three times, which might indicate that he thought it was close to the truth of what happened. Even if that is what he thought, we have no way to judge if he was correct.
With that caveat, there is one feature I want to highlight in these stories. In all three versions Paul’s experience involve a light and a voice. That is nothing like the appearances of Jesus in the gospels; Paul doesn’t see or touch Jesus or witness him eating something. This would indicate that for at least one follower of Jesus–the author of Acts–a light and a voice are sufficient to establish an appearance of the risen Jesus. This is an additional piece of evidence I will use in my concluding assessment.
Paul on Jesus’ appearances
The earliest Christian documents we have copies of are probably the letters of Paul to various Christian communities around the Mediterranean. Dating such documents is tricky, but the academic consensus is that he wrote them approximately in the decade of the 50s C.E. That would be about 15-25 years after the presumed date of the death of Jesus and about 15-20 years before the earliest gospel we know of, the one attributed to Mark. In other words, about mid-way between the reports of the resurrection and the first written narrative of Jesus’ life. Much of what we know about Christianity during those decades comes from the letters of Paul.
Paul’s letters do not show much interest in Jesus’ life, focusing instead on the meaning of his death and resurrection and offering instructions to the communities he wrote to. He expected the end of the world as they knew it and the inauguration of the “kingdom of God” to happen in the very near future, so his eyes were on the present and his mission of preaching to the Gentiles (non-Jews) while waiting for the imminent return of Jesus as judge and ruler of all.
Nowhere in his letters does Paul mention the idea that Jesus’ body disappeared from its tomb. In what is called his First Letter to the Corinthians he does indicate that there is some continuity between the body of a person who dies and the body that is resurrected, using the analogy of a seed that falls in the ground and later emerges as a plant. This suggests that a buried corpse could be raised back to life as something very different, but his stress is on the difference rather than the emergence from the ground.
Earlier in the letter Paul bequeaths us some information about the resurrection appearances of Jesus:
For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures and that he was buried and 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 and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. (1 Cor. 15: 3-8)
Paul’s language of handing on and receiving information of “first importance” implies carefully passing down a tradition with a set verbal formulation. That formulation starts with the kernel of Paul’s missionary message, that Jesus died for our sins as predicted in the Jewish scriptures, that he was buried, and that God raised him from the dead, again as predicted in the scriptures. He goes on to include a list of appearances of the risen Jesus: to Cephas (which roughly means “man of stone” in Aramaic, as does “Peter” in Greek), “the Twelve” (apostles), five hundred Christians at one time, a “James” with no further identification, “all” the apostles, and then finally Paul himself.
Nowhere does he describe what any of these appearances were like, including his own experience. Did they see Jesus? If so, was he here on earth or in a vision of the heavens? Did they hear his voice, either along with a visual appearance or a voice by itself? Did they touch him? Did he handle any objects? Where did he come from and where did he go? Paul says nothing to satisfy our curiosity. However, we have a few clues as to Paul’s understanding of what the resurrected Jesus was like.
In the passage that uses the metaphor of the seed he attempts to answer a question: “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?” His answer is not very clear, except to emphasize that our “imperishable,” glorious and powerful resurrected body will be categorically different than our “perishable,” dishonorable and weak ordinary body. The Greek terms he uses for the different bodies are sōma pneumatikon and sōma psychikon, usually translated as “spiritual body” and “physical body.” However, the words pneuma and psyche and their derivatives are not directly translatable into English.
Dale Martin (1995; especially Ch. 5) has done an extensive analysis of the First Letter to the Corinthians in the context of ideas about bodies and life after death which were contemporary with Paul. The material body/immaterial spirit duality which is now taken for granted was not a feature of that culture. The general view of the Greek and Roman philosophers was that living human bodies are composed of a hierarchy of various substances, all of them material, but some denser like the earth, and others less so like the air. At the bottom of the bodily hierarchy was sarx, roughly meaning flesh. The psyche, usually translated as “soul,” could be denser or more refined, depending on whether an individual was more inclined to desires shared with animals or the pursuit of philosophical contemplation. For Paul the hierarchy went from flesh, to psyche, to pneuma at the highest level. Pneuma, which can literally mean air and is often translated as “spirit,” was regarded as the very refined substance of divine beings such as angels. Paul, according to Martin, expected the resurrected body to shed sarx and psyche and to be built upon the remaining substance pneuma.
