Did Jesus Really Rise From the Dead?

Did Jesus really rise from the dead? This is a question that has been debated for quite literally millennia. We have records of Christians and non-Christians debating this all the way back in the 2nd and 3rd centuries, both sides utilizing all sorts of arguments to prove the case one way or another. Since it’s around the time of Easter, maybe you’ve come across the obligatory TV special or YouTube video with a provocative Easter title, claiming to settle the debate once and for all. No matter where you land on this issue, it cannot be doubted that the (paraphrased) words of C.S. Lewis remain true. Whether or not Jesus rose from the dead is either the most important question that you could ever seek to answer in your life, or it is of no importance whatsoever. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important. 

If Jesus rose from the dead, if His claims to divinity and the authority to judge every living soul truly were vindicated by God raising Him from the dead around 2,000 years ago, then everyone in this room has an obligation to listen and obey His voice. However, if Jesus did not rise from the dead, if His remains have been rotting away for the last 2,000 years in some Palestinian tomb, then no one should be a Christian. To quote the words of the apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:17-19, “if Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless; you are still in your sins… [and] we [Christians] should be pitied more than anyone.” Pretty harsh words, yet true nonetheless. 

Now, as a Christian, I’m just going to put all my cards on the table right now. My goal in this article is to convince you all that the hope of the Christian faith is not in vain, because Jesus the Messiah of Israel truly rose from the dead on Easter morning all those years ago. He is alive and seated at the right hand of His Father as we speak. That’s what this article is hoping to prove. And if you already believe that, then this article will hopefully strengthen your faith, such that when you’re at church this Easter and someone tells you, “the Lord is risen,” you can confidently reply, “He is risen indeed.” So without further ado, let’s begin.

I’m not going to make you wait until the end of this article to hear my actual argument in favor of Jesus’ resurrection. Instead, I’m going to give you the argument right now, and then spend the rest of the space below defending each premise. Here it is. 

Premise #1. The original eyewitnesses of Jesus’ ministry claimed that He physically rose from the dead. 

Premise #2. The disciples were not lying about and or making up this claim. 

Premise #3. The disciples were not mistaken about what they claimed to see. 

Conclusion. Therefore, Jesus rose from the dead.  

So there you have it, that’s my argument. If the disciples claimed Jesus rose from the dead, they were not lying, and they were not mistaken, then He really did rise from the dead. It makes logical sense, however as any good student of logic will tell you, in order for the conclusion to follow, each premise must be defended. Failure to support even one of these premises would completely destroy my argument, and so the rest of this presentation will be going through each of the premises of my argument and demonstrating, in detail, why I believe them to be true.

Premise #1. The original eyewitnesses of Jesus’ ministry claimed that He physically rose from the dead.

With that, let’s dive right into the first premise: That the original eyewitnesses of Jesus’ ministry claimed that He physically rose from the dead. I’m assuming you’ve all played the telephone game? Someone tells something to someone else, who tells it to someone else, and so on, until the original message is completely different by the time we get to the last person in the chain. So what if our primary historical sources on Jesus’ resurrection, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, were created through a process similar to this? What if they don’t even contain the original claims of the eyewitnesses?

Well, my argument against this supposition and in favor of the resurrection accounts being reliable eyewitness testimony is one that the New Testament scholar Richard Bauckham popularized in his influential book, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, which I will be heavily relying on throughout this section. This argument is that, contrary to the view of older New Testament scholarship, which held that the resurrection traditions in the Gospels developed within different early Christian communities, Bauckham argues that they were actually directly associated with named eyewitnesses who, at the time of writing, could still be consulted and asked about their claims. In order to support this argument, Bauckham first points to the way that the four Gospels use personal names. The names of well-known individuals, such as the political rulers at the time or Jesus Himself, we would of course expect to be present in these accounts; and it comes as no surprise that seemingly unimportant individuals, such as those that Jesus heals or just talks to in passing, remain anonymous. This isn’t too unusual, however what is unusual are the exceptions to this general rule.

In the resurrection account of Luke 24, for example, we’re told about two disciples who met the risen Jesus on the road to Emmaus. What’s strange is that we’re given the name of only one of these individuals, a man named Clopas. The story does not at all require that either of the disciples be named, yet one is and the other is anonymous for no apparent reason. Likewise, since every other person Jesus healed in the Gospel stories remains anonymous, one could reasonably ask, why are we given the names of Jarius in Mark and Luke, Bartiemaeus in Mark, and Lazarus in John? Why are these individuals named while every other recipient of Jesus’ healing is not? Similarly, since people who encounter Jesus on only one occasion are usually not named in the Gospels, why should the Pharisee who entertains Jesus to dinner in Luke 7 be given a name, namely Simon the Leper? Why should Simon of Cyrene, the man who helped Jesus carry His Cross on Good Friday, be named? And perhaps most curious of all, why does Mark not only give us Simon of Cyrene’s name, but also the names of his two sons, Rufus and Alexander, who aren’t even characters in any New Testament stories?

The point is this: Why are there no “rules” about who gets a name and who doesn’t in the Gospels? Bauckham’s explanation is rather simple. The reason some people are given names in the Gospels, and others aren’t, is because the named individuals are the ones whose eyewitness testimony is being relied on. 

