Seven Evidences for Jesus' Resurrection

Part One: The Turin Shroud, Disciples' Martyrdom and Women at the Tomb

The claim that God raised Jesus bodily from the dead is generally thought to lay beyond the purview of the modern historian. Yet this has not precluded arguments that we can be confident in much of what Jesus’ followers claimed about Easter.

Over the next two posts, I take a look at seven evidences surrounding the resurrection. Ranking them from the conspiracy-theory-esque to the historically-very-intriguing, I provide a peek at the good (and not so good) of resurrection apologetics.

1. The Turin Shroud

The first argument is that the Catholic Church possesses the burial shroud of Jesus, which bears the subtle imprint of his crucified body. According to some, this imprint could only have been created by an enormous burst of energy. In other words, by an event very much like the Resurrection.¹

The question of how the Turin Shroud was created is certainly a puzzle, to which many have offered potential solutions.² The key difficulty with this argument is that there several lines of evidence converge upon a medieval dating for the Shroud. As I have detailed elsewhere, these include the following:

• The first clear documentary evidence for the Shroud is a 1389 letter from the Bishop of Troyes to Pope Clement VII.

• In 1988, samples of the cloth were radio-carbon tested in three separate laboratories, giving a dating between 1260 and 1390.³

• The weave itself is a medieval “linen Z-spun in a 3/1 herringbone twill pattern,” while “the linen textiles from the Land of Israel until the medieval period are S-spun, plain weave tabby.”⁴

• The appearance of the Shroud, which shows a bloodied corpse, fits the Church’s medieval fascination with flagellation and the wounds of Christ.

By contrast to these clear data points, the evidence that the Shroud dates to the first-century is highly theoretical. To provide just one example, two scientists recently caused a splash with a paper concluding that the cloth could date to the first-century.

But notably, their conclusion was contingent upon a experimental form of dating. For them to arrive at this first-century date, they had to assume that the cloth was kept at the same temperature for twenty-centuries. This is a highly specious assumption, given that the cloth was damaged by a fire in 1532. When this is the sort of argument we need to support the cloth, we can be confident we are clutching at straws.

2. The Disciples' Martyrdom

Another argument runs like this: Jesus' disciples went on to die for their belief in the resurrection. And while people often become martyrs for what they believe to be true, the disciples died for what they had directly experienced. The disciples' martyrdom is therefore evidence that they had really experienced Jesus alive after his death.

This argument is surprisingly persistent in some quarters. For example, the popular Catholic writer Rupert Shortt has recently claimed that a “supremely important ground for orthodox belief... [is] the willingness of all the inner disciples and apostles to submit to martyrdom for maintaining the truth of what they had seen.”⁵

A similar conclusion is drawn in the most comprehensive study of the argument from martyrdom, Sean McDowell’s doctoral thesis in apologetics.⁶ According to McDowell, we can say that at least Peter, Paul and James (the son of Zebedee) were ‘very probably’ martyred for the belief, and all the disciples were willing to die for it.

In the eyes of critical scholars, however, even this judgement is optimistic. One of the world’s leading experts on early Christian martyrdom, Paul Middleton, has questioned the “methodological flaws” and “questionable handling of data” within McDowell’s work, pointing out that the Gospels are not even in agreement who the Twelve were, let alone that they are were willing to be martyred for their resurrection beliefs.⁷ (At least from Matthew, it is not clear to me that all his disciples did come to believe.)⁸

This seems to be the crucial flaw in this argument. We do not, as McDowell concedes, have any contemporary evidence for the martyrdom of the Twelve. Indeed, we know next to nothing about them at all. What we have to go on depends on spurious sources like the Apocryphal Acts and ‘living memory.’ But when much of this ‘memory’ is closely inspected, it begins to look more like shared tradition.

More can be said of this argument. One notable question, for example, is whether we have any clear evidence that those who were martyred, such as Peter, died specifically for their testimony to the resurrection – or whether they died for something more vague, like their refusal to worship pagan gods. At most then, the argument from martyrdom seems to make it severely unlikely that some of the disciples concocted the idea of Jesus’ resurrection. But did we not already know this on quite separate grounds?

3. Women at the Tomb

The next argument to consider is perhaps the most well-known piece of evidence in favour of the empty tomb tradition: its discovery by Jesus’ female disciples.