Martin’s thesis is that in his letter Paul was arguing with a faction of the community made up of more educated members of higher social status, who had different ideas than the less educated common laborers who composed the majority of the members of the Corinthian church. The more educated would have been exposed to Greco-Roman philosophical ideas and opposed to the notion that a corpse, with its heavy, dense substance of flesh, could be raised to a higher life in heaven—heaven thought of as literally above the sky, where the stars were. The less educated would not find the philosophical distinctions meaningful, and they commonly thought of resurrection as portrayed in myths and legends of people who returned to life in the familiar form of bodies pretty much as we know them. Paul agreed that “flesh and blood” could not inherit the kingdom of God, but wanted to maintain that there is a continuity between the body that dies and the resurrected body. Even more importantly, he would want to deny the implication that an individual’s pneuma was refined by wisdom attained through philosophical study rather than by participation in the pneuma of the risen Christ. (See also Segal, 2004: 424-431) It is easy to see why the idea of the resurrection of the body was controversial among the Corinthians and understood differently by those of different levels of sophistication. It would also explain the continuing controversy over the risen Jesus’ physicality that the gospels seem to be addressing with the empty tomb, Jesus being touched and eating, and so forth.
What about the witnesses to the resurrected Jesus who Paul lists? Does such a list, carefully handed down as a specific formulation, indicate the veracity of the appearances?
My answer is a qualified yes. Consider that Paul includes himself at the end of the list. Would an earlier tradition been have passed down to him saying that Paul himself was “last of all, as to one untimely born”? (“Untimely born” refers to the miscarriage of a pregnancy, meaning something that occurs at the wrong time.) How would the originators of the tradition know he was last and why would they bother to describe his experience as untimely? I don’t think it’s likely that they did; it is more likely that Paul added himself to the end of the traditional list. This raises the question of where the traditional list ends and Paul’s addition(s) begin: just before Paul is listed or at some point before that?
The problem was in discussion as early as 1996, with most commentators holding that the original list ended either with Cephas or with Cephas and the twelve. (Barclay, 1996: 16) Bart Ehrman (2014: 139-142) argues that it ends after the mention of Cephas. That would leave a formulation with a parallel structure easy to remember and convey to others:
Christ died/for our sins/in accordance with the scriptures/and he was buried.
Christ was raised/on the third day/in accordance with the scriptures/and he appeared to Cephas.
The first section in each line is a parallel statement about Christ (he died/he was raised). The second section ties the statement to a prophecy in Jewish scripture (for our sins/on the third day). The third section is exactly the same in each line (in accordance with the scriptures), following up the previous section. And the final section is a brief conclusion (he was buried/he appeared to Cephas). It is a tightly constructed set of parallel statements, which would be asymmetrical if more was added after the mention of Cephas. That would suggest that all of the rest of the list was added by Paul from some source(s) other than the tradition as it had been handed down to him and to the Corinthians.
I find this argument compelling. If correct, the tradition, which according to Paul was in existence before he learned it, would be the earliest source concerning who was the first to have experienced Jesus after his death: Cephas/Peter. Peter as the first witness fits with Luke’s awkward insertion of an appearance to “Simon” (Peter’s original name before being renamed) when the two disciples who were heading to Emmaus come back to Jerusalem to tell their story. John recounts multiple appearances to disciples and names Peter specifically as among them. Peter as a key witness to the risen Christ also fits other evidence that Peter was a central figure in the early Christian community, such as the story (inserted?) in Luke and John of Peter witnessing the empty tomb, Paul’s reference to him as a “pillar” of the Christian community in Jerusalem (Galatians 2:9, but see also Ehrman’s blog post on the identification of Cephas with Peter), his prominent role in the gospels and the Acts of the Apostles, and letters to early Christian communities that were purported to have been written by him. In the Gospel of Luke there is also an indication that Peter was the first to take heart after the death of Jesus, recounted just before Jesus’ prediction that Peter will deny him three times after Jesus is arrested:
“Simon, Simon, listen! Satan has demanded to sift all of you like wheat, but I have prayed for you that your own faith may not fail, and you, when once you have turned back, strengthen your brothers.” (Lk 22: 31-32)
Based on this evidence, I think Peter was the first to experience what he took to be a resurrected Jesus, and that his claim to have experienced this was carefully preserved and handed down in the larger Christian community. I don’t think we will ever know what Peter saw, but apparently it was convincing enough to bolster his confidence and become a turning point for him, for the other early disciples, and for the rest of Western history.