As Bauckham explains, the individuals who are given names in the Gospels are precisely those whom we would expect to be very first followers of the Jesus movement. We would expect Jesus’ earliest followers to consist of some of those He had healed, such as Bartiemaeus and Lazarus, some who had joined His ministry while He was traveling throughout Judea, such as the women disciples named in Luke 8:2-3, namely Mary Magdalene, Joanna , and Susanna (remember them because they’re coming up again soon), and the many residents of Jerusalem who were initially sympathetic to Jesus’ ministry, such as the Pharisees Nicodemus, Joseph of Arimathea, and Simon the Leper. These are all people who would have been well-known in the Jerusalem church where traditions about them would have first circulated. This explains why all of these people are given names in the Gospels, while many others aren’t: These were the early Christian “celebrities” who were still alive at the time when the Gospels were being written, and by including their names, the Gospel authors were inviting their first readers to go and find these people and ask them whether or not these things are true! 

This is especially the case with the women disciples who were at the Cross on Good Friday and the Tomb on Easter Sunday. The three Synoptic Gospels, which are Matthew, Mark, and Luke, all independently agree that the women disciples were the primary witnesses to Jesus’ death and resurrection. John’s Gospel only adds that the Beloved Disciple was the only male disciple present. The Synoptics clearly place an emphasis on the women as eyewitnesses, those who saw the events. For instance, the Gospel text says that they “saw” the events as Jesus died (Matt 27:55; Mk 15:40; Lk 23:49), they “saw” where He was laid in the Tomb (Mk 15:47; Lk 23:55), they went on the first day of the week to “see” the Tomb (Matt 28:1), they “saw” the stone rolled away (Mk 16:4), they “saw” the young man sitting on the right side (Mk 16:5), and the angel invited them to “see” the empty place where Jesus’ body had lain (Matt 28:6; Mk 16:6). In Bauckham’s words, “It could hardly be clearer that the Gospels are appealing to their role as eyewitnesses.” 

And what’s important is that these women are not an anonymous group. All the Gospels name some of them, while also stating or implying that there were others. The significance of this is that the Gospels have both agreement and variation in the specific women who are named. Below is a table from Bauckham’s book of different women named in each Synoptic Gospel:

These divergences in names, properly understood, demonstrate the scrupulous care with which the Gospel authors present the women as eyewitnesses. Mark names three women at the Cross, and the same three women as those who go to the tomb, but only two of the three are said to observe the burial of Jesus. The explanation must be that in the known testimony of these three women, only the two Marys were known to be witnesses of the burial, while Salome was not. 

Similar care is perhaps even more impressive in Matthew. For Matthew, Salome was evidently not a well-known witness and he omits her from the lists all-together. At the Cross he adds a unique witness, the mother of the sons of Zebedee, however he does not add her to the two Marys at the burial or empty tomb, surely because she was not known as an eyewitness of these events. Matthew could have so easily used her to artificially increase the number of witnesses at the tomb, but instead he is extremely careful to only name the two women well known to him as witnesses, Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James. 

Luke, who names the women only at the end of his account of their visit to the tomb, lists, besides the indispensable Mary Magdalene, Joanna, who is unique to his Gospel and has already been introduced along with several other women in Luke 8:2-3. Like Matthew, Luke omits Salome from the list of women, but he does not simply reproduce the list of women followers he introduced in 8:2-3, which, remember, included Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Susanna, instead he just lists Mary and Joana, presumably because he was not aware of Susanna witnessing these events. Like Matthew, Luke could have easily inflated the number of eyewitnesses by adding Susanna to the list, yet he doesn’t because he is meticulous in making sure he only names those who were known to be actual eyewitnesses.

By giving these different names, the Gospel authors reveal that the women disciples were not just well known for having once told their stories about Jesus’ death and resurrection, but rather they remained accessible and authoritative sources of Gospel tradition for the earliest Christians. Once again, the names of these women have the unspoken invitation to, “Go and ask them for yourself,” which the first readers of the Gospels could have plausibly done. 

Nowhere is this invitation to “Go and ask” more clearly seen than in the Gospels’ portrayal of the Twelve Apostles who, in Bauckham’s words, constituted the official body of eyewitnesses to Jesus’ resurrection. All three Synoptic Gospels contain a list of the Twelve Apostles. Some scholars have proposed that these lists serve only to introduce the main characters of the story, however this isn’t very likely given no less than seven of the twelve Apostles never make another appearance in Mark and Luke ever again, and six never show up again in Matthew. Despite the Twelve as a group being very important in the Gospel stories, about half of them never actually feature as “main characters.” 

This leads Bauckham to suggest that the reason why we’re given a list of apostolic names in each Synoptic Gospel, which would otherwise be irrelevant, is so that the first readers would know who is actually a part of the official body of eyewitnesses. Luke’s Gospel actually tells us this explicitly in its opening reference to the “original eyewitnesses and servants of the word” in Luke 1:2. These original eyewitnesses are the people whom Luke is identifying in his list of the Apostles, and the same can be said of Matthew and Mark as well. The fact that all three of these lists have both agreement in placing Peter first and Judas last, yet variation in listing the other disciples in different orders, and sometimes even referring to them by different names, suggests that these were all independent lists of the Apostles that were circulating in the early Christian movement. The only reason we would expect such lists to be relevant is if the early Christian movement was absolutely hellbent on making sure that their beliefs about the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus were coming directly from eyewitness sources, and not a telephone game of oral tradition. 

