Why We Can't Prove the Resurrection

(But can still believe in it)

When, as a teenager, I was introduced to Christian apologetics, I became intoxicated by the prospect that my beliefs were in some sense demonstrable.

I felt deeply that my Christian worldview was true. Yet apologetics – particularly historical apologetics – promised me the opportunity to show that it was so.

Now that I am older, my faith still remains the deepest source of truth and meaning in my life. Yet as I have studied the historical origins of Christianity, I have become persuaded that the Resurrection is not demonstrable, as my younger self thought.

By this, I do not mean only that we cannot demonstrate the Resurrection in the same way as we might follow a set of mathematical proofs. That is generally true of history. Rather, I mean that sensible, intelligent people can look at the same evidence and come away with plausible yet competing explanations of that data.

I realise that this piece has the potential to disturb two sorts of people: the first will think that if history does not overwhelmingly support the Resurrection, then one might as well not believe it. The other will think that the evidence for the Resurrection is so good that any informed person would be absurd not to believe.

I think both of these positions are not quite correct. As I will try to show in this post – which will touch on issues of both history and theology – the evidence for the resurrection is much more mysterious than apologists and polemicists might assume. We cannot prove the Resurrection – but we can still believe in it.

1. Difficulties with our sources

The biggest problem concerns our sources: these are not the sources we would like to reconstruct a robust account of what happened after Jesus’ death.

Our most prized source for the resurrection – the pre-Pauline formula enshrined in 1 Corinthians 15:3-5 – is a marvellous illustration of this. On the one hand, the creed is a piece of gold dust! My best guess would be that this is an officially sanctioned formula, which attests to the experience of some of Jesus’ earliest followers.

The creed tells us that the resurrection claim was early. But beyond this, it is difficult to make much of it. It attests to both individual and collective experiences of Jesus; the problem is that it does not tell us about the character of those experiences, or how this belief was formed. It also tells us nothing about the empty tomb of Joseph.

When we turn to the gospels - written a generation and more after the event - we fare little better. Mark most likely ended at 16:8 with the story of the empty tomb and the angel’s announcement that Peter would receive a resurrection appearance. After this, Matthew, Luke and John filled in the gaps, but in ways that are strangely terse, difficult to reconcile and betray apologetic concerns.

Much intellectual energy has of course been spent tidying up these mysterious accounts into neat reports. John Wenham’s Easter Enigma: Are the Resurrection Accounts in Conflict? is a classic example. But I will leave it to judge for themselves whether such harmonisations are satisfying. I personally do not find them so.

2. Plausible naturalistic theories

A further problem – given the ambiguity of our sources – is that it is possible to come up with plausible naturalistic theories about the origin of the disciples’ belief.

Here is a theory I presented recently to a friend. It goes something like this:

After Jesus’ death, some of the disciples had visions of him alive. These visions they considered to be quite real, even physical, since they were expecting the Kingdom to arrive very shortly, and an aspect of that end-time picture was a physical resurrection.

We know that people have very real-seeming visions, and so they interpreted it through the hermeneutical prism which was most immediate to them: bodily resurrection.

Jesus was either buried in an unknown criminal’s grave, or was buried in a known tomb by Joseph of Arimathea, and the body later went missing – it was perhaps stolen by grave robbers. The stories in the gospels, forty years-plus on, evidence an evolving story.

That at least some of the disciples continued to believe in Jesus after his death is not surprising. We know that movements often do not simply abandon their beliefs in the face of contrary evidence; rather, they re-interpret them. The same thing happened here.

There is nothing about this scenario which strikes me as outrageously implausible. If I had a materialist view of history, this is how I would account for the disciples’ belief that God had raised Jesus from the dead. It would certainly strike me as more plausible than the view that God intervened in the course of history.

Given that the reconstruction of history engages our worldview – what we believe about the nature of reality – this means that people with different worldviews can come up with rational accounts of the same data. I don’t think there is anything about the data which necessitates that we adopt a Christian worldview to make sense of it.

3. The metaphysics of Jesus Research

This bleeds into a third problem for proving the resurrection historically: modern historical methods, like scientific methods, typically assume naturalism. They look for cause and effect within a closed system. Towards this end, historians draw on the principle of analogy: the past must have occurred in some way like the present does.

Yet this creates a problem for scholarly apologists like N.T. Wright, who hope to show that Jesus’ resurrection is historical according to an Enlightenment historiography. For of course, modernity does not permit the explanation ‘God raised Jesus from the dead’ any more than it says that God saved the allies in the Second World War, or that God created the big bang.

To make this problem worse, the Resurrection is – by definition – an event without precedent, without analogy. It is an apocalyptic event breaking into the middle of history – it has never happened before! (If it had, we would be dead.)