As for the other appearances on the list, aside from Paul’s own experience I regard them as stories Paul heard from someone or other but likely had not done much to verify. You would think five hundred people seeing the resurrected Jesus at the same time would be dramatic enough that reports of it would reach those undertaking to write about Jesus, but there is no mention of it in any other source. Nor is there any other mention of an appearance to James, unless this was James the apostle and he saw Jesus as one of several unnamed apostles present at one of the appearances in the gospels. Either the authors of the gospels had never heard of these appearances or they did not think they were worth repeating.
I can imagine a report of an appearance to Peter touching off a contagion of reports of unusual experiences, such as a light or a voice, interpreted as the risen Jesus. (See my discussion of Paul in the Acts of the Apostles at the end of the previous section.) For Paul’s experience to be the last, the others he lists must have happened before his conversion, which took place just a few years after the death of Jesus is presumed to have happened. But Paul may not have heard about these other appearances until years later, nearer the time he wrote the letter to the Corinthians. The reports could have been second-hand or even more remote from the alleged events. Once the idea of the resurrection took hold, additional reports would have a ready audience among those who believed, no matter their substance or lack of it.
In my judgment, other than Paul himself, Peter is the only person on the list whose experience, whatever it was, is convincingly attested, and his experience became the foundation for the belief in the resurrection and the catalyst for the rest of the reports.
Conclusions
In this final section of this page I offer my assessment of the evidence discussed above, leaning primarily on Paul’s list of Jesus’ appearances and supplementing that with a few details from the stories in the gospels and Acts.
Paul’s list in 1 Corinthians convinces me that, beginning with Peter, multiple members of the early Christian community reported they experienced the risen Jesus over an indeterminate period of time. Those members may have included one or more of the other apostles, and possibly other disciples such as Mary Magdalene (as in Matthew and John). They certainly included Paul. As historical evidence the gospel accounts add very little to what we learn from Paul. None of sources mention anyone actually witnessing the moment of Jesus’ resurrection or his emergence from the tomb.
Peter’s experience seems to have been so powerful that he was inspired to rally the faith of other disciples and to establish or contribute to his role as one of the most prominent leaders of the early Christian community. Paul’s experience convinced him Jesus was the Messiah and that Paul had a responsibility to bring the Christian message to the Gentiles.
Many of the experiences reported by disciples could have been ambiguous, such as a flash of light or a disembodied voice as reported by Luke of Paul’s experience. I base this partially on the gospel descriptions of disciples who did not initially recognize they were encountering Jesus and disciples who doubted what they saw or what they heard reported to them. It would also fit modern cases in which people report experiences they interpret as something familiar within their culture, such as a visitation by a UFO, but which they describe with details that are ambiguous such as lights moving across the sky in unfamiliar ways.
Multiple disciples at the same time and place may have experienced what they interpreted as the risen Jesus. I base this on the several accounts of such an event: three in Paul’s list and the accounts in the gospels of Matthew, Luke, and John. Such a group experience has modern parallels. One example would be the 1917 “miracle of the sun” that took place in Fatima, Portugal, in connection with alleged visions of Mary, the mother of Jesus. Another is the Pentecostal and charismatic revivals of modern times in which crowds of people gathered together in worship have simultaneous unusual experiences they attribute to the Holy Spirit.
In conclusion, I think an initial report by Peter of a powerful experience of a risen Jesus touched off a contagion of reports that were also interpreted that way, but that could have been more ambiguous in character. On the next page I will assess various modern theories of the appearances, and why the early Christians would have interpreted the appearances as a resurrected Jesus.
Bibliography
Barclay, John M. G. (1996). “The Resurrecton in Contemporary New Testament Scholarship,” in Gavin D’Costa, ed., Resurrection Reconsidered, pp. 13-30.
Ehrman, Bart D. (2012). The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings. Oxford University Press.
Ehrman, Bart D. (2014). How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee. HarperOne.
Freeman, Charles (2009). A New History of Early Christianity. Yale University Press.
Lüdemann, Gerd (2004). The Resurrection of Christ: A Historical Inquiry. Prometheus Books.
Martin, Dale B. (1995). The Corinthian Body. Yale University Press.
Segal, Alan F. (2004). Life after Death: A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion. Doubleday.
Wright, N.T. (2003). The Resurrection of the Son of God. Fortress Press.
Jesus Reconstructed 