It’s a fair question to ask. Christianity stands or falls on one event: the empty tomb and the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ.
If that didn’t happen, the whole faith collapses. Paul says as much, plainly:
If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead. But he did not raise him if in fact the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. (1 Corinthians 15:13-17 NIV)
There’s no middle ground here. Either it happened, or Christianity is built on nothing.
Where to start?
It can feel strange to weigh evidence for something that happened two thousand years ago. And because the resurrection is so central, alternative explanations have followed it from the beginning.
Before testing those explanations, it helps to agree on the facts most historians (believers and skeptics alike) accept as a starting point (minimal facts):
- Jesus died by crucifixion and was buried
- The tomb was empty, and no one ever produced His body
- The disciples reported seeing Jesus alive after His death
- The disciples’ lives were transformed by this experience
With those facts in place, we can test the theories built to explain them away.
Was the body stolen?
The claim: the disciples stole Jesus’ body and invented the resurrection story.
It has problems.
An empty tomb doesn’t prove theft, it’s also exactly what you’d expect if the resurrection were true. And Pilate had the tomb sealed and guarded specifically to prevent this (Matthew 27:62-66). Getting past that guard would have been no small task.
Even if the body was taken, theft doesn’t explain how a living Jesus then appeared to so many separate people, in different places, over time.
And theft doesn’t explain what came after. The disciples spent the rest of their lives under hostility, many dying for what they claimed to have witnessed. They scattered in different directions and never recanted, even under threat of death. People don’t usually die for something they made up.
There’s also the cultural angle. A resurrected Messiah wasn’t a believable story to invent – not to Jews, who held tightly to the Mosaic Law, and not to Greeks, who saw bodily resurrection as beneath consideration. If you were fabricating a new religion, this is not the story you’d pick.
This theory isn’t new, it goes back to the first reports of the empty tomb:
While the women were on their way, some of the guards went into the city and reported to the chief priest’s everything that had happened. When the chief priests had met with the elders and devised a plan, they gave the soldiers a large sum of money, telling them, “You are to say, ‘His disciples came during the night and stole him away while we were asleep.’ If this report gets to the governor, we will satisfy him and keep you out of trouble.” So the soldiers took the money and did as they were instructed. And this story has been widely circulated among the Jews to this very day. (Matthew 28:11-15 NIV)
It’s a theory some still hold to. But the evidence against it is significant.
Was it a hallucination?
The claim: grief and wishful thinking led the disciples to hallucinate a risen Jesus.
This one struggles too. It still doesn’t explain the empty tomb, where did the actual body go? Hallucinations are also individual experiences; they don’t happen to groups of people at the same time, and Jesus was reportedly seen by multiple groups, on multiple occasions.
There’s also a psychological problem. Hallucinations tend to arise from expectation. The disciples expected the opposite – they were in hiding, demoralised, and not anticipating a resurrection at all.
Even Thomas, famously sceptical, refused to believe until he’d touched Jesus himself (John 20:24-29). Hallucinations don’t have anything to touch.
Scientifically, mass hallucination is a harder sell than the resurrection itself.
A related theory suggests an imposter took Jesus’ place in these appearances. It runs into the same problems, plus one more: an imposter would have needed flawless knowledge of Jesus’ mannerisms, teaching, and command of Scripture – as shown on the road to Emmaus, where He walks two disciples through the entire Old Testament (Luke 24:13-35). That’s a difficult performance to sustain across multiple encounters with people who knew Him well.
Did Jesus really die on the cross?
Known as the “swoon theory”: Jesus survived the crucifixion, then appeared to the disciples having recovered.
This asks a lot. Roman executioners were professionals, and incompetence carried serious consequences for them, they even confirmed death with a spear to the side. Nobody watching, including those who took His body down and prepared it for burial, seems to have noticed anything.
And practically: how does a man who has just survived crucifixion escape a sealed tomb, without food or water, and then appear to people in apparent full health?
This theory also asks us to believe the disciples lied about what they’d witnessed, which conflicts with everything else we know about their transformed, costly commitment to the story. They weren’t willing to die for a lie.
And it doesn’t explain the ascension. If Jesus survived, why does He simply vanish from the historical record instead of being seen for years afterward?
The theory doesn’t hold up well under its own weight.
Did the story grow over time?
This view treats Jesus as a wise teacher, and the resurrection as legend – added to and embellished over the years.
But the earliest written accounts already treat the resurrection as central, not as a later addition. The claim has been consistent since the earliest records, and the empty tomb and missing body were part of the story from the start. If it was invented later, it’s hard to explain why no one, ever, admitted to making it up.
Is it a myth?
The claim: Jesus’ resurrection was borrowed from older myths.
This is a relatively recent theory (19th century), rejected by scholars at the time, that keeps resurfacing without new evidence behind it.
The apostles’ own testimony describes direct, repeated encounters with the risen Jesus, not secondhand legend. And when the supposed parallels are actually examined – Osiris, Mithras, and others – the similarities to Jesus’ resurrection are thin at best. This article goes into more detail.
Even if some parallels existed, they wouldn’t outweigh the historical and eyewitness evidence for the resurrection itself.
Every counterclaim deserves to be weighed fairly. But once you look closely, none of them hold up better than the resurrection they’re trying to explain away.
Or was it a historical event?
What if Scripture is simply telling us what happened?
This explanation accounts for everything the others struggle with:
- The empty tomb and the missing body
- The disciples’ willingness to endure persecution
- The survival and spread of Christianity in deeply hostile conditions
- Christianity spread rapidly from Jerusalem outward, in the very city where the crucifixion and empty tomb could be checked. That kind of growth is hard to explain if the central claim could have been easily disproved by anyone producing the body
- Why the faith is still here, two thousand years later
The one thing it asks of you is to accept the supernatural.
Scripture gives us eyewitness testimony: an empty tomb, and a risen Christ, seen and reported by the people who were there.
Only one conclusion?
The evidence points toward the resurrection, but accepting it isn’t easy, because it asks something of us. It calls for change.
The angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. He is not here; he has risen, just as he said. Come and see the place where he lay. (Matthew 28:5-6 NIV)
Jesus made extraordinary claims throughout His ministry, including predicting His own death and resurrection in advance:
He then began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and after three days rise again. (Mark 8:31 NIV)
Anyone who claims they’ll die and rise again sounds unbelievable, until their track record backs it up. Jesus’ ministry was marked by exactly that kind of evidence.
Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting? The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. (1 Corinthians 15:55-57 NIV)
Nothing will surpass this moment except Jesus’ second coming. What happened on the cross changed everything – and it asks something of you.
When the evidence is weighed honestly, one conclusion remains: Jesus Christ died for you, and was raised to prove it. Jesus defeated death. Will you follow Him?
Now, brothers and sisters, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand. By this gospel, you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain. For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born. (1 Corinthians 15:1-8 NIV)