To use a methodology rooted in analogy to prove the occurrence of an event without analogy is deeply misguided. If the logic is followed through to its conclusion, it reduces the Resurrection to something mundane. On this view, attempts to prove the Resurrection are not only be historically problematic – but theologically flawed.

Unprovable and thus… Unbelievable?

So far, I have sketched three propositions:

1. The data of early Christianity is not sufficient to ‘prove’ the Resurrection;

2. There are plausible naturalistic accounts of the disciples’ belief; and

3. The Resurrection is ruled out by an Enlightenment historiography.

Yet here I want to sketch some arguments for a fourth opinion:

4. It does not follow from any of the previous statements that one cannot believe in the Resurrection.

In what follows, I explain three reasons why I believe that while we cannot prove the resurrection – I can still believe in it.

a. The Irony of Proving the Resurrection

The great irony in proving the Resurrection is that if the Resurrection/ascension occurred, it means that Jesus is a living spiritual being. In other words: one could come into a connection with Jesus without knowing the first thing about history. Indeed, Christians believe that any person can, in some sense, come to know Christ.

The idea that the Resurrection rises or falls on whether it can be proven as a historical event therefore strikes me as very odd. We know very little about ancient history, but we know much more about our present experience. And if the Resurrection has occurred, it has to be something which hinges upon our present experience.

This just so happens to be how people do come to believe in the Resurrection. To paraphrase the apostle Paul, they believe in their heart that God has raised Jesus from the dead. This often comes after a period of searching and prayer, or spending time in Christian community. Few are convinced of the historical evidence on its own.

b. The Early Christian Evidence

The second reason why I don’t think we can prove the Resurrection is because of the New Testament. When I turn to the New Testament, I find a series of phenomena which are extremely odd.

This convinces me that if one believes in the Resurrection, one cannot understand it to be a run-of-the-mill event: a man gets out of his tomb and starts walking around.

Rather, this event involves the complete transformation of Jesus’ corporeality. He is not so much physical as “trans-physical” (N.T. Wright). Yet of course, what it might mean for a trans-physical being to interact with our space-time continuum is baffling.

What we do find in the gospels is thus naturally mysterious: the disciples doubt; Jesus is not recognised by those he meets; there is an injunction to ‘search the scriptures’; and he is at one point recognised in the (liturgical?) act of breaking bread.

None of this suggests to me that the Resurrection is something that was an obvious, or demonstrable. Rather, the Resurrection is presented as something which involves all of our resources of sense-making; our will, hopes, intellect and rhythms of life.

In brief: if the Resurrection wasn’t obvious to Jesus’ first-century followers, it probably will not be obvious to us, two-thousand years on from their accounts!

c. The Metaphysics of Jesus Research

The first two points above concern our epistemology: if the Resurrection occurred, how would we know that the Resurrection occurred?

I have suggested that we would not know it in the same way as we might know other ordinary historical events. To say that we can is to make a category mistake; it is to assume that the Resurrection is akin to those normal historical events.

Yet a similar problem occurs in relation to our historiography. As Jonny Rowlands has persuasively argued in The Metaphysics of Historical Jesus Research (2023), how we approach the reconstruction of the past is always rooted in metaphysical assumptions – how we understand the ultimate nature of reality. And there is no neutral, secular starting point.

The problem is that many Christian scholars – for whom the resurrection is a worldview-defining – do not factor the Resurrection into their historiography. Instead, they are dependent upon an Enlightenment metaphysics which rules out supernatural explanations from the start. They are Resurrection ontologists – but methodological naturalists.

In this picture, resurrection is the end of the syllogism. Yet because they work from naturalistic starting points, it is no surprise when others (working with the same assumptions) are not convinced by where they end up. If the Resurrection occurred, it arguably needs to be the starting point of our historiography – not an after-thought.

The Resurrection: Too Weird to Believe?

We cannot prove the Resurrection – but really, that shouldn’t be a surprise.

If the Resurrection occurred, it has to be very strange – a mystery which is known by one’s whole self. And if the Resurrection occurred, it has to be one the founding axioms of our historiography, not tagged on as the conclusion of a naturalistic one.

All of this may seem quite a different direction to the one pointed to by the modern apologist, armed with historical-critical tools. Yet it is the early Christian literature itself which invites us to reconsider what it means to know the risen Jesus.

If the resurrection does not meet the burden of an evidentialist epistemology or meet the rigour of a historical-critical analysis, we can rest content. It never intended to.

Further Reading

Jonathan Rowlands, The Metaphysics of Historical Jesus Research: A Prolegomenon for a Future Quest for the Historical Jesus. London: Routledge, 2023.

Dale C. Allison, Jr, The Resurrection of Jesus: Apologetics, Polemics, History. London. T&T Clark, 2021.