Indeed, the fact that this is how the early Jesus movement functioned is attested to by some of the earliest Christian writers we know of outside of the New Testament. Writing in the early second century, the Christian writer Papias said the following about how eyewitness testimony was treated in the earliest days of the church:

“If by chance anyone who had been in attendance on the elders should come my way, I inquired about the words of the elders — [that is] what [according to the elders] Andrew or Peter said, or Philip, or Thomas or James, or John or Matthew or any other of the Lord’s disciples, and whatever Aristion and the elder John, the Lord’s disciples, were saying. For I did not think that information from books would profit me as much as information from a living and surviving voice.” (Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. 3.39.3-4)

Clearly, early Christians like Papias wanted to get their information directly from specific and named eyewitnesses, like Peter, Philip, Thomas, or John, and not just from some guy who knew this guy who knew this guy. This is precisely what the names in the Gospels allowed these early followers of Jesus to do. It is true that Papias was living at a slightly later time and so most of the eyewitnesses were dead by the time he grew up,  however as Bauckham notes, two of Jesus’ disciples that he mentions, John the elder and Aristion, were both still alive and living in a nearby area during Papias’ lifetime. This allowed Papias to have access to their testimony through only one transmitter, namely any of their disciples who happened to visit his city. This means that even into the early years of the second century, decades after the life and ministry of Jesus, the original eyewitnesses were still alive and active in telling their stories.

This is also attested to by the early second century Christian writer Quadratus who wrote the following in a letter to the Roman Emperor Hadrian,

“The works of our Savior were always present, for they were true: those who were healed, those who rose from the dead, those who were not only seen in the act of being healed or raised, but were also always present, not merely when the Savior was living on earth, but also for a considerable time after his departure, so that some of them survived even to our own times.” (Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. 4.3.2)

Quadratus was writing in around the year 117 AD, but by “our own times” he presumably means not when he was writing but rather an earlier era in which both him and Hadrian had lived. This is precisely the time period in which it would have been credible to say that some people healed by Jesus were still alive and well. And what’s significant is the fact that Quadratus explicitly invokes the eyewitness function that these recipients of Jesus’ healings played in the early days of the church. They were essentially “living miracles” who people could seek out and directly ask about their experiences with Jesus. Once again, this strongly suggests that the Jesus traditions recorded in the Gospels, including and especially Jesus’ death and resurrection, were not stories that originated through a game of telephone long after the events took place. 

Unlike the game of telephone, those who started the message, namely the eyewitnesses, played an active role in maintaining their respective traditions until the end of their earthly lives. As Bauckham likes to say, Jesus’ original disciples did not fall off the face of the earth the second Jesus departed, rather they remained alive and well for decades, playing a prominent role in their own movement. In other words, the four Gospels truly do record the claims of those who were witnesses to Jesus’ life, death, and alleged resurrection; they do not record stories that were invented long after these witnesses had passed.

Now before we get too excited, let me be clear about what has just been argued. At this point, I have not demonstrated that Jesus rose from the dead, or that the miracles recorded in the Gospels actually happened. No. Instead, I’ve reasonably shown that the four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, accurately record the claims of the original eyewitnesses of Jesus’ ministry. Remember the first premise of my argument: that the original eyewitnesses of Jesus’ ministry claimed to have the experiences of the risen Jesus that the Gospels record. Since it has now been argued that the Gospels 1.) Had direct access to information from the eyewitnesses, and 2.) accurately reported this information, I will now consider the first premise of my argument proven, and move forward with the assumption that the resurrection accounts in Matthew 28, Mark 16, Luke 24, and John 20-21 originate with the very first followers of Jesus, a supposition that (in case you remain skeptical) will be further supported throughout this next section. This brings us to the next premise in my argument, namely, that the disciples were not lying about what they claimed to see, that is, they were not intentionally fabricating the resurrection stories. 

Premise #2. The disciples were not lying about and or making up their claim. 

They knew that Jesus did not actually rise from the dead, however they made up stories about Him rising anyway. Now us Christians should not be offended by this possibility, it’s perfectly reasonable to ask whether or not the first followers of Jesus committed some kind of pious fraud, as we know from the existence of contradictory religious systems that this is something that does indeed happen. For whatever reason, sometimes religious people just lie. However, I’m going to argue that the overall coherence of all four resurrection accounts can only be explained by these accounts being authentic eyewitness testimony, and not historical fiction. For this section I will be drawing extensively from pp. 141-156 of Lydia McGrew’s recent book, Testimonies to the Truth. With that said, let’s begin. 

What are the signs of authentic, as opposed to invented, eyewitness testimony? This is actually a very relevant question in the field of criminal investigation, where eyewitness testimonies often play a decisive role in landing convictions. Let’s think through this with an example (which I’ve taken directly from Lydia). Suppose that a man named Bill has a rich aunt who recently passed away. Since she left Bill all of her money, the police suspect foul play and are carefully investigating his movements on the day she died. They have narrowed down the time of her death to between 3 and 3:30pm and are trying to answer the question, does Bill have an alibi? 

Bill insists that he was at the gym all afternoon until exactly 3:30, and the gym is a good 45 minutes away from his aunt’s house. However, there weren’t many people at the gym that day, and only Bill’s friend Ginny could confirm that she saw him there at around 3:15, however because of how close Bill and Ginny are the police suspect that they could have colluded to provide this alibi. 

