Could Something Else Explain the Resurrection Evidence?

What We Know

Several alternative explanations have been proposed during the long history of discussion about the Resurrection.

Perhaps Jesus did not really die

This is sometimes called the swoon theory.

On this view, Jesus survived crucifixion, later revived, and was then seen alive by His followers.

The proposal has one obvious advantage: if Jesus survived, there would be no need to explain how a dead man returned to life.

But it creates other difficulties.

Roman crucifixion was designed to kill. The Gospel accounts portray Jesus as severely scourged and crucified before His body was released for burial. Modern medical writers disagree about the precise physical mechanism by which crucifixion caused death, but survival after the completed Roman execution described in the sources is not the usual historical explanation.

Even if Jesus somehow survived, we would still have to ask whether a badly injured survivor would naturally lead His followers to proclaim that God had conquered death and raised Him into a transformed life.

Perhaps the body was moved or stolen

If Jesus was buried and the tomb was later empty, a moved body is an obvious possibility to consider.

Someone might have transferred the body to another location. Grave robbers might have taken it. The disciples themselves might have removed it.

Such proposals can offer an explanation for an empty tomb.

But an empty tomb is only one part of the evidence.

A moved body by itself does not explain why Peter, James, Paul, and others became convinced that Jesus had appeared to them alive.

The proposal therefore needs an additional explanation for the appearance experiences.

Perhaps they went to the wrong tomb

Another proposal is that the women mistakenly visited a different tomb and found it empty.

That could explain an initial report that the body was missing.

But Mark connects women who observed Jesus' burial with the later visit to the tomb. If that tradition reflects what happened, a simple mistake of location becomes less natural.

The wrong-tomb proposal also does not by itself explain the appearance traditions.

And if Jesus remained buried in a known location, we must ask why the mistake was not corrected as the Resurrection message spread in Jerusalem.

Perhaps the appearances were visions or grief experiences

This is a more substantial proposal.

People who have lost someone they love sometimes report vivid experiences in which they sense, see, or hear the deceased person.

Religious visions are also known in human experience.

Such experiences could help explain why an individual sincerely believed that Jesus had appeared.

Paul's experience is especially important in this discussion because his encounter came later and because his own letters give little narrative description of what he experienced.

But questions remain.

Were the experiences of Peter, James, Paul, and the groups all the same kind of event? How should the group appearance traditions be understood? How does a visionary explanation relate to the empty-tomb tradition and to the early Jewish understanding of resurrection as something more than a departed person appearing in a vision?

A psychological or visionary explanation may address an important part of the evidence. Whether it accounts for the whole picture is a further question.

Perhaps the Resurrection story grew through legend

Stories can grow in the telling.

The Gospel appearance accounts contain details that are not present in Paul's earlier summary. Luke and John, for example, strongly emphasize physical features of the risen Jesus.

It is reasonable to ask whether some details developed as Christians told and retold the story.

But our earlier investigation found that the basic Resurrection proclamation is much older than the completed Gospel narratives.

Paul had already received and passed on a tradition that Jesus died, was buried, was raised, and appeared. He personally knew Peter and James.

Legendary development might help explain some later details. It has greater difficulty explaining the origin of Resurrection belief itself if that belief was already present near the beginning of Christianity.

Perhaps the disciples invented the story

Deliberate invention would explain why a false claim was being proclaimed.

But it must be compared with what we examined in our investigation of motive and sincerity.

Paul's own letters describe substantial suffering connected with his Christian mission. Acts records opposition to the earliest apostles. Early sources associate leading figures such as Peter, Paul, and James with persecution or violent death.

Suffering does not prove that their beliefs were true.

But there is a difference between suffering for something mistaken and knowingly suffering for something one invented.

A deliberate-fraud explanation therefore has to account for the conduct of the people closest to the proclamation.

Perhaps several natural explanations worked together

Not every explanation has to solve the entire problem by itself.

Someone might propose that the body was moved, that one or more followers had grief-related experiences, and that later storytelling developed those experiences into the fuller narratives preserved in the Gospels.

This kind of combined explanation deserves consideration because history is often complicated.

But adding explanations also creates a new question.

Does the combination arise naturally from the evidence, or are separate possibilities being added mainly because no one of them accounts for enough?