Meeting the principle (or so-called ‘criterion’) of embarrassment, it is argued that the evangelists would not have invented women as the witnesses of the empty tomb or the ‘apostles to the apostles.’ This is because women’s testimony was not trusted in antiquity. It is therefore likely that women really did discover the tomb empty.

I don’t think this argument is negligible. Women’s testimony really was not trusted to the same extent as men’s, especially in court-room scenarios.⁹ The Jewish historian Flavius Joseph expresses first-century attitudes when he states: ‘From women let no testimony be accepted, because of the levity and temerity of their sex’ (4.219).

In fact, to find discomfort with the women’s discovery of the empty tomb, we need look no further than the Gospels themselves. In the Gospels, the men assume that the women have told an idle tale (Lk. 24:11), and the later evangelists are quick to clean up Mark’s cliff-hanging account. Rather than having the women tell no one, the men appear very quickly on the scene to authenticate their testimony.

We also know that sceptics dismissed the resurrection on account of the women’s testimony. The second-century critic of Christianity, Celsus, describes the resurrection as the concoction of a ‘half-frantic woman’ (Against Celsus, 59). That his work deserved a full-length response by Origen in the third-century gives us some insight into the popularity of such views, at least among elite Roman writers.

Critiquing the Argument

Why then do I not find this argument convincing? To begin with, I think that women were the most natural witnesses to the empty tomb. At this point in Mark’s narrative, all of Jesus’ male disciples have fled. As a result, they do not know the location of the tomb. This in keeping with a Markan theme of the disciples’ ignorance and cowardice.

Who then are the natural recipients of the empty tomb tradition? It is the women who knew where he was buried. The women who, historically, would have been entrusted with the task of grieving and anointing his body with spices. To have men appear – even just to follow the women – would not have made literary or historical sense.

Second, I don’t think that the women were embarrassing to Mark’s audiences. The testimony of women may not have always held up in a court of law. But the Gospels are not a court of law; they are texts written to believing communities. This is why the criterion of embarrassment has received such widespread criticism in recent scholarship. Because it is has not always interrogated what would be embarrassing and to whom.

To someone like Celsus, looking for a cheap shot, the fact that women went to the tomb was surely embarrassing. But to the audience of the Gospels it was probably less so. Women played an important role in the fledgling Christian movement, and their testimony was considered trustworthy. In John, for example, the Samaritan woman brings others to belief in Christ precisely through ‘her testimony’ (4:39).

In sum, the proposal that the empty tomb tradition could not have been invented by Mark is not persuasive. Women are the very characters we might expect to see at his empty tomb in his narrative. Therefore, while there may be other good reasons to believe that the empty tomb is reliable, the argument from embarrassment is weak.

Here endeth part one.

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1. See, for example, Eberhard Lindner, The Shroud of Turin and the Resurrection: God’s Help for the Church in a Very Difficult Time (Karlsruhe: Martha Lindner, 2010), p. 22.

2. For example, the proposal that the image was created by the imprint of a monk who had taken upon himself the sufferings of Christ. See Joan E. Taylor, What did Jesus Look Like? (London: T&T Clark, 2018), p. 66.

3. P.E. Damon, et al. “Radiocarbon dating of the Shroud of Turin,” Nature, 337 n. 16 (Feb. 1989): 611-615.

4. Orit Shamar, “A Burial Textile from the First Century CE in Jerusalem compared to Roman Textiles in the Land of Israel and the Turin Shroud,” SHS Web of Conferences, 15, 000010 (2015).

5. Rupert Shortt, The Eclipse of Christianity: And Why It Matters (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2024), p.82.

6. Sean McDowell, The Fate of the Apostles: Examining the Martyrdom Accounts of the Closest Followers of Jesus (Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2015).

7. Paul Middleton, Book Review, “The fate of the Apostles. Examining the martyrdom accounts of the closest followers of Jesus. By Sean McDowell . Pp. viii + 302 incl. 2 tables. Farnham–Burlington, Vt: Ashgate, 2015. £65. 978 1 4724 6529 7,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 68 n.4 (2017): 818-819.

8. See Matthew’s perhaps unavoidable note that ‘some doubted’ (28:17) and the commentary by Maurice Casey, Jesus of Nazareth: An Independent Historian’s Account of His Life & Teaching (London: T&T Clark, 2010), p.495.

9. For some qualifications, see Carolyn Osiek, “The women at the tomb: What are they doing there?” HTS 53 n.1/2 (1997): 112-113.