Does Bill have any other confirmation of his alibi? He tells the police that he stopped at a grocery store about 10 minutes away from the gym on his way home. The police question the employees, and one of the checkout clerks recognizes Bill’s picture. She says that he came through the line and bought a loaf of bread at about 3:30 on the day in question. 

Now, one could argue that the checkout clerk’s testimony actually contradicts Bill’s , since he says that he was at the gym until 3:30 and the clerk said he was at the grocery store at 3:30. However, the testimonies of Bill and the clerk exhibit what the 19th century Anglican scholar T.R. Birks called “reconcilable variation.” Reconcilable variation is when various accounts of the same events have differences that some might say are discrepancies, but these differences do not really amount to irreconcilable contradiction. In our example, the clerk says that Bill was at the grocery store at around 3:30 while Bill says he was at the gym until 3:30. But the two locations are not far away from one another, and a little imprecision on the part of the clerk is enough to explain this minor apparent discrepancy. Unlike Bill, she isn’t claiming to be precise down to the minute. In the larger scheme of things, the fact that she attests to Bill being on the opposite side of town from his aunt’s house at 3:30 is far more important for confirming his alibi.

When an account is fabricated, it is almost bound to result in an irreconcilable contradiction with some other fact or account. However, if different eyewitness accounts are actually telling the truth, then the witnesses will certainly have seen and remembered different details, which may even appear to conflict, yet when putting them together the story will be a coherent whole and not contradictory. The process of seeing how different stories can fit together even when there is some apparent discrepancy is known in biblical studies as harmonization. Sadly, harmonization tends to get a bad rap in scholarly circles because it’s assumed that the only reason one would try to reconcile different parts of something like the Gospels is because one has a religious commitment to do so. However, as we just saw in our example, harmonization is not a uniquely religious activity. You don’t need any religious commitment to Bill’s truthfulness to see that, “I was at the gym until 3:30” and “He came through the checkout line at about 3:30” are quite easily compatible. 

The Gospels very often exhibit reconcilable variation, which Lydia McGrew has shown extensively in her two amazing books, The Mirror or the Mask and The Eye of the Beholder, the latter of which tackles what is perhaps the most infamous apparent contradiction in the Gospels, which is the date of the Crucifixion. But since this article is about the resurrection of Jesus, we’re going to go crazy and dive right into the weeds of the resurrection accounts in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and tackle just about every major so-called “contradiction” that your Religion 200 professor might bring up. And along the way it will be shown that the overall coherence between these accounts, despite immense variation, makes it almost unthinkable that these stories were made up.

And so we start with Easter morning. The Synoptic Gospels all tell us about a group of women, including Mary Magdalene among others, who came to the tomb and found it empty. Matthew says that Mary Magdalene and another woman, also named Mary, came to the tomb (Matt 28:1), and from that point on, Matthew says that various things happened to a plural group of women (28:5, 8-9, 11). 

If we only had Matthew to go on, we would assume that this group included Mary Magdalene all the way through the passage. If one makes that assumption, then one will assume that she met Jesus on the road along with the other women in Matthew 28:9. But that assumption would create a problem: John 20:1-18 gives us a detailed account of Mary Magdalene’s movements that shows that she did not meet Jesus on the road and that she was almost certainly alone when she first saw him. According to John, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb at first, saw the stone rolled away, ran to Peter and “the other disciple” (who is John) to tell them that someone had taken away Jesus’ body. John makes it quite clear that Mary Magdalene did not see Jesus until she returned to the tomb and stood weeping outside. 

So the question becomes, are these variations reconcilable? Can we reasonably put together the movements of the women on that morning? Was John just making up a story about how Mary Magdalene met Jesus? Did Matthew change his story? Or did both stories come to Matthew and John through a telephone game, passed from one person to another, in the course of which they became corrupted? 

Well, to see how these accounts fit together, the first thing to recognize is that there were more women at the tomb than Matthew mentions. Suppose you went on a vacation during Spring Break with five other people, but later when you were telling a story about your vacation you only mentioned two of those people, are you therefore denying that the other three people were there? Obviously not. Not mentioning something is not the same as denying that it happened. Thus, the fact that Matthew only mentions Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James being at the tomb, does not mean that he was denying the presence of other women. We know that more women were present at the tomb with the two Marys because Mark and Luke independently confirm this. You’ll recall that Luke 24:10 adds Joanna to the list of women there, as well as “several others” who he doesn’t name. In Mark 16:1 we actually learn the names of one of these previously unknown women, namely Salome. We already discussed how the variation in the names of these women lends credibility to the eyewitness origin of these accounts, and now I will add that the differences in details among the stories further represent the different details that the women remembered, precisely something we expect from truthful eyewitness testimony.

We see something similar to this happening in John’s account of the women disciples. If you were to read John 20:1-2 without a careful eye, you could easily come away with the impression that John says that only Mary Magdalene saw the empty tomb, since she’s the only woman present in his story. However, not only does John never say this (that is, he never denies the presence of other women), but there’s a casual detail in Mary’s message to Peter and the Beloved Disciple that demonstrates that more women were there, and John just didn’t mention them. After seeing the empty tomb, Mary ran to Peter and the Beloved and told them, “They’ve taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they’ve laid him” (Jn 20:2). Although Mary was likely alone when speaking with Peter and John, the fact that she says “we” do not know where Jesus’ body is, definitively proves that Mary started out with the other women, but then left the group as soon as she saw that the tomb was empty. 

The solution to the movements of the women on Easter morning, then, depends on recognizing that real life resembles a movie, not a set of still shots. And it certainly doesn’t resemble a series of stone statues. Just because several people are together at one time, it doesn’t follow that they stay together. They can start out in a group and then separate. Real life is more complex and messy than fiction. Mary Magdalene and the other women weren’t chained together on Easter Sunday.

If we think of the Gospel accounts as different perspectives within a movie, we can think of John’s “camera” as following Mary Magdalene as she goes away. Meanwhile, the other women went to the tomb, looked inside, and had the experiences with the angels described in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Those evangelists’ “cameras” follow the other women. After hearing from the angels that Jesus had risen, they ran to tell the disciples, meeting Jesus on the road, as explained in Matthew. It’s not clear whether or not Matthew even heard about the fact that Mary Magdalene left the group and met Jesus alone, nor is it clear that he knew that there were four or more women present. But he doesn’t deny any of this. He simply says that “they,” a group of women, met Jesus on the road. Once we realize (by reading both Luke and Mark) that there were more than two women present to begin with, Matthew's “they” makes sense even after Mary Magdalene is no longer there. Several women received the message from the angel and met Jesus on the road. This is a good case of reconcilable variation. The accounts differ but can be put together like a puzzle to form a plausible picture. This outcome makes perfect sense if the authors are drawing on different truthful witness accounts. 

Another infamous difference between the resurrection accounts concerns the mention of the city of Galilee. In Mark and Matthew, the angel tells the women that Jesus is going before the disciples into Galilee and that they’ll see him there (Matt 28:7, Mk 16:7). They are to carry this message to the male disciples. However, unlike Mark and Matthew, Luke doesn’t mention this message but instead mentions that the angel reminded the women of something that Jesus told them while He was in Galilee, namely that He would suffer and die and rise again (Lk 24:6-8). 

Some scholars have tried to say that this message of the angel is Luke’s invention. Because Luke, they say, didn’t want to mention a trip by the disciples to Galilee, he supposedly changed the reference to Galilee to something quite different—Instead of Jesus telling His disciples to meet Him in Galilee, Luke changed this to a reminder of Jesus’ prediction, made in Galilee, of his own death and resurrection. As compelling as this fictionalization may sound, this is an example of one of the many “forced contradictions” that scholars have imagined that are simply too clever to be plausible. 

Part of this implausible theory is that Luke wanted to eliminate the angel’s reference to the trip to Galilee because he was going to move Jesus’ first appearance away from Galilee to Jerusalem, a point we will come back to soon. But the theory doesn’t even make sense. If Luke wanted to do that, why wouldn’t he just drop the angel’s mention of Galilee altogether? Why make up some other, unrelated mention of Galilee to replace it? Why think that Luke had some attachment to the word “Galilee,” so that he felt obligated to keep that word there but simultaneously felt free to falsify an important historical detail like the location of Jesus’ first appearance? In other words, why would Luke be committed to maintaining a small historical detail, but not at all to maintaining a huge one? 

Scholars have an unfortunate tendency to be captivated by verbal resemblance. Since the word “Galilee” appears in both accounts of what the angel said, they suggest that Luke was “adapting Mark” while hanging on to the word “Galilee.” But such a strained effort on Luke’s part to keep that one word while inventing a different angelic message simply doesn’t make sense. And in fact, Luke’s record of the angel’s words actually fits very well with repeated references in the Synoptic Gospels to a group of women who came with Jesus from Galilee. 

Matthew, Mark, and Luke all explicitly and independently refer to this group of women who began following Jesus while He was ministering in Galilee. What’s worth highlighting here, like we did previously, is the fact that, despite all three Synoptics apparently referring to the same group of Galilean women, they all give different lists of who these women were. Luke names Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Susanna, and “many others,” Mark names Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome, and Matthew names Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and the mother of the sons of Zebedee. Isn’t it interesting that the only woman who shows up in all three of these lists is Mary Magdalene, yet it really looks like it’s the same group of women being referred to in all of these passages. Reconcilable variation. 

Furthermore, Luke 9:21-23 does record that Jesus predicted His death and resurrection while He was in Galilee, so it’s very probable that these women did actually hear Him say this while they were all there. The angel’s words are thus perfectly explainable without contriving this theory about how Luke was intentionally changing the facts.

What does this all mean? The Synoptic accounts of the angel’s words and the names of the women present are an exemplar of reconcilable variation: The angel referred to Galilee in both ways—both as the place where Jesus’ followers were to meet Him (recorded by Matthew and Mark) and as the place where he previously predicted His death and resurrection (recorded by Luke). As we previously discussed, the different Gospel authors were all relying on different women for their eyewitness testimony, and so these accounts line up perfectly with different women remembering different parts of the angel’s message. This is precisely the kind of variation and coherence we would expect with truthful eyewitness testimony.

This brings us to another area where the Gospel resurrection accounts are said to be hopelessly contradictory: Where did Jesus first appear to His group of male disciples—in Galilee or in Jerusalem? After telling the story of the guard at the tomb and how they were bribed to tell a lie about the disciples stealing the body of Jesus, Matthew says that the Eleven proceeded to Galilee and met Jesus there (Matt 28:11-16). It would take at least seven days to travel to Jerusalem, so if this were the first time that the eleven met Jesus, they did not first meet Him on Easter Sunday. 

However, this creates a problem. Luke 24:36 describes an appearance of Jesus on the very evening of Easter Sunday to His gathered disciples in the upper room in Jerusalem, and John 20:19-29 describes two such meetings, a week apart, both in Jerusalem. Almost certainly, the first meeting that John describes is the same one that Luke 24 tells about. These meetings give the disciples ample opportunity to verify Jesus’ identity; the second meeting a week after Easter even convinces Doubting Thomas.

Not only does Matthew not describe any meeting between Jesus and the male disciples in Jerusalem, but at the meeting in Galilee, Matthew 28:17 says that “some” were doubtful when they saw Jesus. If the Eleven had already met Jesus in Jerusalem as described in Luke and John, why would any of them still be doubtful when they met Him in Galilee? This indeed looks like a problem for the Gospels’ coherence.

It goes without saying that critics have seized on these differences to say that some of the appearances must be made up or corrupted. If this is true, then my argument tonight obviously falls apart. On the critical view, John and Luke may have just invented the appearances in Jerusalem. Maybe Luke “moved” the first appearance to Jerusalem. Maybe Matthew is contradicting Luke and John by saying that the very first appearance happened in Galilee. Did Matthew make up the meeting in Galilee?

Not so fast! Something we saw with Jesus’ first meeting with Mary Magdalene is relevant here as well: It’s important not to insist that a document means only what we would have thought the first time we read it, without any input from any other account. How many of us have had the experience of thinking that someone meant one thing and then deciding later on that he must have meant something else? Another thing that happens all the time in real life is that we make a mental picture based on just one account of something, and then later correct it. 

To slightly recycle my analogy from before, if one person mentions that Kali and Demetrius were both at a retreat in Wisconsin during Spring Break, but doesn’t mention that his close friend Liz was also there, we might go away thinking that Liz wasn’t there, even though the witness didn’t say that. What he said was true as far as it went. Maybe he didn’t happen to notice that Liz was there, or just didn’t think to mention her at that particular time for some reason. However, if we hear from someone else that Liz was at the retreat, we have to revise our opinion. This commonsense willingness to change our minds and our interpretations needs to be applied to the Gospels as well as to ordinary conversations. Just because Matthew doesn't mention any appearances of Jesus in Jerusalem, and just because we wouldn’t have heard about them without John or Luke, this doesn’t mean that we conclude that Matthew is denying that the disciples saw Jesus in Jerusalem.

It’s especially important not to use the mere silence of one account to make us dismiss another account that we have some reason to trust. Suppose that your spouse mentions an accident at a prominent intersection, while a teenager who drove home from work past that intersection doesn’t mention it. Should you doubt your spouse’s account because the teen driver didn’t happen to mention the accident? Of course not. There could be lots of reasons why the teenager focused on talking about other things, even if he saw the accident scene. Or maybe it was cleaned up by the time he passed by. We have to be willing and able to take in new information and correct our initial mental picture. No mention of meetings in Jerusalem in Matthew? Okay, but there are such descriptions in John and Luke, cool so we learned something new!

But we haven’t solved all of the problems yet, and so there is more to be said. The women were told by the angel (and according to Matthew, by Jesus as well) to tell His disciples to meet Him in Galilee. The angel in Mark 16:7 mentions Peter specifically. At first, this seems like another problem for reconciling the accounts: If Jesus was going to see His Eleven disciples, including Peter, in Jerusalem that very evening (as Luke and John say He did), why would He and the angels tell the women to carry this message to the Eleven at all? 

Well the answer to this is actually really interesting, and it ends up also answering our other lingering questions. We find in Matthew 26:32 that Jesus had privately told the Twelve Apostles at the Last Supper that after He was risen from the dead He would meet them in Galilee. It’s very likely, then, that, for the Apostles, the women’s reference to meeting Jesus in Galilee was meant to function like a code to signal that they had actually spoken to the risen Jesus. Why? Because it really looks like only the Twelve were there at the Last Supper. So if that was the only time that Jesus predicted meeting the disciples later in Galilee, the women wouldn’t have heard that prediction. The male disciples should have then known that the women had received a real message from Jesus, due to the mention of going before them into Galilee. The women would have had no other way of knowing about that unless they had spoken to the risen Lord. 

This makes Luke 24:11, which says that the male disciples doubted the women’s word, even more damning for the Apostles than most of us realize. If they were paying attention to Jesus’ teaching at the Last Supper, they would have remembered that meeting Him in Galilee was essentially a code that He is truly risen. That’s why the angel and Jesus told the women to tell this to the Apostles, not because Jesus wasn’t going to see them Himself that evening, but rather because this was the first test of their faith.This is, once again, a prominent example of reconcilable variation among the different resurrection narratives. Not only do the pieces fit together seamlessly, but we actually gain more information about the resurrection narrative by putting the independent accounts together, than by keeping them apart, which is exactly what we would expect from truthful testimony, and not at all from made-up accounts. 

Once we have this detail in place, everything comes together. Since the function of the message of the Galilee meeting was only meant for the Eleven Apostles as a test of their faith, the actual meeting itself probably included more people than just the Eleven. According to Luke 10:1, Jesus sent out seventy disciples on a special mission earlier in His ministry. According to the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:6, more than five hundred people saw the risen Jesus at once—something that could not have happened in the upper room. So the message that the women were to carry was likely not just as a test of faith for the Apostles, but also intended for a much larger group of people than just the ones who would see Jesus that very evening. 

Paul’s account is worth further considering for a moment, not only because he mentions that the 500 eyewitnesses were still alive, and so the Corinthian readers could go take a boat over to Jerusalem and ask them about their experiences, but also because of the order in which Paul describes Jesus’ appearances. He mentions an appearance to Cephas, who is Peter, which is independently confirmed in Luke 24:34. He then mentions an appearance to the Twelve Apostles, which lines up with Luke and John’s accounts of Jesus appearing to them in Jerusalem, and he says that, after this, Jesus appeared to a crowd of 500. This is almost certainly a reference to the Galilee meeting, recorded in both Matthew and Mark, thus confirming that this meeting was intended for many more disciples than the Eleven. 

And this is what clears up the point mentioned earlier about the ones who doubted in Matthew 28:17. Matthew mentions only the Eleven traveling to Galilee, but that doesn’t mean that they were the only ones who came to the meeting that Matthew refers to, as we’ve already discussed how silence doesn’t equal denial. If a larger group met and saw Jesus in Galilee, including some who had not seen Him since His resurrection, then those who doubted in Matthew 28:17 need not have been those who were present at the meetings in Jerusalem. Those who met Jesus in Jerusalem had already had a full chance to have doubts cleared up. They were invited to touch Jesus, they saw His hands and feet, they saw Him eat. But in the hills of Galilee, it is plausible that a larger group met Him at this designated location. Some who were present worshiped Him, but some among this larger group doubted, at least when they first saw Him. We can surmise that as the meeting continued, they also had a chance to have closer conversations with Jesus and to see that He was indeed alive and physically present. 

John is helpful here in a special way, for he tells us openly that Jesus did meet His disciples both in Jerusalem and in Galilee. He tells of two meetings in Jerusalem in John 20 and then of a meeting in Galilee in John 21. To be sure, I’m not saying that the meeting in Galilee in John 21:1-22 is the same one that Matthew tells about. It clearly isn’t. John makes it clear that only seven disciples were present— Peter and six others who went out fishing all night (21:2-3). They saw Jesus unexpectedly on the shore the next morning. John specifies that this was the third time that the (male) disciples had seen Jesus since He rose from the dead (21:14). 

The point is that John, without even trying to do so, confirms that Jesus’ core male disciples saw Him in Jerusalem after He rose from the dead, then traveled to Galilee and saw Him there as well. They probably waited until the end of the Jewish Feast of Unleavened Bread to make the several-days journey north. Later on still, they could have returned to Jerusalem. 

Indeed, the idea that the disciples saw Jesus in Jerusalem, traveled to Galilee, and then returned to Jerusalem further explains a detail mentioned in Luke 24:49, where Jesus tells the disciples to remain in Jerusalem until they receive the promised Holy Spirit. Did Jesus say that on Easter Sunday? If He did, then that would create a contradiction with Matthew, since the Apostles would have had no chance to go to Galilee if they were supposed to stay in Jerusalem the whole time.

Skeptics are rather fond of pointing this out and claiming a contradiction. However, Luke himself clears up any potential confusion in Acts 1:3 by emphasizing that Jesus was with His disciples for forty days after His resurrection and gave them lots of evidence that He was real and had risen from the dead. A trip up to Galilee and back to Jerusalem, which, remember, we can reconstruct from John’s Gospel and by putting Matthew, Mark, and Luke together, could easily fit into that forty days.

All of this, once again, leaves us with a picture of total reconcilable variation. Despite the resurrection narratives in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all being independent accounts that vary drastically in their details, so much so to the point where there are even apparent (though not real) contradictions, despite this, when you put them all together, they tell a coherent story. Jesus rose from the dead, tipped the disciples off to this by having the women remind them about His promise to meet them in Galilee (recorded by Matthew), He met with the disciples in Jerusalem on two occasions (recorded by Luke and John), He met seven of the disciples for a third time in Galilee (recorded by John), and then He met a larger group in Galilee for the predetermined meeting (recorded by Matthew, Luke, and even Paul). Then He told the disciples to stay in Jerusalem until Pentecost (recorded by Luke), and despite maybe not even being aware of all of the disciples’ movements, Luke gives an accurate time frame in which these movements could have happened, about six weeks. The pieces not only all fit together like a glove, but they, once again, tell us more as a whole than they do on their own, which would only be possible if the disciples were transmitting truthful eyewitness testimony, and not deceitful or invented testimony.

Therefore, after all of that, we can finally conclude the second premise of my argument, which is that the disciples were not lying about Jesus rising from the dead, has been proven. They did not just fabricate this claim. This brings us to the third and final premise of my argument for Jesus’ resurrection, which is that the disciples were not mistaken about what they believed they had seen. Don’t worry, because of how much ground we’ve already covered, this part of the argument is relatively brief and will close us out. 

Premise #3. The disciples were not mistaken about what they claimed to see. 

Were the disciples mistaken about what they had claimed to see? Did they truly believe that they had the encounters recorded in the Gospels, but in fact they experienced something completely different? The answer is no, simply because the experiences recorded in the Gospel resurrection narratives are not the kinds of things you could plausibly be mistaken about. In his masterful book, The Resurrection of the Son of God, N.T. Wright makes an exhaustive case that the kinds of experiences with the risen Jesus described in the Gospels have absolutely no parallel in any ancient literature. 

I would add on to this that, if you go through collections of credible stories about visions, hallucinations, and paranormal experiences, they are absolutely nothing like what we see in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. It is incredibly rare in paranormal encounters, for example, to even speak with a ghost (whether real or hallucinated), let alone have lengthy conversations with a ghost over the course of six weeks!

Because keep in mind what the Gospels actually claim about Jesus’ resurrection appearances. These aren’t just one or two visions that a select few groups of people had at one point in time. No. These are encounters with a physically resurrected Jesus. A Jesus who invites the disciples, many of them who are all together, to touch the wounds in His body, a Jesus who has lengthy conversations with His disciples, sometimes even while sitting down and eating dinner with them. A Jesus who even converts once skeptical people, such as Thomas, the eventual apostle Paul, who was an enemy of the church, and even James Jesus’ own brother who had rejected Jesus during His ministry in Nazareth, but after seeing the risen Lord went to his death proclaiming the resurrection of his brother. Are these really the kinds of things we would expect people to be mistaken about?

Consider for a moment John’s account of Jesus’ appearance in John 21. Jesus meets with seven of the disciples by the Sea of Galilee, calls them in from fishing, and has breakfast with them; you can probably imagine them all sitting over the charcoal fire, having conversations as friends, and maybe one of them says, “Hey Jesus could you pass the fish?” These were not hallucinatory experiences, these were meetings with a real person that the disciples knew and loved. These kinds of appearances happened over the course of six weeks and, as we just got done showing, at one point it was around 500 people at once who were experiencing this. These are just not the kinds of things that this many people, across that much time, could seriously be mistaken about.

To further illustrate this point, the philosopher Tim McGrew likes to say, suppose that a group of you and your friends were all together during Spring Break; given we just got back from Spring Break I imagine this isn’t hard for many of us to do. Imagine that you were with someone that you knew very well on this trip, however when you got back someone told you that this person had actually died a month ago. What would your response be? It would probably be, what are you talking about?! We all saw him again and again, sometimes individually, sometimes as a group, and sometimes in different groups. Other people not in our friend group saw and interacted with him. We ate with him, and had lengthy conversations with him over the course of an entire week! How could he possibly be dead? 

These things are not religious hallucinations, paranormal experiences, visions at a distance, or anything like that. Tim and Lydia McGrew refer to these kinds of experiences that Jesus’ followers had as “polymodal experiences,” that is to say, experiences involving senses like sight, touch, and hearing, all together, all these different senses together with different groups of people. This simply isn’t what hallucinations or visions are like, where they go on and on with a whole group of seven, or twelve, or more people all interacting with each other, looking at each other, looking at this person who they’re all hallucinating at the same time and in the same way, this just doesn’t happen. This would be absolutely unreasonable to believe. Once again, a hallucination or vision of this scale had never been recorded prior to the time of Jesus, and it has never been recorded since. The most reasonable conclusion to draw, therefore, is that, given the content of what the disciples claimed, it is not reasonable to suppose that they were mistaken about what they had seen. Thus, premise #3 has now been proven.

Conclusion. Therefore, Jesus rose from the dead.  

And so, after all this time, we have finally arrived at our final conclusion. I began this article by demonstrating that the original eyewitnesses of Jesus’ ministry really did claim that He physically rose from the dead. This is not a claim that later authors made up and put into the mouths of Jesus’ Apostles, rather it came from the lips of the Twelve themselves. Next, I showed that given the existence of substantial reconcilable variation within the resurrection narratives, it is unreasonable to believe that they were fictionalized, that is to say, it is unreasonable to suppose that the disciples were lying. And finally I have just shown that given the content of the disciples’ claim, which consists of polymodal experiences among different groups of people over a lengthy period of time, it is unreasonable to believe that they were mistaken. This leaves us with the conclusion. Jesus really did rise from the dead.If the disciples claimed Jesus rose, they were not lying, and they were not mistaken, then He really did rise from the dead. It’s as simple as that. 

And although this article has been a bit intellectually heavy, I want to be sure to close by emphasizing that Jesus is not an abstract concept. The resurrection is not merely a set of intellectual propositions that you agree with, the same way you would agree with the fact that the sky is blue or the grass is green. No. The resurrection of Jesus is an historical event that the risen Lord has commanded us all to partake in. If Jesus really did rise from the dead, if His claim that “All authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth” (Matt 28:18) is true, then you, yes YOU, have an obligation to hear and obey His words. The author of John’s Gospel, who is the apostle John, said it best, “these [things] are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name” (Jn 20:31). 

The joy of Easter is for everyone. Jesus’ resurrection is not just an event that happened 2,000 years ago, rather it’s an event that we can all partake in through the waters of baptism received in faith. And with that, I would like to end this presentation tonight by quoting a very short poem that a man with a great mind and a great heart wrote. He wrote this after going through an intense period of doubting his Christian faith, but thanks be to God he came out a believer on the other side. He writes,

The sun really shines, the birds they really sing, God really loves me and Jesus truly rose to renew all things. Thank you.